POTD #236 Monte Carlo Monday: A Short Stack PLO Hand vs d.apollo
Will I get a grade better than D?
It’s funny that a poker variant named after the biggest city in Nebraska has become the quintessential European form of poker. If you asked someone to picture a resident of Omaha, they’re probably not imagining someone who looks like Joni Jouhkimainen, but if you asked someone to picture someone winning at high-stakes Omaha, they certainly are. If you imagined that same PLO crusher playing in a high-stakes live game, you wouldn’t be wrong to picture Florida or Vegas, but to me, I’ll always picture a place where I’ve played a fair amount of PLO, Monte Carlo.
So it’s a little unusual that, after almost fifty Monte Carlo Mondays, today is the first time I’ve featured a PLO hand on a Monday. Playing Triton PLO tournaments is a tricky experience for me, because I lack the confidence and precision that I have when playing NLHE. At any given point, in any given PLO hand, I’m liable to make a big mistake. When I’m playing hands vs. VIPs, I have more confidence in my abilities, but still not enough to determine the max-exploit strategy or to know the exact equity of my hand when facing an all-in. Where things can really get hairy for me is when I am playing hands versus legitimate experts, especially because while I want to play the best poker I can to make as much money as possible, I am also human and don’t like looking like an idiot. The idea of losing a big pot is bad enough; the idea of losing a big pot and looking stupid is even worse.
Today’s hand occurred shortly after registration closed in the $100k PLO Main Event vs. Gruffudd “d.apollo.777” Pugh-Jones, a much more experienced and better PLO player than me. I barely know how to best exploit fish in PLO, so when I play pots versus a world-class player like Gruffudd, I generally just try to play my four cards the way they were meant to be played. In today’s hand, I had a couple pretty simple decisions and got half of them wrong, which is never my intention when playing a hand of poker.
Triton Monte-Carlo 2024 Event #15 $100K PLO MAIN EVENT
(6k/12k/12k) (SB/BB/BBA) Registration is Closed.
It folds to me (780k) in the SB with A♦️A♣️9♦️4♥️ and I make it 36k, Gruffudd Jones (221k) calls in the BB.
Flop (84k) Q♦️J♣️4♠️: I check, Gruffudd checks
Turn (84k) 9♣️: I check, Gruffudd checks
River (84k) 2♥️: I bet 20k, Gruffudd calls and mucks.
