PLO

First poker related post in a while, will probably do more Asia trip report stuff soon just can't really be assed at the moment...


Been playing a bunch of PLO recently, for a few reasons... I had a 25bi downswing at NL, one of my current housemates is a mid-stakes PLO player so getting railed is awesome, and SlowHabit sent me a pre-release copy of his new PLO book.

It's been going real well so far... I'm mainly playing $100plo on FTP... people play BAD and I'm running like Jesus.
I have to say that I'm finding the game really interesting. It's a much more complex than NL but at the same time at the small stakes I feel like it's pretty simple to beat the games. At the mid-stakes I'm sure it'll get a lot more complex. Hell I probably don't even 'get' most of the game yet.

A bit of a plug/review of Tri's new book. If you're not aware Tri co-wrote the $1,800 NL book last year with CTS. His new book has a much more affordable pricetag, coming in at under $400 making it affordable for an NL player that wants to pick up PLO.

The book doesn't teach the basics of PLO and it doesn't really intend to. So if you're still calling your stack off for chops with AA67 on a 4TJQK board or cold-calling preflop with 66TK then you've got some work to do before picking it up. I'd heavily recommend watching the 2x6 series on DC and also checking out DJ Sensei's fantastic new PLO Dojo series.

The purpose of the book is to illustrate the more complex intricacies of PLO in a straight-forward understandable way. It serves as a great eye-opener to the way the game should be played, it's certainly given me multiple 'lightbulb' moments and I'm only 1/3 of the way through so far.

Another thing that quickly becomes evident when you start playing PLO is that it's very important to know you're hands equity against villain's likely hand at each stage of the hand or you will be making huge mistakes. PLO revolves much more around equity than NL and the book teaches you a ton of the important spots where you need to know your equity in order to make good decisions.

I would definitely go ahead and recommend it to any small to midstakes PLO players, or NL players looking to take a serious crack at PLO. You can pre-order it for a discount price of $250 at DailyVariance now.