5/5 Omaha 4 high

Middle limp, CO (1200) LAG raises to 20, btn (2400) calls, I (1050) 3! to 90 in SB with AcAs9d8s, both calls.

(280)

Kd4c3h


X, CO bet 180, Button folds, hero?

I think I often have the best hand but next street will be tough to play against an agressive and splashy player. I have better aces to call. I think I can fold this combo but it seems weak. I would have called HU but him betting 3 ways looks stronger.

How would you play this hand?

1) What's your image .. 3b range from EP? If you are checking all your QQxx 3b (and he knows this) then you have to call one bet to see what happens.

2) Why wouldn't you lead here? Can't you have KK?

While you really don't 'actually' have any BD help from this Flop they might not either. I'm just not sure why you would give up the betting lead from OOP on a Board as bad as this one without some more intel. It's much easier to bet/fold here than to even consider monsters under the bed when facing only one bet. If AA is a set mining operation then why 3b? If that is your mindset then you need to flat here (not 3b) to control the pot size PF before V can use the pot size against you. Let loose V do what they do .. bet everything and build a pot for you.

3) If you peel and an Ace hits Turn are you x/f to a pot bet, just assuming V has a straight?

If you're playing PLO you're going to lose some hands .. eh? That's the nature of the more similar equities. Get a 'simple' odds App and look at your equity here against some made up holdings. If V has a set or pr/wrap you're in tough shape here .. but a loose V will have a lot of Kx and you're probably just under 30% to V 2pr combos.

Lots of posters on this site wont help a Player 'get out of jail' since they feel you shouldn't be in jail to begin with. Well, I don't think you're in jail. But if you think you're in jail here with bad AAxx, then don't 3b so you can see a Turn 100% of the time on a Board like this one. Once you've done that 20-30 times from EP AND actually got to Showdown you'll find you you have the best hand and then can be more confident in playing the bigger pots via 3b.

I'm not trying to rag on you too much, but your post suggests that you really shouldn't be playing 5/5 PLO. This is a slam dunk c-bet for anyone that has your perceived image as I read into it here. If you want to discuss a c-bet size, we can do that.

A) You have a pretty decent hand
B) You are the aggressor PF
C) Allowing a chronic betting loose Player to bet tells you nothing
D) While a loose Player calling a bet may not tell you much, at least it tells you more than just allowing them to bet on their own
E) You need to get more comfortable being ready to double barrel or call down a couple bets in these types of spots. If you are constantly folding out then you will just get run over .. IF THIS IS THE CASE, then just play smaller from EP so you can at least see the Turn card for under 10% of your stack. GL

In theory, K high board are not that good for the preflop 3better because I'm not 3 betting many KK here.

As an exploit, I could have bet 1/3 here and make my life easier

Cb flop is probably best. You will have some good KK in your range here, and the board being disconnected means it's harder for them to flop 2 pair. Checking seems okay but it needs to come with a plan. I probably call now and see what he does, but if he's a lag he could easily just barrel many runouts with just AK. You might have to strap yourself in and call down. So folding isn't an awful option given you have little visibility. Jamming might even be an option too.

Yeah, you're the guy that's always fun to read because you manage to say so very little within a huge number of words. I'm not convinced you're so much better than the OP that you can talk to them like that. I'm not convinced that you should be playing 5/5 while OP shouldn't. And I'm not convinced that your advice here is good I'm afraid.

@ answer20

You miss the point here. It's hard to adjust against maniacs who give a lot of action and doesn't like folding much.
A good adjustment is sometimes to let them bluff off so I'm going to check to him a lot.

K high boards are absolutely not a slam dunk cbet as you said.

5/5 is the smallest stake I will play live. I have 0 financial pressure.

This game is played as a dealer choice, I'm pretty bad at PLO4 because I lack of experience.

i'm less of a student of GTO preflop strategy than some, but i play with this type of player / game a lot and i will flat a fair portion of my bad-to-middling AA out of the blinds at this depth, because these types of boards are hard to play against loose players who can easily have weird 2 pairs or low sets that tighter players won't. i don't think 3-betting is wrong here, but for me it's sometimes a pick easier spots type of thing when playing against bad players.

that being said, if you are 3-betting this pre then i think we are supposed to be betting this flop OOP pretty often. heads up OOP we are supposed to be weighted towards larger sizings on disconnected boards, but being multiway and against wider ranges should probably reduce our frequency somewhat if not our sizing. i think bet 2/3 pot and usually fold if raised is probably right here, but honestly i don't love it and that's why i sometimes just flat pre. lol

as played, check call one street is pretty reasonable, but i don't hate folding either.

