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

Can I outplay Laszlo "omaha4rollz" Bujtas

At the conclusion of the post there will be a #onemorething and a video of an #IOU that I shared with Premium Subscribers in the Discord channel. If you’d like to become a Premium Subscriber you can do so here or you can pay for an hour of private coaching with me and contact me at any of the methods outlined here.

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.

What I Was Thinking

You don’t always three-bet AA out of position deep in PLO, but AAKQ with a suit is far too good a hand and has so many high cards that it’s less likely I induce a squeeze from the BB; my only option preflop is to three-bet pot. On the flop, I was concerned; it is PLO and Laszlo could have flopped trips, and I do not have trips. I also don’t have any backdoors. I was confused about what to do and decided to check with the plan of figuring it out if the pot got big. Once he bets, there is no reason for me to raise and no reason for me to fold. On the turn, I was thinking “boy I hope he checks back the turn because I don’t know what to do if he bets big again” and he did. On the river, I thought Laszlo would almost always bet trips or better on the turn, and I thought AA was often the best hand. I was reminded of a mechanic one occasionally sees in NLHE: You check the river— see what size your opponent bets, gauge their hand strength, call if you think they’re strong, shove if you think they’re value betting thin. I never had the chance to test out my play, as Laszlo checked back and I scooped after fading his wrap and flush draw.

What I Got Wrong

Preflop is the right play. My flop check appears to be fine, except it’s illustrative of a very common PLO leak: playing too scared on boards that are mediocre for bare aces. This board is not great for me; he can have trips and I don’t have any backup. I wish I had a draw, second pocket pair, backdoor draws, or blockers to fives full or flush draws, but a pair of aces is still often the best hand on this flop.

Additionally, I can just bet small, and just as players do on paired boards in NLHE, Laszlo’s raise size will likely be small. I am not worried about getting blown off my hand. If I bet 5bbs on the flop and Laszlo raises to 13bbs, I can call, see a turn and play poker. When I checked the flop, I ended up putting 10bbs in the pot. Checking did not save me much. I think Laszlo’s big flop size represents trips, so there is no reason for me to lead the turn here; even though check-calling bare aces and leading on a safe turn is a play in PLO, I don’t think this is the spot for it.

Laszlo rarely checks back the turn with trips or better, so unless he improved to jacks full on the river, AA is likely the nuts. So my plan to check-raise is okay with some combos of AA, but not this one. Laszlo’s three most common thin river value bets would be AJ, KK and QQ. I block all three of them, and since I do not block a jack, that means when I check and Lazlo value bets the river, he has jacks full significantly more often than if I had, say, TT99. However, there is another problem here: Since I don’t block a jack, I block a ton of hands he might have that can bluff-catch the river. He might check back AJ/KK/QQ on the river, but any KJ/QJ/JT combos would never value bet the river and could call if I bet are hands that I am losing a ton of value to by checking. Finally, this whole hand is just greedy from me. I have 2x pot to play and I have a pair of aces; I should just be content that I can value bet full pot and potentially win 40bbs. I tried so hard to win 80bbs that I made it too likely I ended up with nothing.

Types of Errors
Scared flop check
Bad trap

Grade

Ben’s advice was to use your side cards, and I cannot think of a worse AA combo to check-shove the river with than mine … maybe AAKK? If I had AA52 or AA33, I think my line is defensible, although AA with two low cards are likely hands that would want to c-bet the flop to squeeze value out of hands like KK/QQ. In NLHE, I am used to being, if not the best, one of the best players at the table, and I feel comfortable going off-script and abandoning fundamentals. Today I played a hand vs. someone better than me and my lack of fundamentals showed. I am not even good enough at PLO to correctly gauge how much I punted this hand, but I can confidently say I did.

C

POTD #184 ⁠onemorething

One thing that threw me off about this hand was Laszlo’s big flop bet size. I thought it was likely his range was pretty polar and by the river most of his flop big bets would be total air, so I checked. This is a common mistake I make in PLO where I read too much into my opponent’s bet size without considering how many combos of an individual hand he could have. Do I think Laszlo bets bare KK on the flop, probably not, but what about KK5 with a flush draw, what about KKTT with a backdoor? What about AKK with the nut flush blocker? In NLHE there are spots where you can confidently say something like, I don’t think they ever have a wheel on a245. In PLO you never want to say never, it’s always possible and that’s why doing things like reverting your side cards can help balance out your over confident instincts. Laszlo has played a ton of HS PLO, he’s obviously capable of bucketing different classes of hands into all his different ranges so he will be balanced on a variety of boards. As a matter of fact, vs someone like me betting half pot with KK here might be a pretty good exploit. Laszlo can get some value on the flop, while increasing the chance he gets some cheap showdown. As I was playing the hand I thought KK-QQ were unlikely hands for him, the more I thought of his range strategy, the more I think it’s a good exploit versus a lot of the field, but even if it's not there are always some combos of KK/QQ that might play like this.

When I write about PLO hands where I don’t have a sim, I cash in IOUs from subscribers where I write about hands that subscribers request. One of those hands was the final hand of the summer Wynn Millions