I don’t know much at all about PLO but it seems like you just basically want to cooler people?

Limping is a lot more popular and taking a lot of flops in position seem much more important.

It seems so complex like what hands to play if someone opens and you have Ac10cJc8x is it a standard call in the cutoff?

Such an odd game

It's not an odd game to me. When NLHE become more popular towards the end of the 20th century, standard poker was generally 5c draw, where you get to make live reads on every single face card that comes up. You could do very well out of poker with little strategic understanding of the game, as long as you had good psychological discipline and the ability to read opponents. Those guys would have found NLHE to be like muting an entire sense and fumbling around in the dark.

I've described PLO before as like treading water in the bits inbetween where you cooler the f**k out of your opponents. When you're getting coolered yourself and bad beat in the most improbably ways, pot after pot for thousands of hands, losing 35 out of every 40 flips, getting no action on your big hands, etc etc, which happen far more in PLO than in NLHE, it's easy to feel like you're drowning. But if you can stay alive i.e. keep playing well enough to have your head above water then when your luck turns and you're the one doing the coolering, you'll make your money back and then some.

Also,

If you think the game is just about coolering people it means you don't properly understand hand strengths. If you are playing just to hit the nuts and bet big so is 80% of the other players and if you're playing the way almost everyone else is you aren't going to be a winning player. Knowing how a specific player plays certain types of hands post flop as well as tilt control are 2 of the biggest edges you can get in PLO.

I might view the prevalence of limping as evidence of the games still being very soft. Eventually the games may not be so soft and players might evolve depending on the stakes. Even microstakes plo regs online tend to open for a raise for example.

Coolering: A lot of new players think it's a cooler to run into AAxx with their KKxx (Evidence from people posting conspiracies about Global Poker: https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/s...8&postcount=19 ). And you might have your people who win just by overset mining, but people overplaying an underset multiway is not really a cooler at PLO. People chasing draws to the non-nuts isn't really a cooler.

Limping as a general strategy: Since weak/rec players are limping, it can be optimal to try to play more pots with them in position with hands that play well multiway. Especially if raising doesn't isolate and you don't have issues building pots postflop.

Weakish players also tend to undervalue position in PLO. Playing OOP is much, much tougher in PLO - for example, let´s say you raised AQT8ss in EP and got two callers. Flop is AQ4, two of a suit that you don´t have. You cbet, both players call. Turn is a 5, putting the second flushdraw on board. Now what? If you bet and get called, what do you do on a non-A/Q river? If you bet and get raised, are you just tossing your two pair in the muck, putting your opponent on somethng like 44 or 32? But how many 32 and 44 do they have in their range, and does 44 really raise here against someone who has all the AA/QQ in his range? If you check and there is a bet, do you call or fold?

It very quickly gets very, very tough to play OOP. Now, reverse the positions in this hand and assume it checked to you OTF, you bet and got called in two spots. All of a sudden you have a host of options depending on how the other players act and it is much easier to make a decent decision.

The deeper the stacks get, the harder it is to play OOP. And at least live PLO (don´t play online) often plays very deep, at least in the games I usually play.

nah. plo isn't about coolering people. that's not how you make money. or if it is, it's a byproduct of something else. after all anyone can cooler anyone.

where does profit come from in PLO? the same way you profit in any poker game. from making fewer mistakes than your opponents.


At beginning levels of PLO, say $.10$/.25 this will come mostly in the form of punishing players who are too loose. This is a very common mistake, and one that is easy to punish. You simply beat them by going for thick value. So a couple players limp in, you iso with AKJTds. They call. Sometimes you miss the flop and give up, and sometimes you smash or hit and you start betting. Often we end up in position, in a raised pot, with a superior hand. That is a lot of advantages, and that translates into winning more pots and/or winning bigger pots.

