Yes and I get your point. Between the two of them they are still the most likely to win any given hand, however.

Your example is a dumb one which shows the colluders losing money and the other player making money (as long as that player does not fold a top 5% hand). A better example would be two colluders waiting for one of them to get a good/great hand, and then raising re-raising each other, particularly when there are whales in the game that like to play every hand (and may or may not have a fold button preflop).

So using the #s you provided above, you'd have one colluder with 47% equity, one colluder with 26% equity and the whale with 26% equity. The colluders obviously make money on a call and print money if the whale folds at any point. The colluders will have a top 5% hand 1 out of 10 hands and will have a top 17% hand every 3 hands.

You're hopeless.

I've got a great idea. Let's have 8 colluders sit at a table with one guy who doesn't know. The 8 colluders will shove every hand. Wow guys, we'll win most of the hands. We have a great collusion strategy! It's the same as your logic.

These reraising wars really aren't that effective, and they create wild variance as described for such small equity gains. any colluders knowledgable enough to do that effectively will be better off just working separately and playing skilled poker. Dream crusher did give a better example though of how this could work. Worth being aware of.

When the third player wins, they make double the profit. When the colluders win, they have to split the stack of the third player.

In order for collusion to be a good idea, the colluders need at least 66% equity (ie for the third player to only have 33% equity) or they need to make up their lack of equity edge with fold equity, something that seems to rarely exist in gambly PLO games.

TBH it seems like it would be almost impossible to collude in PLO except when the stars align on the rare occasion.

Edit: Actually come to think of it this wouldn’t be true in a four way spot. In that case they would only need 51%+ equity to be profitable. If they could figure that out consistently they’re probably good enough to just play normally.

"If they could figure that out consistently they’re probably good enough to just play normally."

Bingo. They'd probably win more playing normally too. Good players can do much better in live PLO than just getting all in with slight equity edges.

It's crazy more people don't play PLO considering the rampant cheating in live NL.

Will be interesting to see how all this plays out and how this effects the other rooms etc. Kind of a bummer though if everything comes crumbling down.

so been a loooong time since their last webcast.

I haven't seen any since they had all the freezing issues when the Three Musketeers first took over... Have they not done any since then?

nope

I did mention this scenario in my original post as well. And it seems the consensus is that collusion is possible but my main example was just not a good one.

BRB, going to get rich colluding at Roulette. I'll put bets on 70% of the numbers, making me the most likely to win any given spin!

Then the whale should just wait for a top 10% hand which has >33% equity versus the 17% hand and the 5% hand. Nobody is holding a gun to the whales head and forcing him to commit his stack preflop with a weak hand.

Edit: are you saying the whale feels priced in to call at each decision point because of perceived pot odds? If so, that’s an interesting example. I still don’t see what that has to do with PLO or PLO bomb specifically. Seems like it could be executed also in NL by colluders repeatedly min-raising each other preflop or something like that.

The consensus is that collusion is possible. Yes, sharing information about nut flush blockers. That’s not a problem about bomb pots that’s a problem about PLO more generally. Nobody has demonstrated other examples of a simple collusion strategy yet. Mason said it was possible somewhere upthread but never explained why. I’m still waiting…

I mean if a whale is playing 100% of hands you can make more than 7% equity with less variance every 10 hands in other ways probably. This doesn't account for other players having a top 5% hand as well and just making your ev 0 if its 4 way and negative if its 5 way and makes it incredibly difficult to be profitable if whale plays 50% instead of 100%.

really the situations where collusion is really bad preflop in plo is when one of the colluders has a short stack and other has a big stack as they get to either capture a lot of equity in side pots or have a lot more fold equity but I doubt people actively try to find/set up such rare occurrences. Plus its pretty obvious if one guys always short stacking and reopening for his friend.

This is bizarre to me. I've successfully played PLO live and online, all over the world, for the last 12 years. Have never worried about this nonsense at all.

This sounds like you are trying to justify collusion. But yeah, you seem to think it's realistic for a whale to play 10% of his hands (or maybe 2 to 5% if he's running poorly on card distribution) in PLO of all games which is even slower and gets less hands/hr than live NL. Also, lol @ a whale even knowing what a top 10% hand is.

Not trying to justify the collusion, no. I did not initially understand what you were saying. Once I understood, I posted an edit comment which is my main response to your post. Some points:
1. Really interesting example. Thank you for that. Yours is the first post I've seen ITT explaining clearly what live collusion might look like.
2. I am still trying to understand the context of this discussion. Are people still discussing Mason's posts from 1 month back? Basically, Mason was pleading to Doug to eliminate double board PLO bomb pots due to rampant collusion opportunities. Are people still discussing this?
3. I still don't understand how the examples you give are specific to PLO, much less PLO bomb pots. It seems that your collusion strategy could be executed on the preflop street in NL as well.
4. I realize you aren't making any arguments in your post about PLO collusion vs NL collusion. So my questions above should be directed to the forum more broadly.

Feb 2: “The live stream will be going dark. There will be no new streams for the next few weeks or months.”

Bomb pots can be agonizingly slow. Every slow player, is in every hand. And you have to sit there and be patient with their slowness, because you're in every ****ing hand too. It's not like normal hands where you can tune out somewhat after folding preflop.

good point. add all the time bomb pots take to the tanking and use of time chips and they get what, like 4-5 hands an hour?

I think on average bomb pots take about 6 minutes. So, about 10 hands per hour. Most hands are a bit faster, but some pots where multiple players are all in and people are getting quartered and dealers are getting confused, well those hands can easily take 10-15 minutes or more. I estimate I've played about 1000 bomb pots this winter.

I hope Brad is a better businessman than he is a poker player…

He reminds me of how I played ten years and twenty million hands ago.

Wish I was smart enough to have got into vlogging in 2006 though

He does pretty well at poker though, no? It also looks likes he does pretty well at business. If he's successful, whether or not he is good at it seems pretty irrelevant.

cool story bro