Hey guys,

Im reviewing some hand I played on my last session. Vilain is a reg 28/17 fold cb 63% Wshowdown 25% Wshowdown river 66%.




I think the first 2barrel are std with the nut blocker but on the river an other heart come on the deck, I should maybe consider it and slowdown (since its less likely I have the nuts now) ?

What do you think of this spot do you 100% 3barrel it even if a heart come on the river ? If its a non heart brick do you barrel it 100% of the time?

Thanks for your answers
Regards.

Seems okay, though I don't think leading flop, and therefore committing yourself to barreling is completely necessary. Though sometimes I guess you need to have just the blocker. Actually, when the last heart comes, you might be better off betting something like half pot as his range will mainly be AA/KK, and high flushes, though that depends on his 3b tendencies from the co.

dont hate it, but dont love it either, since with the nut blocker, i like to choose a line where i am polarized to nuts or air. in this spot, i personally might easily play the ten high flush the same way for value, which gives him a supereasy call. depends on history between you two i guess. not bad, not good, why not trying it, whatever, nh

I'd probably give up after 2 people call the flop.

River you can bet smaller, maybe $100. The bigger bet looks more bluffy, unless you plan on full potting the nuts as well.

didnt see two people called flop. in this case, nice bluff, you rep the nut flush and the nut flush only imo. he just called you this time, but its good for your metagame. you have the initiative here, and he is in a guessing game. advantage OP.

i dislike this line.

nicely played...as long as you play your nuts this way as well...though I would tend to bet smaller on the river....say 1/2 pot to 3/4 pot, but then I do that with my nut flushes as well as the blocker.

if you bet 1/2 or 3/4 pot you will get snapped off by any legitimate hand. as i said, the key by playing your nut blockers is that you rep the nut flush and nothing else. your bet size reps not the nut flush, but every flush, which makes it an easy call with 2nd nut flush for villain.

I'm new to PLO, and the responses to this thread illustrate something else I've been wondering about, so if you'll entertain me...

1) I'd say repping the flopped nuts with the donk bet makes sense; it's a pretty logical conclusion for anyone looking on that that's your hand, UNLESS they know more about your range.

2) I'd also assume that you should probably conclude that anyone who calls you on that first bet has a flush. It's pretty hard to see an ABC player continuing with anything less right? So I'm in shut down mode, especially OOP.

3) a lot of the replies here mention OP has the nut blocker. It seems silly to put that much value in having that card. Sure, there are more options that you have it but cominutorically you're requiring everyone here to see monsters under the bed (granted a common problem in NLHE, at least), and fold. Seems like a jump even given point 1 here.

Very interested in thoughts here from PLO regs.

.... do you really think someone is folding AAxx on the flop here?

We bet the flop 4way and turn 3way, no way opponent thinks "maybe he's valuebetting worse" if he holds 2nd nuts. If we had something like T high flush we'd probably just be c/folding the turn with that action. Definitely not 3barreling.

Also in opponent's shoes I disagree with being more likely to call half a pot bet. You need 33% to call psb or 25% to call half a pot bet, so difference isn't that massive. However, almost nobody ever takes bet-bet-½pot as a bluff EVER when it's obvious the absolute hand strenght of 100% of your range is strong, so for most regs that line would always be Q/J high flush, and if we have J high flush he has the nuts. I think there's definitely a bigger chance of psb being a bluff >33% of the time than half pot bet being bluff >25% of the time, and villain can't have anything but a complete bluffcatcher here.

I'd still bet more than half pot, mainly because I also do so with the nuts. Around 100 probably.

When we bet the turn his J high flush is 100% a bluffcatcher here. Standard play is definitely to fold turn/river with it (but his calldown is by no means absurd)

No, NLH is actually very different from PLO in this respect. In PLO we have the nut flush surprisingly often when we take this line. We have it often enough that we need to balance it by bluffing sometimes, and the best hands to balance it with is with the nut blocker (and/or some sets).

I'll show you the math: Suppose we have the Qh and another 3 random cards. How often do we have another heart in our hand? After removing the flop and the Qh there are 48 cards left in the deck, 9 of them are hearts. A quick calculation will show you that we have another heart around half the time. In fact, we have another heart more than that, since we called pre and our range is skewed towards suited and double-suited hands. So we have another heart more like 2/3 of the time or so. You see then that given that we hold the Qh, we have the nuts twice as often as not. We're going to take an aggressive line when we do have the flush, so we should take the same line when we happen to not have another heart. If villains call us down they're making a mistake against our range and leaking money to us in the long run.

