PLO-Challenge

iPoker - €0.50 PL Hi (6 max) - Omaha Hi - 6 players
Hand converted by Holdem Manager 3

BTN: €44.50 (89 bb)
SB: €185.64 (371.3 bb)
BB: €68.38 (136.8 bb)
UTG: €57.50 (115 bb)
MP: €100.20 (200.4 bb)
Hero (CO): €55.89 (111.8 bb)

SB posts €0.25, BB posts €0.50

Pre Flop: (pot: €0.75) Hero has A♣: 7♦: A♠: 6♠:
fold, MP raises to €1.50, Hero raises to €5.25, BTN calls €5.25, 2 folds, MP calls €3.75

With a Maniac (60/35/15 AF 4.5) otb sitting behind me, 3-betting the Lag (30/25/4 AF 4) before me is a mistake. Should have flatted to lay a trap. Anyways, BU calls cold. MP calls too.

Flop: (€16.50, 3 players) 9♣: 3♦: 5♣:
MP checks, Hero bets €12.37, BTN raises to €24.74, fold, Hero calls €12.37

Flop is favourable and I cbet to protect the hand and set up a shove ott. BU minraises and I assign him sth. like overpairs, sets, 2pairs, mediocre combodraws like top-pair+fd/oesd/gs. No need to come over the top since I am rarely far ahead. If he had called the flop and the turn would be a I give it up, and if it would have been a or it would have been a somewhat iffy spot, probably a stack-off considering my straight-draw blockers, his wide range and the SPR.

Turn: (€65.98, 2 players) 8♠:
Hero bets €25.90, BTN calls €14.51

Nice.

River: (€95.00, 2 players) K♣:

Results: €95.00 pot (€1.50 rake)
Final Board: 9♣: 3♦: 5♣: 8♠: K♣:

GTO-Training UTG

Let´s start with some Ace-Broadway hands:

There seeems to be a pretty significan difference between hands that have 2 suits and 3 suits (singlesuited). This one is a fold which is not typical for its hand category.

Having a as sidecard and a instead of the wheel danger makes things different.

The :Tx:x and :9x:x doublesuited hands fall closely on the side we still open from UTG. Their singlesuited versions are strong aswell and opened from later positions.

We do open some :Ax:-Broadway + Connector but with triple suit this one is too weak. :Ax:-Broadway-:5x: with a suited Ace often is an openraise though from UTG, we have nice wheel potential.

The medium-/low-rundowns are tricky too:

Triple suit, again, hurts us. We generally avoid medium rundowns that have 3 suits.

This seems to be the lowest rundown we can still openraise from UTG.

This one is a little strange, I do not really understand...

... why folding the mid-gapper but raise the top-gapper?

Originally posted by Mascherano95
iPoker - €0.50 PL Hi (6 max) - Omaha Hi - 5 players
Hand converted by Holdem Manager 3

UTG: €87.51 (175 bb)
CO: €62.32 (124.6 bb)
Hero (BTN): €57.45 (114.9 bb)
SB: €88.52 (177 bb)
BB: €56.97 (113.9 bb)

SB posts €0.25, BB posts €0.50

Pre Flop: (pot: €0.75) Hero has 7♣: J♦: 8♦: 8♣:
fold, CO calls €0.50, Hero raises to €2.25, SB calls €2.00, fold, CO calls €1.75

Generally I rarely have been raising medium semi-connected pocket pairs very aggressively. Something I changed after my training with PLO-Vision. GTO has some preflop raises with hands like J♠:9♦:8♠:8♦:, T♠:8♣:7♠:7♣: or J♥:8♣:7♥:7♣: from spots I did not expect it. I do want to play here with position against bad players, SB is a very loose passive player (75/15 AF 1).

Flop: (€7.25, 3 players) A♦: J♥: 8♠:
SB checks, CO checks, Hero bets €3.62, fold, CO calls €3.62

Pretty standard cbet here without draw-blockers or backup by myself. Despite the board being not very dry I opted for 1/2-pot only since the A♦: locks it down somewhat and I have decent FE with my perceived range here. The limper, a loose player (40/13/2 AF 5) comes along. He will have a decent portion of hands beside to obvious made hands and draws, weak-pair+gs too.

Turn: (€14.49, 2 players) 3♦:
CO checks, Hero bets €10.86, CO raises to €21.72, Hero calls €10.86

Following up a second barrel with my standard sizing when the texture goes towards enabling more draws. I prefer not betting pot here exploiting low-stakes tendencies of check-calling too much. The minraise is not very meaningful cutting down his range a little towards non-total crap. I had to think a moment between calling and raising since he won´t be folding much here but I did the call to let him hang himself.

River: (€57.93, 2 players) 4♣:
CO bets €34.73, Hero calls €29.86

River card is a perfect blank and I made the call as planned.

