PLO Primer

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So if you haven't seen RonFezBuddy's latest Tweet (hopefully you have) he just finished working with the next new pro on a PLO Theory vid! For all of you out there who enjoy mixed games or want to diversify your learnings beyond NLHE I am sure this is incredibly welcome news. I can tell you that I for one and excited to see this. As a little background, I do play PLO, but I only play cash games. I have actually only ever played one PLO tourney and it was on a bet during Mini FTOPs last September. I almost cashed it, but needless to say it was a bit of an arduous experience. That being said I am looking forward to some PLO tournament strategy. What I thought I would do today is give you my 30 second primer on the game and things I think are important so your brains can start to churn in anticipation of big players coming to share their wisdom on the game.

Step 1. The Basics

PLO is very similiar in construct to Texas Hold'em as there are three streets which have the same betting rules. The two major differences are you get 4 hole cards rather than 2 and you MUST use 2 of your hole cards to make the best 5 card hand possible. That last one is a biggy. The first point is pretty important too as a major difference between HE and PLO is in HE we can discount a lot of potential hands based on probability because so few cards are dealt, in PLO you can't because so many are on the table. The other major difference, which affects live a lot more than online, is that the maximum you can bet in any round is the size of the pot. This doesn't really affect the betting from the flop to the river, but it has two major implications, the first is that all-in pre-flops are pretty rare and the second is pots will get HUGE. It is an action game, no doubt about it.

Step 2. What Hold'em Players should know.

This is coming from a PLO cash background so take it for what its worth. I am sure that there will be applicability to the tournament play, but I'll leave the details up to those who know what their talking about. In general there are a couple of things that you need to be very comfortable with when you jump into PLO. The first and perhaps one of the more important is that you need to be able to read and process the board very quickly in your head so that you can effectively make decisions. With 4 hole cards you have 6 possible combinations of cards in your hand to combine with the board to make the best possible hand. From the HE universe, this is a lot more to look at and think about in the same amount of time you have to make a decision. The second skill and what I think is by far the most important skill in PLO is that you must be able to evaluate equity and potential quickly and correctly. What do I mean by this? Well I'll break it down into two segments, Pre and Post Flop.

Pre-Flop

When you are looking at your hand pre-flop you need to be able to look at the 4 cards and efficiently determine the potential in the hand. Remember because of all of the cards PLO is very much a game of big draws. Sets can be a dog against the right draws in this game, so we are playing a game of straights and big flushes (and some boats). So what things do we really want out of our hand? I look for a couple of things. I love to see a suited Ace in my hand. drawing to the nut flush is a big part of PLO so that is nice. For the other 3 cards I am looking for cards that work with each other (ideally all 4 work together, but sometimes that isn't possible). So what does that mean? Here are a couple of examples.

Ah5hTsJd — Something like this offers some reasonable potential. We have two hearts and one is the Ace so there is nut flush potential. We have an Ace and a 5 so there are the ends of a wheel there and they are suited so there is some straight flush potential. The TJ are not suited which would be ideal, but we can work with it because this combined with the Ace gives us a bunch of ways to see a potential Broadway straight.

5h6h8d9d — These are interesting hands when you get them as they require care when flushes come out as you have made a baby flush which is usually not good in PLO, but they are really nasty straight making hands as if low straights come out you have solid options for redraws. Nothing is better in PLO than when you get into a huge pot with someone and you both have the same hand, but you are sitting on re-draws to the nuts and his gun is empty.

Post-Flop

I made mention of it in the last little hand example above but what we want Post-Flop is pretty simple. We are looking for substantial equity. Big thing to remember here is that unlike HE where you will see 80/20 favoritss pre-flop, that doesn't really happen in PLO. The hand equities are much tighter (typically 60/40 is considered a big equity gap, with most hands falling in the 55/45 range) so you need to be very aware of where you are at and what potential you have. The big things you are looking for are:

1. Am I drawing to the top or bottom end of the straight?

2. Do I have a re-draw to the nut-flush?

3. If the board is paired am I (or am I drawing to) underfull or overfull?

You want to be drawing towards the top end of everything. You will be punished mercilessly in PLO if you are playing the sucker end of a straight for the world (at least in cash…besides how do you think it got that name?) This is absolutely a game of the stone cold nuts. You need to recognize what that is, and if your hand has you drawing at it, or holding the current nuts with a draw to the next possible nut hand (i.e. you have the nut straight with a re-draw to the nut flush, etc). 

Step 3 Conclusions

Okay, I have rattled on long enough with this. It is really a very cursory look at some key things to be aware of if you are interested in PLO. If you don't play currently and want to start taking a look my best advice (as this is the path I took so I don't really have any other frame of reference) is to play in the play money world for a while if you aren't the most efficient board reader. I found that this was a cheap way to play in a bit of a vacuum with no real risk to me and allowed me the time to work on the skills I needed to play (board reading and equity determination). The betting and what players show up with is nothing like it is on the real money side (even at 10PLO and 25PLO), but the excercise here is not to make a million play money $'s, but rather to make sure you can read boards and understand hand equity without hemmoraging real money. Nothing beats preperation before you start putting something real on the line. Anyway, I'm out for now. If you want to talk more PLO I always love to. Look me up on Twitter at @lespaulgmanTPE or send me a PM and we can chat. Gl at the tables and I hope you can't wait for this new content like me!!! This is the Gman signing out!!