Back when I was first writing Winning Low Limit Hold’em (1994), my friend and poker buddy, Roy Hashimoto, described to me a phenomenon that was relatively new to the poker scene at the time. You see, hold’em had only recently been legalized in California and first everybody wanted to see the game, then they wanted to see the flop. Remember that back then, the game du jour was Limit Texas Hold’em, and you couldn’t blow people out of the pot with a massive raise. So let’s say you were playing $2-4 Limit Hold’em. The blinds were $1 and $2. You’d raise (to $4) with your Ace-King suited and 4-5 people would happily call two bets cold.

Of course, even if you flopped top pair, you would have no idea of where you stood against that many opponents. Similarly, bluffing into a field that large was out of the question; somebody, somewhere, was going to call you.

Thus the term “implicit collusion” came to be. It wasn’t as if the players were actively colluding against the raiser. But when that many of them called a raise, from the raiser’s perspective, it often felt like they’d all signaled each other to gang up on him, hoping one would out-flop him.

The advent of No Limit Hold’em (NLHE) largely brought that problem to an end. If there was a raise and a bunch of calls, usually somebody would take the opportunity to put in a massive three-bet. And thus the squeeze play was invented.

But the recent growth in popularity of Pot Limit Omaha (PLO) has brought back implicit collusion with a vengeance. With the limited size raise you can put in, it can be very tempting for somebody looking at four cards to find a reason to call your 3.5 big-blind raise. Once one person does it, the next few people all claim “pot odds” and come jumping in.

This means that it’s damn difficult to limit the field with your hands that prefer fewer numbers of opponents (for instance, the big pairs). Suppose you’re playing $.50-$1 PLO, and raise in the hijack seat with a couple of aces – let’s even say one of them is suited. The cutoff and button both call, as does the small blind. Now the flop comes J-5-5 rainbow. Are you going to continuation-bet those aces as you would in a hold’em game? In general, no you aren’t. There are 12 cards out there against you, and if any one of them is a five, you’re drawing terribly thin.

Furthermore, the guy with a five is not going to fold. Not unless the stacks are extremely deep and he’s willing to give up a five with a bad kicker if he doesn’t fill up. But remember that unless he has a pair in his hand, he thinks he’s looking at a fistful of outs; you’re going to have to fire 2-3 barrels to move him off his trips.

Of course, this works out extremely well for you when you hit a flop. Now all that money that was invested pre-flop becomes part of your leverage as you try to fade the draws that might be against you. Suppose that we glance back at our hand and discover that one of our side cards with the aces was, indeed, a five. You note that there are now 15 big bets in the pot and the stack-to-pot ratio (SPR) is less than 7 (assuming everybody started with approximately 100 big-blind stacks). That means pot-size bets (PSBs) on the flop and turn are going to end everything interesting about the hand. Now if you can trap somebody holding the case five, you can probably get all the money in on the flop and not have to guess about whether he hit a kicker or not.

Obviously, though, you won’t get such a delightful flop most of the time. You will have your naked aces against 12 seemingly random cards, any one of which could have driven a spike through your beautiful pair.

What this means is that when you see this “schooling” effect (and it’s rampant in lower-stakes PLO games), don’t try to bully your way through a hand. Years ago, in one of the first books about Omaha, Bob Ciaffone said something to the effect of, “Don’t try to represent a hand you don’t have; somebody is probably looking at that hand.” That is particularly sage advice when the table unwittingly colludes against your premium starting hand.

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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