Results: €117.65 pot (€1.50 rake)
Final Board: A♦: J♥: 8♠: 3♦: 4♣:

Spoiler

CO shows A♥: T♦: 3♠: Q♥:: (Two Pair, Aces and Threes)
(Pre 47%, Flop 33%, Turn 20%)

Hero shows 7♣: J♦: 8♦: 8♣:: (Three of a Kind, Eights)
(Pre 53%, Flop 67%, Turn 80%)

Hero wins €116.15

Very nice analysis. If everyone could so eloquently describe their reasoning, we'd have a lot of coaches coaching each other around here in the forum. (and with ghaleon, kyyberi we do have some!)

im glad youre back, excited to read more from your journey. good luck

e: and also grats to the 10k. well deserved! if you like you can still holla at skype

I think turn is better to shove in J887ds hand. Villain is likely almost never folding and there are lot of rivers making it either tough for us or potentially kill action versus two pairs. Any 7 or higher or diamond that is unpaired changes nuts.

Those marginal small to mid rundowns are often better to open fold from EP imo. Issue is that pool likely call lot more than they should so we get more into multiway pots. That is obviously not so great for these type of hands.

I am happy with my results from June so far. I played 13476 hands where I won 2206 bb which equals a winrate of 16.4 bb/100.

My HUD now looks like this ( I cannot use it on GGPoker):

I have 2 pop-ups with positional stats of RFI and Cold-calling.

In my session reviews I use the following tags:

My goal is to maintain similar results for July and to crack the 360 $ rakeback bonus on GGPoker and complete "The preflop mastery" from the PLO-Vision course "PLO from ground up" beside some studies from my books.

Checking out the net results in my database, I found that playing PLO25 and PLO100 fast tables was very unprofitable so far. I am going to avoid those tables like it´s already been recommended here.

Originally posted by Mascherano95
Checking out the net results in my database, I found that playing PLO25 and PLO100 fast tables was very unprofitable so far. I am going to avoid those tables like it´s already been recommended here.

Playing NLHE fast-fold tables, I find that tightening up considerably pays off.
I don't know if that translates to PLO or not.
Another thing is that people are rarely bluffing when I call them, but they call my bluffs — so the trick is not to bluff as much.

Originally posted by VorpalF2F

Originally posted by Mascherano95
Checking out the net results in my database, I found that playing PLO25 and PLO100 fast tables was very unprofitable so far. I am going to avoid those tables like it´s already been recommended here.

Playing NLHE fast-fold tables, I find that tightening up considerably pays off.
I don't know if that translates to PLO or not.
Another thing is that people are rarely bluffing when I call them, but they call my bluffs — so the trick is not to bluff as much.

Yes I agree. This seems to be the same like in PLO, you have to be considerably tighter in stack-offs postflop but not necessarily tighter preflop. Preflop when people before you tighten up, you can openraise looser in order to steal the blinds and the same is true vice versa.

The bluffings part is exactly the same in PLO. All people play more according to hand values and that makes high winrates much harder unless you would have a reliable Hud which I do not have on GGPoker. It is also problematic, because I would have to change my style from session to session depanding on which site I play because of the different player pools of Win2day and GGPoker. This is confusing and does not help me in my focus sessions which are not $/hour focused but should help me to learn how to implement my preflop ranges for becoming a better player.

Originally posted by ghaleon
I think turn is better to shove in J887ds hand. Villain is likely almost never folding and there are lot of rivers making it either tough for us or potentially kill action versus two pairs. Any 7 or higher or diamond that is unpaired changes nuts.

I found here another hand, that is similar. But this time I got raised on the flop.

iPoker - €0.50 PL Hi (6 max) - Omaha Hi - 4 players
Hand converted by Holdem Manager 3

BB: €19.11 (38.2 bb)
Hero (CO): €178.87 (357.7 bb)
BTN: €34.56 (69.1 bb) - a very loose passive player (65/10/0 AF 0.7)
SB: €57.82 (115.6 bb)

SB posts €0.25, BB posts €0.50

Pre Flop: (pot: €0.75) Hero has K♦: J♠: K♣: 9♠:
Hero raises to €1.75, BTN calls €1.75, fold, BB calls €1.25

Flop: (€5.50, 3 players) T♦: 2♦: 8♠:
BB checks, Hero bets €5.50, BTN raises to €22.00, fold, Hero?

A very important question is: What´s within villain´s range raising range?
Specifically: Would he raise overpairs (:Ax: :Ax:-:Qx: )?

This might be a common play at the SPR of 6.5 but against villain we have to take into account he is very passive raising only strong hands.
You might include A♦::diamond: as he could raise the bare nutflushdraw aswell, but it does not change the Equities considerably.

We compare our Equity one time against overpairs included and one time excluded:

Villain has overpairs in his flop raising range.

