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"Philadelphia fans would boo funerals, an Easter egg hunt,
a parade of armless war vets, and the Liberty Bell."
-- Bo Belinsky
Rec.gambling.poker once had a discussion about Pot
Limit Omaha High worth repeating here. Peter Lizak started it by writing: "I would rather play AKQJ over AA24.
AA kinda sucks alone. It needs back up. Think of it like chess. The queen is powerful, but you don't shove her into
enemy territory without support."
My view is that if a player would rather play AKQJ for all his chips head-up, then he needs to hit the lottery quick.
Full table Pot Limit Omaha is not about cards very much. It is first and foremost position, position, position. If the chips are
deep, position renders everything else trivial. If the chips are not deep, you want to get all-in or close to it before the
flop with AAxx. You are a significant dog to nothing, besides a dominating other AA hand, and a good favorite over most.
Raising first under the gun with AAxx is suicide, not because AAxx is bad, but because raising under the gun in PLO is foolish
with any hand. Limp and reraise if the chips are short and you can get all-in. If the chips are deep you should be limp/fold
almost everything -- though the weaker your opponent, the more likely he is to foolishly dump chips post-flop while drawing near
dead, the more hands you can call with. If you are playing with players in the same skill ballpark as you, the main reason to
play hands out of position in PLO is to encourage other people to play out of position. That is really and truly the main reason.
You want to limp and fold, while they limp and call your raises when you are in position. If you limp and are allowed to
see the flop cheaply, then you just play poker
with the hand you flop -- which should be a strong one since you should not play terribly weak hands out of position. (Of course, if
you are playing against opponents much weaker than yourself, then you can play more hands out of position and play them more aggressively,
but still, even against very weak opponents your edge will be far greater when you are in position versus out of position.)
One thing to keep in mind though is that PLO is the game most different in casinos compared to online. The online cardrooms have
buy-in limits that prevent you from playing the normally sensible way -- buying yourself a big stack of chips. They have capped
buy-in amounts and thus require you to play small stack PLO (until you win your way to a big stack). In that way, AAxx is a much
better hand online than in a casino, since any pot size reraise will often be over half your stack.
But again, assuming deepish stacks, PLO is position and betting. A solid player who understands the game and has deep chips,
can play 3579 in position and eat up AAKK, while also playing AAKK in position to eat up 3579.
Most any hand can eat up a better hand that is out of position.
If someone wants to make a pot raise under the gun with AAKK or AAJT, I'll play the big majority of hands against them if we have
deep chips. This is especially true if I can put the player on AA with great confidence. The player in position will generally lose
small pots and win much bigger ones. This is why
you can't get good PLO games with only good players. They become utterly pointless. You need players playing out of position for
a lot of chips for the game to exist.
Another person then wrote that in a multiplayer pot you can get more out of the AKQJ, and that such multiplayer pots weaken AA42 quite a lot.
I replied that this was not saying much, unless we know specific hands, and the position of those hands. AKQJ offsuit
is a very lame hand multiway when AA is also out, and more so when you have other big card players in the pot. The
Broadway straight is the #1 sucker hand of PLO where people get freerolled for all their chips. Also, a hand like
AdKdQJ is not great because you have the key payoff card that you want in an opponent's hand, the K of diamonds.
AAxx should be looking to play pots headup, via a pot raise in position or a pot reraise out of position. If it can't
manage one of these scenarios it should commonly be limped before the flop, then folded when the flop misses. If you do
see a flop out of position for a limp multiway, AAxx is vastly superior to AKQJ because the way AA will hit the flop is
either an Ace, or a nut flush draw with a small pot. In either case you are in fine shape. AKQJ hits sucker flops, two
pair against sets, straights against the same straights with flush outs. Only very rarely will you have the best freeroll
with the nut straight and top two pair, and that is only four outs. A suited ace, flopping the Broadway straight and having
the nut flush draw, there you have a hand, and it comes along pretty rarely!
Like No Limit Hold'em, even more so, Pot Limit Omaha is a card game that is only a little about cards. Personalities,
chip stack size and table position dictate play much more than the spots on the pasteboards.
In response to two recent emails I thought I better clarify a few things... The above article is written about full table PLO.
In a full game, three off the button is in position; in a six-handed game, three off the button is first to act. These
situations are not similar. The less players, the more blinds you have to pay, so the impact of the blinds on your play will be
greater, as it will on other players too. Also, as stated above, online games with restricted buy-ins are a different sort of game
than casino games where players often have 1000x big blinds or more in front of them. And of course, the level of play in online
games is far weaker than full, casino PLO games (where tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars can be in play with some of the best
all-around players in the world), so you can typically play many more hands.
You make money in poker by playing when you have a positive mathematical expectation. The weaker the players, the more often
you will be able to get a positive expectation... so you can limp with more hands, bluff more hands from both out of position and
in position, play more hands out of position for a raise, raise with weaker hands, etc. A winning PLO player can win from every
seat at the table, but generally when out of position you should be playing smaller pots before the flop, while in position
you want to be looking for pots to play for all your chips, while ALSO doing what is the core principal of winning poker:
achieving and identifying when you have a mathematical advantage over your opponents. This can be from having position,
from a liveone being drunk, from an opponent misreading a hand or a lot of other things. The key to PLO is position,
but the key to all poker is to play when the math is on your side.
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