POTD #184 A PLO Hand with some help from Ben "Sauce123" Sulsky

Can I outplay Laszlo "omaha4rollz" Bujtas

One of the best poker players, minds, and training-video makers, Ben “Sauce123” Sulsky, did an AMA on Run It Once (Use code: POTD for 10% off) on Thanksgiving. I asked him a fairly innocuous question about my PLO game and he responded with something that helped me unlock how to approach the problem I was having. The question I asked him was

PLO has a lot more pure strategies than mixed strategies and since I have less experience and confidence in my PLO game, I find I spend too much brainpower thinking about what the pure play is, instead of thinking what the best exploit is. Tell me how to stop thinking like this and get better (turns out this not a question, but a demand)

He responded with a couple very long and thoughtful posts about the best way to exploit players in poker, which you can read here, but he began by rejecting my premise. In PLO I should not be as focused on exploiting people in earlier streets, but focused on figuring out exactly how I should play given my side cards.

I actually do a lot less exploiting in PLO than in NLHE. I sometimes think that NLHE hands “wish they had four cards” insofar as they need to balance their frequencies among different lines but have no decider to do so efficiently aside from randomization. In PLO in contrast we get the sidecards (of which there are many combinations typically) to efficiently randomize our frequencies of our two card hand at the given node.

It is my belief that you should always be trying to at least marginally exploit your opponents, but when I am equally skilled as my opponent or at a deficit, I try to resort to solver baselines. Ben inspired me to think of some PLO hands I played where I did not consider my side cards or their impact and made the wrong play vs. an opponent who is more skilled than me, and there are few PLO players more skilled than my opponent today, Laszlo “omaha4rollz” Bujtas.

Triton Jeju 2024 - Event #15 50K PLO 6-Handed
(1k/2k/2k) (SB/BB/BBA) 200k Starting Stack Registration is Open

It folds to Laszlo (335k) who makes it 6k, I (203k) have A♠️A♦️K♣️Q♣️ in the SB and make it 20k, it folds back to Laszlo who calls.

Flop (44k) 8♥️8♦️5♥️: I check, Laszlo bets 20k, I call
Turn (84k) 2♠️: I check, Laszlo checks
River (84k) J♦️: I check, Laszlo checks and shows me K♥️9♣️7♣️6♥️ and I win.