Of course, if villains don't have a fold button we don't need to balance out our value range and the point is moot. But when they play well, not bluffing with the nut blocker is terrible. In fact, we need a bunch more bluffs: having only 1/3 bluffs in our range is not game-theoretically enough, and we seen a bunch more bluffs, probably some sets.

this is obviously +ev, of course he's calling jack high flush against a reg

only thing bet less otr

come on, he should definitely call down with jack high flush vs. a reg, game theory etc.

this is exactly the post I was looking for, thank you.

follow up ?s, how often do people make this mistake? Is this a common translation error from NLHE players? I guess one of the big parts I don't get isn't the math, knowing what we know aka that we have the Qh, but rather the math on the other end. I'd say the part that gets me is that while it makes 100% sense that we've got some kind of flush 2/3rds of the time, if I'm putting you on a range from an NLHE perspective (common error I know), you've very rarely got the nuts. I understand Omaha is often a game of the nuts, but this still seems like if I was on the other end, with that Jhigh, I'd definitely be inclined to call.

thanks again for the thoughtful response. more discussion very welcome.

yeah? I mean, as mentioned below by another poster, one of your two opponents almost always has a flush. It seems like there's no justifiable call for a big bet on that flop. again, I'm new here.

Happy to help. I keep learning about PLO myself and these things become more and more natural with time. I still remember why they're so counter-intuitive in the first place.

As to your new question: you're essentially saying that you find it hard to put people on a range in PLO, especially in situations where their bet represents strong holdem hands, e.g. flushes, or simply the nuts. A good way to get used to PLO hand frequencies is simply to count combinations, and to get a lot of practice doing that.

Let's do an example: suppose the flop is 987r. How often does our opponent have the nuts? Suppose for now that our villain has a random hand, and that we haven't looked at our cards yet. There are 16 combinations of JT, our of 1176 possible two-card combinations. So, if we were playing holdem, the chance that villain has the nuts is 16/1176=1.35%. Very small. Now, seeing as villain has six two-card combinations in his hand, a reasonable approximation to the probability he has the nuts is to simply multiply 1.35% by 6, getting 8.1%. This is not the exactly correct answer (PPTing it, I get the correct answer is 7.1%, which is actually surprisingly far off), but it's a decent start and you can do it in your head. How probable is it that villain has a straight on this flop? Multiply by 3, getting 24%. (PPT gives 19%.) Quite a lot for a villain with a random hand, eh? So if you're seeing this flop 4-way, it's more likely than not that one of the villains has a straight.

Now, let's get back to estimating how probable JT is on this flop. We got 8% (or 7% from PPT), but this was assuming villain has a random hand. However, people tend to play well-connected and high hands, so if villain has a range of around 30%, I'd say that more or less doubles the probability he has JT (but it shouldn't change the probability he has 65, and it should probably decrease the prob. he has T6). PPT says 11.6% (using PPT hand ranking, but that should be reasonable for our purposes). So, having a range of 30% increases the chance he has the nuts here by 63%.

Ok, now, suppose we took a flop headsup with this villain, and he donked into us on a 987r flop. How likely is villain to have the nuts? The best thing to do would be to construct a donking range for villain, but that seems really difficult here. What I like to do in this situation is just to estimate how often villain donks into us on this flop; 25% seems like a decent guesstimate (very villain-dependent, of course). Now suppose for the sake of discussion that villain always donks with JT (this is pretty inaccurate actually, but let's assume it anyway). So villain has JT 11.6% of the time and he donks 25% of the time: we get that almost half the time that villain donks into us, he has the nuts! This is actually a pretty similar situation to the situation in OP's hand and you see how with a pretty large donk%, villain still has the nuts half the time.

Now, let's do the same math on OP's hand, taking it from villain's perspective (villain has some info on dead cards of course since he holds 4 cards, but let's just ignore those). Say hero bets on this flop 25% of the time. How often does he have the Q-high flush? There are 10 live hearts, giving 9 two-card combos of Q-high flush. So using our inaccurate approximation, the probability that a random hand is the nuts is approximately 6*9/1176=4.6%. So assuming hero's hand was random and he donked 25%, we get that 18% of his donking range is the nuts. Now let's suppose hero's hand is actually top-30% and put it in PPT. PPT gives 5.8%. So 23% of the time that hero donks here, he has the nuts (assuming he donks 25% of the time, which is probably way too much).

No matter what you think about the exact estimates we've used, you see the probabilities we get are rather large: much much larger than they would be in NLH. In fact, they're about 6-times larger, for the obvious reason: as Vanessa Selbst says: two times the cards, six times the fun. We really have 6 two-card combos in our hand, and that's what counts. If you think how the math above changes when flops start getting multiway, you'll see why there are many situations where we should definitely see monsters under the bed when playing PLO, or at least know that in many situations, the monsters are there with like 20% probability.

WP.