Dipping Your Toe into PLO (Pot Limit Omaha)

Lee Jones · September 29, 2010

C’mon, you know you want to try it. You’ve seen the nosebleed games online with their multi-$100K pots – mansions being won, lost, and won again as the flop, turn, and river came out. Or perhaps you’ve walked by the cash game at a major tournament. Often a majority of the players are Europeans, with the latest hair product and fashionable jeans. But those are definitely greenbacks – big piles of them – in front of all concerned, along with stacks of green and black chips. In the meantime, there’s a mountain of chips and bills in the middle of the table and two players each have four cards face-up in front of them. They’re discussing running it twice while the rest of the table scratches their heads and tries to figure out who’s in front.

What’s not to love about Pot Limit Omaha (PLO)?

Here are a few tips to help keep your chips safe should you decide take a shot at the best poker game ever invented:

– Position, position, position. Yeah, I know. Poker writers have been preaching position for a couple of decades now. But it’s even more important in PLO. One of the key reasons for this is that because of the pot-limit betting structure, you can’t blow out people’s implied odds with a big over-bet. It’s much harder than in no-limit hold’em to accomplish the stack-to-pot ratios (SPRs) that you seek. I saw one wise forum post that said, “There are three positions in PLO: (1) the button, (2) the cutoff, and (3) positions where you fold.” In fact, good discipline over your positional play may well be more important than good discipline about starting hand selection.

– Position is really important. Did I mention that?

– You get aces a lot in PLO – about one out of every 40 hands. But they are not the through-ticket in PLO that they are in no-limit hold’em. They are still the best starting hand and you should certainly raise them, but given the limitation on how much you can raise, you often find yourself playing them as just an overpair with deep money behind. If you routinely get in all your on the flop with unimproved aces, your PLO career will be short and expensive.

– Conversely (and contrary to some popular wisdom) aces do just fine “hot and cold” against any other hand. A nasty AA92 with no suits is a 52:48 favorite over JT98 double-suited. A random hand containing two aces is almost a 4:3 favorite over that same beautiful double-suited rundown. The moral of the story is that if you can get most or all of the money in preflop with aces, don’t hesitate to do it.

– In typical games with 100 big-blind (BB) stacks, you have to think carefully before three-betting (re-raising) an opening raiser. That’s because if you three-bet and somebody (either the original raiser or an unexpected hitchhiker) wakes up with aces, he can put in an action-crushing four-bet. Getting four-bet by aces (when you don’t have them also) is usually a disaster. With moderately good hands, folding to the “obvious aces” is a worse choice than calling, but calling isn’t much better. Your implied odds are shot but you often have enough on the flop to call for the rest of your chips, even though you’re a substantial underdog. In short, it’s a mess.

– There are a few hands that you can toss in the muck without a second thought. First, any hand that contains trips needs to be dumped immediately. This, very specifically, includes trip aces. The only exception is if you can get all the money in preflop. If you can do that, go for it – obviously you’re not up against the other two aces (which happens more in PLO than you might expect). But otherwise, fold all three of those aces; they play incredibly poorly post-flop.

Any four-suit rainbow hand has a crippling flaw. Unless it has powerful other options (a pair of aces, four Broadway cards), be done with it quickly.

– After the flop, place not your faith in two pair. Even top two pair is rarely bettable on the river. Obviously, this means that “top-top” (top pair, top kicker), the bread and butter of hold’em players, is just a draw to something better.

– Small flushes and non-nut straights are a good way to lose all your chips. In general, you have to play quite a few PLO hands and recalibrate your hand value meter. Otherwise, you’re likely to be scratching your head wondering how the deck can hit your opponents so hard.

– Bet sizing is a chapter of a book on its own. But as a general rule, just because you can bet (or raise) the entire pot doesn’t mean you should. There are many cases when betting a fraction of the pot makes much more sense; don’t blindly push the slider all the way to the right just because you can.

Obviously, this article doesn’t prepare you for the mansion-betting games you see online or even the car-betting games you see in the side action at tournaments. But maybe it will give you a toehold into a game that’s rapidly becoming a preferred companion to no-limit hold’em.

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Lee Jonesis the cardroom manager of Cake Pokerand has been in the online poker business for over six years. He is also the author of Winning Low Limit Hold’em, which has been in publication for over 15 years.

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