Thoughts from a PLO Game
One doesn’t get many chances to play Pot Limit Omaha live in the United States. The game is still in a stage where it’s only spread as a side game during major tournaments – you just don’t see it played on a regular basis in any American card room or casino that I’m aware of.
Which is sad, because PLO is great fun. It’s a wonderful action game, and anything that gets people to play some form of poker other than No Limit Hold’em can only be good.
So imagine my delight to see a $1/$2 PLO game break out at the Mirage in Las Vegas. Of course, this was during the World Series of Poker, and as one moderately grumpy dealer put it, “Once you guys leave, I won’t have to deal this any more.” It is true that PLO requires the dealers to work a bit harder than they do for NL Hold’em, but I would have thought they might enjoy the change of pace. I know I do. Anyway, I got to play the game on two different evenings – here are some observations…
First, PLO is almost always played high-only, unlike the limit version which is almost always played high-low split eight-or-better. That’s because playing high-only Limit Omaha is rather like having a cavity fi lled. Without anesthetic. In fact (and I’m not making this up) when I worked at PokerStars, if we needed a real money cash game table on which to test some software feature, we would go to the Limit Omaha highonly tables. They were always empty, and this is not a coincidence. But I digress.
PROCEDURES
Normally, I hate writing (or reading) stuff about rules and procedures in poker games. I mean, surely most of us have all this stuff down. But because PLO is played so little, there are a lot of things that aren’t standardized and should be. And I suspect this prevents the game from being more popular. In fact, the dealers at the Mirage, one of the most mature rooms in Las Vegas, had signifi cant diffi culty with the procedures of the game. So:
1. It really simplifi es everybody’s life if you allow the fi rst opener to raise to four times the big blind. Note that in a $1/$2 game, the opener should technically only be able to raise to $7 (he calls the $2, sees a total of $5 in the pot, and raises that $5 to $7 total). $8 really isn’t that far from $7. And in the grander scheme of things, if you’re playing $25/$50 PLO, then an opening raise to $200 isn’t really that different from $175. But it’s so much easier on dealers and players if the answer to “How much can I make it?” is “Four times the big blind, sir.”
2. If somebody straddles (and this is common in PLO), then the maximum opening raise should be four times the straddle. This is, again, very close to the exact amount permissible under pot-limit poker rules and simplifi es everybody’s life. See where I’m going with this?
3. Yes, $100 bills should play in the game. Anything else means the dealer is constantly selling chips and getting fi lls, and then chip runners never get anywhere else in the room. I told you that PLO is an action game and that means there’s a lot of rebuying.
4. Position is everything. The fi rst night I played, there was a guy named “Derek” at the table. Derek was really nice, pleasant, and fun to play with. But he was also clearly the major force in the game – you might say that every pot went through Derek’s seat, because there weren’t many hands where he didn’t at least see the fl op. When we fi rst started the game, I was three seats to Derek’s left. The guy on my right left the game. I immediately moved into that seat. Again, the guy on my right got up. I moved another seat – now leaving only one seat between Derek and me. At that point, I was fairly happy – I could see Derek’s “let’s build a pot” raises coming. It’s also extremely important in PLO to have position because when you act fi rst after the fl op, you have only the leverage of the existing pot for the size of your bet. If somebody bets the pot in front of you, you can make it four times that amount (there’s that 4x again) – putting a ton of pressure on everybody else, including the original bettor.
5. It’s okay to fold aces post-fl op. I think that it may be profi table, if boring, to play PLO in such a way that all you do is wait to suck out on aces. Some PLO players, bless their hearts, never reraise pre-fl op unless they have aces. So you call and then if you’re beating aces on the fl op, you get all the money in. I saw more than one pot where a player committed all his chips post-fl op with just aces, drawing very nearly dead. The most interesting version of that was a pot in which a guy reraised pre-fl op with aces to $70, with him and two opponents having about $600 each. The fl op came down 9-9-whatever. It was checked to the aces guy, who bet $200. The fi rst opponent paused and called, the second folded. As soon as the fi rst opponent called, Aces Guy began explaining how his reraise indicated aces and the opponent should have folded his raggedhand- containing-a-nine pre-fl op. The turn was a blank, and the opponent bet $400, which Aces Guy called pretty quickly, but continued his rant about the opponent’s play. The river was yet another complete brick and the opponent put Aces Guy all in for maybe $150. Now Aces Guy completely lost it, showing his aces (double-suited, if memory serves) to all and sundry, but not quite folding. He berated the opponent for poor play, and generally bemoaned his state in life. I kept thinking, “Well, I’m not sure how you got this far, but now the pot’s $1,400 or whatever and how can you possibly lay down those aces with that board for $150?” But eventually, after a long extended sermon, that’s exactly what he did. So, it’s okay to fold aces post-fl op, but it’s much better to do it on the fl op, not the river.
THREE THOUGHTS ABOUT ACES IN PLO:
Since you sometimes have to fold aces post-fl op, don’t feel the need to go to war with them pre-fl op unless there are reasons to do so. Good reasons to do so include creating dead money in the pot, getting the button, and getting a free card on the turn.
If you have aces and can get about 40% of the available money in the pot pre-fl op, then do so. That leaves little enough money behind that you’re rarely making a mistake by committing the rest of your chips post-fl op. This does not, however, apply to getting $70 of your $700 stack in pre-fl op.
If you build a moderately big pot pre-fl op with aces, and fl op the nut fl ush draw, and particularly if along with the nut fl ush draw, a third ace will give you the nuts, then don’t be afraid to get the rest of your money in. You have to gamble sometimes in PLO and that’s a good hand to gamble with. PLO is a great game. Give it a try among friends and see if you can spawn some interest in it.
