[Mendacious]

Ribbo is right on.

Playing like this is low variance and low profit. If you can combine this type of play with an aggression factor (post flop) over 1.5 and a willingness to apply serious leverage against weaker players, you can still get low variance with I think are very high profits relative to other forms of poker.

By leverage I mean:

--taking advantage of position
--betting scare cards
--potting the low when you think either your opponent has a weak hi, or the same low and a weaker hi than you.
-- and potting your freerolls.
-- building your knowlege base so you know who you should and shouldn't push.

This only applies when you are confident you can get heads up. And it mostly works because PLO8 up to certain levels ALWAYS has fish, and they make the same mistakes repeatedly.

None of these techniques affect variance that much, but they seperate profitable, from unprofitable low variance play.

When I deviate from this type of play (after reading too much Wintermute and Ribbo) I invariable encounter serious variance. And I'm already a 17BB/100 player over 40,000 hands, so you might ask "why try"? The answer is that they are extremely good strong players, who are MUCH harder to play against than the play I just desribed. I don't think they are necessarily more profitable against the average online PL08 game up to $100. But above that, I think you need to be this type of player (with the proper bankroll) to control tables and win big regularly. I am certain they have much higher variance and their approach takes a ton of skill to pull off. I don't think it is required at lower levels, but it IS at some $200 tables, and much more so as you move to $400 tables and above.