I would have flat bad aces but AA98ss is not that bad. I dont want to play 5 ways.

K45r is better for my opponents because they have sets and 2 pairs and I only have a few KK.

If he’s borderline maniac I would sigh and crai. I could be convinced pot / call is optimal on this super dry board.

I don't think this is an AA hand you want to 3b being OOP, especially this deep. Both will call you this deep and you're building a pot to play OOP with a hand that rarely improves on the flop. Here we get a fairly disconnected bland board and are in still concerned with how to proceed. I think the deeper you are the tighter your 3b range should be OOP - on the other side when in position you should open up your 3b range especially over 150-200 bb.

I have an SPR of 3,5 otf, isn't it a little too much? I think it's fine too.

I agree, calling may be better that deep oop.
I hesitate a few seconds between calling and raising and the BB flat out of turn, there was a limper too. We would have played the pot 5 ways.

How would you proceed as played otf ?

Pretty easy fold 3 ways and probably HU also. When you think about your range you are pretty close to bottom. (when you think about your AAxx these are pretty close to bottom: no bd anything, no interaction with board.

In PLO calling down 200bb with bare OP you're gonna have a bad time. Folding doesn't feel good, but it's often correct to overfold on flop so we can continue on enough turns.

This hand is really hard, but I feel like there is a lot wrong in this thread. I haven't had time to really work on this yet as it's hard to get the ranges and work with them. I guess I need to do some work to create some custom propokertools ranges, but alas I haven't.

I don't have the ability to check this at 200bb, but I can check it at 150bb if we ignore the original limper, so I set up a 150bb sim with the co opening and the btn flatting and this was a clear 3-bet. The ev difference was enormous. It was not close.

The second point that has been bothering me is that we have KK in our range less than our opponents do. I think this is categorically false. I haven't had the time to really dig into this, but I feel fairly good about my guess here.

It has to do with Bayes and conditional ranges and how narrow our range is relative to our opponents ranges. I doubt that either opponent has much of a folding range after we 3-bet and let's assume that CO opens large (25%) and let's eliminate AA hands from his range since he didn't 4! and eliminating these ranges would bias him towards more KK hands.

Board - K54
PLAYER_1 25%!AA
PLAYER_2 8%

How often do(es) PLAYER_1 match hand range KK? 6.1377%
How often do(es) PLAYER_2 match hand range KK? 15.0410%

Yeah, we could do a lot more work on this to figure it out, but there is no way at all that either one of these villians is more likely to have KK than we are. Our range is AA dominant, but the second most likely combo in our range is likely KK. I'm not buying any argument put forth in this thread to the contrary but would be happy to have someone do some data anlaysis and show me wrong.

I think given its a 3b pot and your 3 ways you have to x/f. A good player is going to own you here on future streets and you basically have no way to improve. Your a dog to any Kx.

We have aces…

Ok.

I would expect some GTO-orientated players to cbet this flop liberally and play the hand agressively. While I don't have a specific solver solution for this spot (and solvers can navigate this spot differently based on a lot of factors or even players using simplified non-perfect solutions) I do understand a lot of the reasoning for when they choose to do so.

This is a Good flop for PFR, as he has various AA, AK, KK, Kx that connect strongly with the board.

Moreover, even though aa98 without backdoor flush draws is one of the weaker hands on this flop, it will still be the equity favorite or have competitive equity often.

While cbetting the flop is undoubtedly thin, it should generally be +ev and is likely to position Hero for more positive +ev decisions than when he starts with a check (in part because winning the pot immediately or knocking out 1 player is very valuable). These type of lines may make some posters uncomfortable because the natural extension of these lines is turning our hand polar (bluffing!) oop in a 200bb pot (not actually that deep) because there are many soft and easier spots to take advantage of playing live.


And I have no problem with posters optimizing their strategy based on the live games they play instead of GTO.

But the most interesting part of the hand for me is what is the best sizing for a flop cbet. Since Hero can get his stack in on river relatively easy I would be choosing between 40%,50%,75% and 100% psbs.


As played, I think Hero has a very straightforward call.

Winner. I feel like this was the first sensible post in the thread.

