[Closed] My PLO experience so far,...

Hi Jeero,
I started playing PLO in August and have played approximately 70K hands on FTP most of them at PLO25. I am so far only playing break even on PLO25 and My attempt to play PLO50 was a disaster. So even if you post hands watch videos and read additional books and articles, you will find out that PLO is very swingy and you should not expect any winrate for the first 50K hands or so, since I think that you really need to spend some time working on the game and how to play different players. Of course, on PLO10 you can sit down and wait for the nuts, and you will still be paid off. I don't consider that playing though and therefore I am trying to train myself to play shorthanded games in a way to suit the tableflow, even though I think I am still to tight in some situations. Apparently the sessions were I tried to play more loose preflop and 3 bet more, were the biggest loosing sessions I had. The thing is by 3 betting you are getting yourself committed many times and that will increase variance I suppose. Well, if you mainly want to grind to boost your bankroll, go with the bigstack strategy from Jeff Hwang. It will be helpful there. From PLO25 onwards you will have to loosen up a little bit (or maybe not, since so far it didn't give me good winnings, yet. I still think it the right thing though)
For grinding I figured that 6 tables is a good target to go for. Depending on my mood I play 4 or 6 tables now. I have tried 8, but I timed out too often.
Well, that's what I can tell you form my PLO experience. Hope there is some helpful information here.
Cheers, Sebastian

Thanks for your input Sebastian! Although this is good information, it's kind of discouraging. However, I can see your point. I try 8 tabling all the time and I time out far too often. I think I can safely do 6 tables. I actually haven't grinded as much as I innitially wanted to because I noticed that I make a lot of mistakes and need to study. I agree completely that you shouldn't expect much in the way of winrate for the first while.

One thing that I noticed from playing PLO2 and PLO10 is that the average player playing PLO10 is better than that of PLO2. PLO2 players are double terrible and PLO10 players are just single terrible. I guess it was just hopefull thinking that all micro-small stakes PLO players are the same level of terribleness.

Your first 30k hands seem pretty good actually. Then you had a 25k downswing,... ouch. Did you change something there?

This game is swingy, no doubt about it. I still think it's awsome though. I'll post my thought after I've played a few thousand more hands,... maybe at the 100k hands point.

Good luck at the tables!

Hi Jeero,
concerning your question what happened after 25K hands, I guess I was able to read my hands well, and started to play looser, i.e 3 betting. I also had time to put my opponents on hands (usually the wrong ones) and was rather surprised that 248Q are raising and 3 betting hands for some people and that you will see a straight on an A**-3-5 board after the showdown on the river no matter how much betting was involved on previous streets. I have to say though that I am playing a lot of deepstack ante tables lately, which allows for lots of post flop betting.
In addition to that, I had a few sessions were I was simply to tired to play, and should have stopped. I had one hand were I was going broke for 350 BB on the turn, thinking I had the nutstraight + FD. I had one pair+ sucker OESD + FD and paid of the straight. That was just stupidity. I might have tilted away another 2 stacks after that, the down at approx. 46K hands could be explained by that.

I am currently reading the advanced Hwang and test it on PLO10 mainly. The game that I am playing there seems to be totally different from my previous game. I am playing 20-28/12-18 range preflop.
Before I was a real nit and surprisingly, when I played a session on PLO25 again, my stats were a lot tighter once more. I will try to addapt the more aggressive style now to PLO25, because it will give me more action with the premium hands and my losses because of non sd winnings might become better as well.
I have the feeling right now, that there is one key concept in PLO that I am totally misunderstanding, but I also think that because of my high playing volume and reading, and thinking about the game, that I will wake up one day in the near future and simply start beating the game without really realizing what went wrong before. Maybe you already understood that concept and thus will get a nice winning rate straight away.
Anyhow, I guess I wrote a lot more now, then I initially planned to.
Good luck at the tables to you as well.
Maybe we will meet at one FTP table at some point.
Cheers, Sebastian

Hey, in regards to variance in PLO, you can simulate that over www.pokervariancesimulator.fr If you input bb/100, the answer will be in bb's, or you can translate them to dollars by multiplying the amounts. SD stands for standard deviation, which you can find directly in HEM and PT3. The typical amount I find is between 120-130 for me in short handed.

The variance doesn't actually die out even after 100k hands. Only when you get significantly past that (and are in fact, a winning player) you will start to show profit. With 100k, there are still losing players, even with the decent/averageish winrate of 10bb/100.

Non. sd. winnings become a lot more important when the game becomes aggressive (which it is over FTP, as compared to Stars where it is more loose passive), as you need to steal pots to survive. At microlimits, if your non. sd. winnings are significantly going downwards, you are bluffing too much as I presume you are giving up huge pots on the river after having bluffed a calling station two streets.

PS: If they claim they have it, they have it very often. Especially over Stars.
PPS: Still playing breakeven PLO after 70k hands.

Break even/losing after 100k hands is a scary thought. I'd like to know how people make a living off of PLO,... Do you have to be like 'Nanonoko' and play 2 million hands a year? I tried to play 16 tables of PLO once and it was a complete disaster! If I play 8 tables (which is tough enough for me) I can only get in maybe 40k hands a month,... This would mean it will take a year before the results will converge!?

I play PLO because I believe that there are a lot of situations where your edge is huge,... ie. set over set. But it's such a tough game to grind. Although there people say that 10bb/100h is attainable in PLO, I have never heard of anybody attaining that over a reasonable sample size. Infact, people usually claim to be breakeven players (myself included).

Does anybody know where this theoretical winrate came from?

I used to play on Plo25 and I had a 19bb/100hands with 20k hands. I'm now playing on Plo50 and I've got a 11bb/100hands (without rakeback/Bonus/...).

Originally posted by Kojika
I used to play on Plo25 and I had a 19bb/100hands with 20k hands. I'm now playing on Plo50 and I've got a 11bb/100hands (without rakeback/Bonus/...).

That won't last forever seems like a small sample size.

Well, I've played much more hands on Plo25 and it didn't work very well But last month, I had a private coaching from a Plo200 player and it helped me a lot. Here is my monthly graph :

Originally posted by Jeero
Break even/losing after 100k hands is a scary thought. I'd like to know how people make a living off of PLO,... Do you have to be like 'Nanonoko' and play 2 million hands a year?

Does anybody know where this theoretical winrate came from?

Basically, yes. Shorthanded games have variance, and when people say variance, they mean 100k hand breakeven periods are not impossible, though uncommon.