Working The PLO

Have been riding the roller coaster that is Pot Limit Omaha lately and after initially making a right royal donkey of myself and donating my stack as a 70/30 (or worse) underdog on more than one occasion I feel like I’m starting to get the hang of things.

I’ve read both “Pot-Limit Omaha Poker” by Jeff Hwang (HIGHLY recommended, I keep re-reading that excellent chapter on straights over and over picking up something new every time) and “Secrets of Professional Pot-Limit Omaha” by Rolf Slotboom which have helped my game considerably and I was actually starting to turn a half decent profit when, in a PLO $10 full ring game on PokerStars I’m dealt:

:7s: :Qc:

A pretty junky Omaha hand but 5 players limp and I get a free look at the flop:

:4h:

The nuts for the moment, but with the two straight cards and two hearts out there I’m not thrilled. I’m an underdog to any of the big draws. The SB checks and I check not wanting to play this hand out of position. I plan to fold to any significant action.

Significant action does not ensue and somehow we get to the turn for free:

Makes my hand even worse. I could take a stab at the pot here but it’s not big enough for me to risk it, with 4 players still to act I’m only getting action from the straights. Of which none exist apparently as it is checked around again!

This is probably the most passive hand I’ve witnessed in a PLO up to this point. I’m a little embarrassed as passive isn’t really my style, maybe I should have bet that flop! Ah well, let’s see a free river:

Intriguing!

I have the nut full house which is pretty good and someone might have a 7, or the nut flush and want to play…

The SB bets out (the first post flop bet this hand!) $0.30 into a pot of $0.50. I raise the size of the pot up to $1.50 and everyone behind folds. The SB then re-raises pot to $5.10 and I re-raise my last $6.70 and he calls.

At the time I don’t think I considered these bets as much as I should have, in my mind he had rivered the nut flush or a lower full house and got overly excited with it. When in reality he held:

:9h: :2c:

For the straight flush.

Oops. I didn’t see that.

Better players than I would argue that I should have and I’d have a hard time disagreeing, however, with players at these limits generally throwing chips around like they are worthless it’s very hard to put the SB on quads or the straight flush there. I can’t help thinking that I at least should have considered it…

… back to the books!

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 14th, 2009 at 10:58 pm and is filed under Poker. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.