Playing PLO With A Short Stack
Read our essential guide to playing short-stacked pot limit Omaha...
By Philip Tuck 23 October 2007
"No hand is a 5/1 dog pre-flop in pot limit Omaha"** Help support Poker Verdict by using one of our links when choosing to download a new site **
Pot limit Omaha (PLO) has greatly increased in popularity as a tournament game in recent years. Both PokerStars and the WSOP have attracted massive fields to some of their large stakes PLO tournaments.
Many of the people fuelling this explosion have been players familiar with conventional deep stacked Omaha cash games - who often seem to make a higher frequency of mistakes as the blinds expand and the stack sizes shrink. This article is going to look at a situational analysis of a hand deep in a PLO tournament - and how the relative factors can completely change the situation.
You are three-handed on a passive final table - player one and player two both look like they are trying to fold to second. Player one is in the small blind and has 9000 chips left after posting the small blind, player two is in the big blind and has 8500 after posting the blind. You have 25,000 on the button. Blinds are 500/1000.
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You raise to 2500 with Jd3dJc10s. Player one folds and player two re-raises pot and has just 1500 chips remaining (1500 to call plus a 5500 pot re-raise). This player has been extremely tight and the only hand you can see him doing this with is AAxx.
Assuming the absolute worse case example (AsAcJs10c or similar) your hand is 18% favourite to win - in the best case (against unconnected unsuited aces) you are around 30% favourite. The pot is 11,000 and it costs you 5500 to call - over the price you need to call. It is also a large portion of your chip stack at this point, especially considering the tight and passive nature of the two remaining players. In the face of these factors you decide to fold.
Lets now imagine exactly the same situation except that player two has 14,500 chips. After the re-raise player two will have 7500 chips left instead of 1500. Here an interesting situation has developed due to the pot limit nature of the game.
If you call the 5500 re-raise you will leave the pot at 16,500. You can be nearly 100% certain that player two will move the remainder of their chips in on any flop (folding aces after putting half your stack in pre flop would be a massive error by player two).
As a result you are actually getting a free roll flop - you are having to pay an extra 5500 to actually see a flop that you know will be worth at least 24,000 (the whole of player twos stack @ 14,500 big and small blind @ 1500 your initial raise and call of 8000). Now the price you are getting on your hand is nearly 5 to 1 - well over the odds you need to call.
The other great advantage of this flop is that if you miss completely you can simply fold to the inevitable shove. This makes the play twice as effective as not only do you win more when you hit the flop, but you also save more when you miss (you can’t fold when you miss if its all in pre flop).
Understanding the situations where PLO opens up these type of opportunities is of critical importance if you want to get deep in PLO tournaments. Remember to think through what the pot will be, as well as the stack size of the opponent before you call or fold, because often you will be free rolling to such an extent that any four cards are worth a punt (no hand is 5/1 dog pre-flop in PLO).
25/02/08