I would BET100 (100%) here for all the reasons you said above. To be clear

• We have the best range.
• We want to maximize fold equity.
• We are not at the bottom of our range here, I would guess we are at the middle or upper middle of our range on this board. We are not top, but we are not bottom.

A naked King might have correct odds to call our bet, but put yourself in villians shoes with KQJT or AKQJ or QJT4 or some other janky hand he might have. Yeah, he has 40% equity here and can call, but that's fine.

i'm curious how much the EV difference between flatting and 3-betting changes between, say, a 100bb and 150bb sim. as that might give us an idea of how much it might change between 150 and 200 or beyond. i'm also curious whether that change is linear or whether it curves sharply the deeper you get... e.g. is the difference between 100 and 125 the same as the difference between 125 and 150?

i think i agree that we have a pretty competitive frequency distribution for KK combos, but the problem is our opponents should have many more of all the other medium to strong combos besides KK, including two pairs, sets and wraps. and i think this is more the case than it would be in a 3-bet pot against tighter players or at a lower stack depth - these specific opponents are calling wider, and the average opponent can also afford to call wider with more money behind. so our range is less able to support a normal OOP lead as the 3-bettor on a dry board than it would be at 100bb.

a lot of the equity we generate when 3-betting strong hands OOP is our ability to maintain the initiative by c-betting into the relatively lower SPR that our 3-bet created. this compensates for the positional disadvantage, which is really important. the deeper we are, the less we can do that, both because the SPR is higher and because our opponents can call wider and connect with a wider variety of boards, which wrecks our normal heuristic for dryer textures.

Not opposed to flatting pre in a bunch of situations, prefer 3bet vs capable players.

Cool with the 3bet pre here, pretty good flop for us? Betting 50% all day.

As played I’m calling at least one street vs lag.

Check raising flop seems slick the more I think about it. Pretty sure we are just stuffing into junk like AK2x alot. Depends on opponent.

We can talk about this one item then .. OK?

Against this Player type V, how much do/should we change our Flop play when Ace, King or Queen high with everything else the same? We really shouldn't change it much at all .. especially when playing deep .. especially as PF aggressor .. especially if we have an image to work from.


Fundamental difference between 1/2, 1/3 and 5/5 PLO .. that's the BI and typical stack depths after extensive play. I see it practically every day. Player buys in for 1/2 to 1 full stake and then goes into lock down when their stack hits 4x. Two reasons .. one, they don't know how to play when deep and two, they don't want to risk that many BB in one hand unless super nutted. Yes, you could argue that those are basically the same thing but one has to do with Poker and the other has to do with a Player's psych.

In my room the max straddle and opening bet sizing is exactly the same for all three stake levels. GL

I need you to be more direct and specific if you're trying to make a specific or direct point or question. I'm not sure how to answer or respond to you without knowing that.

I don't disagree I'm all over the map .. I will make points on 'both' sides of the thread in the same post.

I also believe there's 'thought' that goes into decision making .. I'm not a very 'standard' guy at the table. I also find myself repeating my 'short' points a lot in the real world .. so I just offer up the paragraph from the get go in an effort to do so only once.

I also end up explaining things 3 different ways in hopes that my listener will grasp just one of them for comprehension.

I do need to follow my own advice .. "Answer the question .. then tell your story." This is a basic guideline for news writers, being you need to capture the reader in the first paragraph or they don't read the article. GL

Yeah on the one hand it's good to be in flow and writing for yourself and all that but if you want effective communication then it's good to regularly place yourself in the readers eyes and try to boil down your prose into being more succinct and direct. You've made a few posts in this subforum that fall into this trap.

“I apologize for such a long letter - I didn't have time to write a short one.”
― Mark Twain

3-bet pre mandatory.

x/f flop, move on. You're actually somewhat bottom of your range here, you have no relevant blockers (98 is actually an antiblocker), you have no bd flush draws, ~3.5 SPR.

If your SPR was lower than 2.5, I don't mind calling and probably going broke.

ProPokerTools Odds Oracle Results (2.3 Professional)
Omaha Hi, Generic syntax
Board - kd4c3h
PLAYER_1 AhAs9c8s
PLAYER_2 Kx
600000 trials (randomized)


All-in Equity

	Equity %	Wins Hi %	Ties Hi %	Wins Hi Count	Ties Hi Count
AhAs9c8s	41.9067%	41.8062%	0.2012%	250837	1207
Kx	58.0932%	57.9927%	0.2012%	347956	1207