PLO8 Theory (Long Ramblings)

[TGoldman]

I've been having a lot of fun playing PLO8 lately and it got me thinking about the game. The PLO8 article on winningonlinepoker said that PLO8 is "strategically very different from any other form of poker." The article covers many of the unique aspects of the game, but I felt that it failed to give an overall general stategy. I like Steve Badger's description that, "...the key PLO8 concept is the betability of hands."

After spending some time thinking about it, I think another way to describe pot-limit Omaha/8 strategy involves thinking about the game in terms of a leverage battle between the high hand(s) vs. the low hand(s).

This contrasts with limit Omaha/8 in which oftentimes a player with a lock on one side of the pot will cooperate with the player who likely has the lock on the other side of the pot in order to carve-up the players in the middle. In Pot-Limit Omaha/8 this form of cooperation is rare simply because large bets blast weak and medium strength hands out of the pot entirely.

"...The key PLO8 concept is the betability of hands" is true, but I don't think it fully capture the leverage inherent in the relationship between the two sides of the pot. Each side of the pot has the ability to apply tremendous amounts of pressure on the other side resulting in situations that although the person may have proper pot equity to continue, the bet is impossible to call. This is something that Wintermute noted in his hand against EmptyShell:

"I think in heads up play, the strength of a hand like A234 is that there are many flops where A234 will not be a tremendous favorite but will have the ability to bet strongly with a low draw than can't be counterfeited. Opponents' medium-strength high hands will not often be able to stand up to that kind of heat, so A234 has a lot of post-flop semi-bluff equity."

A calculator such as twodimes.net can provide the pot equity for a particular match-up, but it cannot calculate the leverage (or "post-flop semi-bluff equity") which is oftentimes more important. A strong hand in one direction is able to lean on the hands in the other direction, which is what I think Steve Badger meant when he described the "betability of hands".