I’ve found myself becoming very frustrated with No Limit Holdem over the last two or three months. It seems that despite getting good coaching and have a reasonably decent grasp of the theoretical side of the game I still keep making dumb mistakes that have been costing me a lot of money. This certainly isn’t due to a failure in coaching there’s only so many times a coach can tell you to stop doing stupid shit, it’s solely down to me and I really don’t know why.
For this reason I’ve decided to play some PLO instead, partly for a break and partly to see how the standard of play compares to NLHE. All I can say is “WOW”, the difference between the standard of play is ridiculous. In NLHE even at the lower limits you need to table select a reasonable amount yet at PLO it sems that you can sit at any table and most of the players at the table will be bad.
I’ve dabbled with PLO a little in the past but only to mess around and certainly I’ve never taken the game all that seriously, and I have to say that I’m really enjoying learning and playing the game at the moment. I find the extra little nuances of the game that is created by two extra cards to be really interesting and despite the common held belief that PLO is basically a game os flipping and small edges, I’m finding that this really isn’t true at all. There are a lot of spots where you can get your money in reall really good. There are also a lot of spots where you can take advantage of some really fundamental errors that a lot of players make preflop and postflop. I really think that any half decent player with a reasonable knowledge of PLO should be able to make a decent amount of money at the game. Of course I’m still making some mistakes myself, but I consider that part of the learning process and I usually recognise my mistakes pretty quickly which is a good thing.
There are a few resources that I’ve been utilising to help learn the game:
- Videos from Stoxpoker and Deucescracked
- I recently purchased a book called “Pot Limit Omaha: The big play strategy” by Jeff Hwang. I’ve found this to be very helpful indeed
- I have been getting some coaching from KasinoKrime from Deucescracked, I’ve only had two lessons so far but they’ve been very good and I’ll definitely be getting more.
While I have been playing I have been making lots of notes on players, which is something I had become really lazy at with NLHE. This is definitely something that everyone should do as it really helps to be able to make better decisions and more accurately work out what someone’s range is when you’re in a pot with them. I’m also going to be doing more session reviews as well which is also something I didn’t do that much of with NLHE. KasinoKrime also sent me a bunch of notes that he had made from videos and books and a load of hand ranges too which I have printed out so I can read them while I’m away in hotels (like I am now) with work.
So it looks like I’ll be mainly playing PLO for the forseeable future, I already have an idea for another blog post based on my observations of players so far and will probably be a little more strategy based.