Villain has no overpairs in his flop raising range.

Both times we do not have Equity edge so calling makes sense (we do not want to go allin with hands that are close to a coinflip at best unless FE is on our side). By making the right play on the turn, we loose less, that we would if we had shoven it otf. But now since we have to assume multistreet-EV here, we need to know how much Equity we actually are going to have, if the turn is the ♦: we plan to fold on.

Villain has no overpairs in his flop raising range.

Villain has AA-QQ in his flop raising range.

On the turn are 21bb left and I need 15.2% Equity to justify calling on a :diamond:.
There are 2% Equity missing if he has no such overpairs. But big Equity surplus of 9,6% in case he does have them. But without proper Multistreet-EV calc this illustrated barely the case he would shove any turn 100%. Those calcs always have to be taken with a grain of salt. But it´s better to do those cals than just trying to imaginate the ranges.

In hindsight, with this hand, I feel like I did the right thing just calling the raise. Because my assumption is: A passive villain is going to check-back his hands unless he does have the flush.

Ingame my thoughts were way less complex, but I might subconsciously played it the way I did. I felt confident blocking the bdfd and blocking the straightdraw with my own nut-oesd so I just called. I also thought I would have great visibility if a diamond comes. The diamond came, I folded (you need discipline here) as planned and probably saved some bucks.

I suppose bet-shove would be reasonable on that KKJ9 hand. If we were 100bb effectives I would likely x-c. On turn when villain has only SPR 0.2 its imo very reasonable for him to shove his whole range. He gets so much value from denying equity from wrap type holdings if those fold when having like top 2 or sets. Even more so if he only has wrap with top pair etc.

Originally posted by ghaleon
I suppose bet-shove would be reasonable on that KKJ9 hand. If we were 100bb effectives I would likely x-c. On turn when villain has only SPR 0.2 its imo very reasonable for him to shove his whole range. He gets so much value from denying equity from wrap type holdings if those fold when having like top 2 or sets. Even more so if he only has wrap with top pair etc.

I agree that money would go in anyways. But even if so, you can still opt play bet-call flop to check-call turns 100% assuming villain would shove 100% with his remaining stack, calling would be still better play assuming we have 0% FE - we won´t have FE since I can´t find any raise-fold bluffs here. (And I rarely see passive players with AF of 1.5 or below shoving all made hands when they do not have the flush on a possible flush board, some even check back top2-pair or set. In my pool it is more likely, that with decent showdown value, they tend to check-back no matter stack sizes). And as already mentioned, if we manage to keep those 21bb remaining stack in situations where we are dead, we minimize our losses and make it a more +EV line after all.

If the river completes our straight on a flush board river, I guess we would have to donk shove otr.

Update July:

The last 2 weeks have been a desaster considering the net-$ results:

On my first session on 17.7.22 I lost over 10 stacks. Afterwards I felt like I tilted very hard during a few sessions and the sessionreview indeed showed a lot of hands were misplayed significantly and also more bad played hands in the other sessions than usual. Bad luck also was an issue during this two weeks so I will consider this is a heavy downswing, which is not a good timing, since I just arrived at PLO100 and still have to adapt to the player environment.

But now let´s show some hands:

I start with my first big losing session on the 16.7.22. ... I labelled 47 hands where 11 (23%) of hands were played badly despite my capabilities and knowledge how to do it better ingame. This mistake ratio is way too high, it should not be over 5% to remain a winrate of more than ~15bb/100 which is necessary to cover my monthly fix expenses and to reinvest in order to make reasonable bankroll progress.

First some information about villain, who is a Maniac (54/34/12) with a moderate overall AF of 2. He is capable of making triple barrel bluffs and big moves for stacks, 3-way aswell. Despite the lack of proper board evaluation and considerable ingame weaknesses like bet-sizing, frequencies etc.. he does have a good sense for handstrength evaluation and positional awareness, and he is capable of changing gears depanding on his monetary results so far in the session (mental weakness). He is a regular player with big leaks but somewhat solid postflop skills, exactly the type of opponent that can bring me on tilt after a series of bad beats.

1. On the flop I really do not like the stack-off with just a pair. I thought something like: Well, this guy barreled me several times now and I have a pair at SPR 1,5. He can very well be bluffing some portion of hands having no actual SDV but in hindsight, this play probably has been a terrible blunder, I was not patient enough. Turn play with an straightdraw picked up was fine. Anyways, this was my first big mistaken hand.

2. He is c-betting the flop with full pot. Idk if it is mirror thinking, but since he is multitabling every day, I expected him to be a regular and use the GTO default sizing (pot, half pot). So his main portion of pot-sized flop bets should not include (he very might have some of those, even should have from a balancing perspective). Wrong. I have enough (implied) value to call otf, the turn call is an odds call with 32% HvH-Equity against his nuts. The single inaccuracy was calling off the rest on the river, I felt committed but I think that was quite faulty with a bare middle pair blocking all of villain´s draws (and potential river bluffs).

