PLO8 Revealed – Omaha Hi Lo Strategy

I play very few MTT’s these days. The problem is with a family its rare that I’ll have 6+ hours to play at once if I make a deep run. But it did take some time the other week in play in the WBCOOP PLO8 event. I went on a nice run and ended up finishing second. I wasn’t disappointed at all getting so close because I felt like I played well, and at least walked away with a SCOOP ticket for May. Everything went pretty smooth and I was able to build up some chips early and had the luxury of a decent size stack throughout. I was also single tabling it which was a huge help. Lately I’ve been multi-tabling rush PLO and have fallen into the bad habit of not paying attention to the tendencies of the other players and noting when they have recently taken a beat and might be a little tilted. In the tourney I was able to really focus in on what the other players were doing and adjust them. I also had the advantage of having a super tight player to my immediate left. Not only was he completely passive, but when it folded to me in the small blind I could just min-raise any 4 cards and he would fold every single time. Once it happened and I decided to fold because I had complete trash and I kept expected him to fight back a little at some point. When I folded he actually typed in the chat “what? no raise?”. And then I proceeded to steal him blind several more times. When I play PLO8 cash games these days there are a decent number of people who have a reasonable idea what they’re doing. But since this was a blogger freeroll most of the field had no clue to I was able to pretty much waltz through the field. It was like a flashback to the PLO8 games from like 2007.

I’m going to be playing on Full Tilt tomorrow as part of the Cardrunners 5th year anniversary activities. I’ll be on a few 50PLO8 tables from 10:30PM-12:30AM Eastern time. My screenname is campfirewest. I’ll record the play, if there are some interesting spots it may get turned into a Cardrunners video. Also, on Saturday I’ll be playing in the Cardrunners tourney on Full Tilt which starts at 3PM. The person who knocks me out will get a free copy of Pot Limited Omaha 8 Revealed Expanded Edition. Hope to see you at the tables!

I wrote an article for Omaha Planet, and they have it posted now, you can find it here.

Its some more advanced content that didn’t make it into the book. Check it out and let me know what you think. In the future I’m probably going to do more article writing. If there are any particular topics you’re interested in holler at me.

In the first part of this post I discussed some of the reasons why you should be careful with high only hands in PLO8. Now I’ll talk about why you should play them and when you should play them. First the why.

The obvious reason high hands need to be part of your various ranges is for balancing reasons. A few years ago when you had a higher percentage of idiots, this wasn’t much of a concern for me, and I could get away with rarely playing high hands. Nowadays that’s not quite the case. If you never play high hands then when the board comes KQT rainbow, an opponent who is even remotely observant is going to know you’ve never hit this board.  Also, since flops with 2 or3 high cards aren’t going to hit your opponents very often we’re going to be c-betting them a lot. But to keep our opponents from exploiting this, its important to show up with the goods every now and then. More knowledgeable opponents are also going to be c-betting these boards a lot as well. Its pretty awesome when you flop a nut straight on a high board and an aggressive opponent keeps barreling at you thinking you couldn’t have hit that board.

Now let’s talk about some of times where it is a good idea to play them. The most common scenario where I play a lot of high hands is when it is folded to me when I’m on the button or in the cutoff. I raise >40% of hands on the button in these situations, and adding a lot of high hands are a good way to build out that range. Often in this situation someone will call you out of the blinds with a weak hand and you can fire the flop and the turn and will win a lot of pots without showing down, so the cards in your hand don’t matter a lot anyway.

Another common scenario is when you have big implied odds. You are usually going to miss the flop with these hands, so you want to be able to get paid when you do hit. In a heads up pot this means having deeper (100bb+) stacks. It can also mean a multi-way pot. A very common scenario is when several people limp into the pot in a full ring game. This is nice because when you nail a board hard, the odds are that much better that one of those players will come along with you.

Lastly, adding high hands can give you some deception value. I’ll occasionally min-raise UTG with one of these hands. Most players are going to automatically put you on AAxx, and call looking to out flop your aces. This is nice for two reasons. One is that when an ace flops they will usually fold when you bet out. The other is that the boards that hit your hand will be interpreted by your opponents as boards that are bad for aces. That sets them up to try to outplay you or overvalue their hand. A word of warning though. Don’t go crazy with this concept and start raising tons of high only hands from early position. Only do it occasionally, and only with the stronger high only hands, preferably ones that are double suited.

High hands in PLO8 cause a lot of confusion. Beginners have a tendency to grossly overvalue them, since their concept of hand values usually comes from other games. I’m going to make this a 2 part blog post since I don’t feel like writing a gigantic essay. In this post I’ll talk about the problems with high only hands in PLO8, in the second post I’ll talk about how they are valuable and when you should play them. I’m taking a little bit of a risk here that readers will misinterpret this and think that I”m saying you should never play high hands at all. That’s not what I’m going to say here, I just want to outline some of limitations of them that can get you into trouble.

First of all, the hot/cold equities suck. KKxx against the top 15% of hands only has 43.6% equity. T-J-Q-K is only 37.9% versus a top 15% range.The average percentile rank for KKxx hands is only 33%. This isn’t the most horrible thing ever, but they’re not favorites over ranges your opponents are likely to have in common situations. I recommend going to propokertool.com and running a lot of simulations to get a better idea of the equity matchups with high only hands.

Playability is not great either. First of all you aren’t going to hit many flops. There are lots of different flop fits you should consider, but in general boards with 2 or 3 high cards are going to hit these hands the hardest. You only get flops like that about a third of the time on a random flop. But if you are holding 4 high cards the odds of that type of flop go down to about 25% or so. Most of the time we’re missing the flop with these hands.

The other problem is its difficult to get paid off when you do hit, since you usually also need your opponent to hold some type of high hand as well. That’s not going to happen a ton if you hold a bunch of high cards and then some more high cards hit the flop.

The last thing I’m going to mention here is that when you flop top set, you can still be in trouble. Most people are familiar with some of common set versus big draw scenarios in PLO. In PLO8 you can be a lot more vulnerable because you may also have to worry about low draws and back door low draws. If you are holding QQ67 on a Q23 two tone board in a 4 way pot, things can get a little tricky…..

I’m going to stop there for now. But again, I’m not arguing you shouldn’t play high hands, just beware of some of their limitations. In a few days I’ll post again and talk about when playing high hands can be very profitable.

At this point most people have figured out that when the board is paired on the flop your opponent has usually missed it, even in a game like PLO8. Another thing a lot of regs do it c-bet too often. When you have a decent reg and a paired flop and then you check to them, you can be pretty sure they are going to c-bet about 100% of the time. The obvious way to take advantage of this is to occasionally check-raise them with air. They won’t have actually hit the flop very often, so this shows a healthy profit against the right players. I’ve been doing this a lot lately and it works a huge percentage of the time. A few words of caution though:

-You can’t do this every time the board pairs. It needs to be an occasional play or people are going to catch on pretty fast.

-If you do this twice to a reg they are probably going to remember it and get suspicious. The next time you do it against them it may be better to have trips+ instead of air

-This only works against competent, aggressive players who are c-betting in these spots way too often. Don’t do it against random fish who never fold.

-Be less likely to do this if you have some decent equity in the hand, like an overpair or a some kind of draw. You don’t want to check-raise and then be forced to fold to a shove when you had a low draw and a flush draw.