But the mistakes don't end preflop. Often our opponents will play too passively. We can exploit this, by "front loading" our range. What i mean by this term is putting all of our good hands in bet. This is dangerous, because it means when you check your range is ultra weak and an observant opponent can exploit this. But against a loose and passive player, one who seldom bets or raises, this danger is minimal. Meanwhile, by putting all our good hands in bet, we take maximal advantage of their loose passive tendencies. By playing aggressively with medium hands and draws we can win pots with them, either when we improve or they fold. And we can get a lot of value from our strong hands. Often we can get some value with our weak hands just by checking them down also, although we don't really care. We're not trying to win with our weak hands.

Of course this is but one archetype, and this is just one maximally exploitative plan. The plo world is filled with players with various tendencies. Aside from stomping on fish with thick value, there are a lot of other ways we can lose less or win a little bit more by optimizing our play. The right button open frequency for example. By opening 40-50% of buttons, we can gain a lot of uncontested blinds. The corollary to this is you need to have a pretty well developed game plan vs big blind defense from a reg. Because just betting strong hands isn't going to cut it any more. Now you need to enter the world of 'GTO', which isn't really GTO at all, but rather highly complicated strategies devised by computer programs which use machine learning and neural nets to create unexploitable pseudo gto equilibrium strategies. Since our opponent will now presumably have a fold button, we will devise a highly intricate strategy which uses our side cards to optimize and calibrate our decision making. We'll employ highly aggressive betting strategies when we are in position and/or if we have an equity advantage. By employing the ancient technique of triple range merging, we will combine value bets, semi bluffs, pair bets, and outright airballs into a mystifying array of potential action. And we will check. Oh how we will check. We will check air. We will check monsters. We will check combo hands. All in exactly the right frequencies.

In your quest for PLO greatness, you will also encounter maniacs. Usually these are degenerate fish with a penchant for action, but sometimes a loose aggressive reg will lose their mind and most of their bankroll while on tilt and become neither reg nor whale, but regwhale, the most delectable and yet dangerous fish in the sea. Maniacs are either the easiest opponent in the world, or someone who makes the game impossible to beat, depending on how well you are running. The best approach is to sit on their right and tactically snipe them with strong hands, although sitting on their right and employing a liberal check raise strategy can also be effective especially if you have a hand that can go with the maniac but you want to make sure none of the nits flopped anything first.

You must study the many PLO disciplines. Attain mastery of bet sizing, note taking, game selection, site selection, seat selection, and hand selection, and you will have only just started on your path. You must also overcome the great challenges of the mental game. When you crave innear peace as much as you crave air, only then will you eliminate tilt and issues relating to motivation. And then once you think you have a solid understanding of the game, the great PLO gods will laugh and rain down on you a five card and six card variant, causing you to rethink all the cherished assumptions about generating profit that you have held so dear for so long.

In summation, allow me to say this. Ask not what PLO can do for you, ask what you can do for PLO. Can you go into the great unwashed masses of no limit hold'em players, and spread the gospel of the good game? Can you implore floormen in casinos everywhere to start a PLO interest list, just to see what will happen, even if the dealers probably won't be able to deal it? My only regret is that I have but one life to give to the game of PLO, for it deserves so much more.

PLO is about realizing and denying equity .. How do you do that when the 'worst' odds you can offer are 2 to 1? You play poker!

While your opponents may have equity to improve .. how much equity do they have to the nuts?. 'Correctly' betting, especially when in position, sends a message to your opponent and it's up to them to decide if you are trying to realize your equity to the nuts by betting or if you already have a made hand and are trying to deny their equity to improve to a non-nutted hand. (Of course an opponent doesn't fold a nut draw .. most of the time)

The coolers are going to happen .. but it's how you use your 6 NL combos to manipulate and interpret the ongoing betting in the non-nutty hands that give you your best chance at a successful session.

Most Players understand that the equities run closer in PLO .. that's why I prefer (Turn) folds all day long as opposed to constantly taking the 65-35 battle with my whole stack to Showdown. That's how I 'control' my variance .. not by RIT after the pot-fest.

As stated above .. the limping and lack of 'wide enough' 3-4 betting means that the games should be profitable in the long run, which is why you need an extended bankroll to absorb the downswings. GL