3. Flat-calling 9♠:9♦:8♥:4♠: against my 3-bet is a mistake imo, very loose preflop range at HU was my impression here. A flop raise would have been superior imo, it might be another inaccuracy.

4. This might have been a mistake. I did not recognize this pot betting otf pattern. I assume him to 2-barrel trips, fulls and straights ott so I made a quite bold hero-call otr.

5. The flop call is pretty standard. Turn and river showed really tilty bullshit plays I made and was not even aware of in the heat of playing 4 tables.

6. This is an iffy one Idk if it is an overplay. Normally with 4+ players you would play very straightforward, but top-2pair is a quite strong hand, there are tons of draws and all opponents are very loose: MP (54/5/2.5), SB (65/0/0) and BB (55/15/4).

7. One more "pot-sized bet on paired board" hand I fucked up. Theoretically it is hard to hit trips. Damn.

8. Bad because tilty river call.

9. A little cooler imo. I have third nuts at SPR2.

10. Flop bluff cbet is standard. On the turn I try to protect my hand against sets and all 2pairs (he is capable of calling 2pair-hands twice on monotone boards. On the river I should be checking for Showdown, but with A♦: and K♦: on the board I really like my J♦: flush blocker very much so I decided to turn my hand into a bluff.

11. Idk how to explain this one. Totally messed up due to tilt.

12. Same holds true for this one. The flop is a standard fold.

12. Tilty call otf combined with a nut-blocker bluff that is against the odds of his tendencies.

13. A triple barrel bluff trying to rep :Ax:.

14. I called the flop because of my K♠: blocking middle-set. But the turn should have been raised, a little inaccuracy.

15. Villain is another Maniac (80/45/30) AF 2.8 so I decided to defend turn and river. Not sure about it, marked it as "gray area". Might make an analysis, which is diffilcult though because of his wide ranges.

I will stop here, the second is similarly a catastrophe. After those 2 terrific session I managed to cool down a bit and read the chapters "Tilt" and "Downswing". I still made some mistakes per session afterward and also kept losing more money due to bad luck. Thanks to my financial reserves, I can still play those limits but I will have to focus on better performance, otherwise I am in serious troubles. Lots of play were sloppy and I prolongued my sessions with the mindset of winning money back, played more than planned. For this weekend I am going to reorganize myself and rewrite my personal goals on my papers, study and session goals and try to stick to it.

I think I can still get value out of his: Since I did not tilt for so long it is interesting to evaluate triggers and reasons and compare them analytically from what I have learnt from "The Poker Mindset" by Hilger & Taylor, I specifically reconsidered emotional stuff and leaks in my thought process that affected my mental game, the book allowed me to systematically summarize reasons for this mental blackout.

Since I currently also doing stats analysis with HM3 to find leaks by my own Id like to help you too on this if I can. If you dont mind you can post stats from you whole database and maybe I can find some leaks. You might want to post stats by position.

You should consider replacing the 'Went to Showdown' statistic since there is better one called 'River call efficiency' which is around 1.39. Jnandez mentioned that a loose crusher on micros is playing something like VPIP 32 PFR 17 3bet 7 fold2bet 11 Agression % 28 (you might want to switch this too since you use the factor default).

Obv stats should not be taken too seriously and on GG you cant even use a HUD. but for analyzing your own plays and finding leaks I believe HM3 is a great tool to improve.

For the tilting: I know this is super hard to overcome. I only have two advices for you to remember:

1: We all make mistakes. Even the best. So if you do some hard misplays I know that feeling but you should constantly tell yourself: It is about to make less mistakes then the other players!

2: Also even the greatest players do tilt. nobody is free from this. Your books will tell you enough ways to deal with this and avoid tilting the roll away. Just try to find ways to stop a session when you feel like you do not make good decisions but autopiloting your way through a downswing.

also find breaks from grinding. dont grind every day. I just played close to 10k hands since restart and already can feel the overheating point where one is too quickly grinding on autopilot for sample. AAA+ decisions > samplesize > monetary outcome

you also seem overplay your reads in the first hands. even in hand 1 villain is a maniac you are not in a great shape onn this flop in 4bet pot so just fold flop vs potsize bet at the low SPR.

Hand 2 is a river fold even in GTO.

hand 3: fold preflop. that proves that you had a too high 3bet% in your stats from the first stats and it is not only due to small sample.

the other hands have mistakes too but you already know that. relax, gear down and play more like if you are doing a trainer session IMO

HU versus aggro opponent is always tough. Personally I tend to evade HU unless I have clear edge. Quickly some opinions. Though in HU its very opponent dependent. If we call wide versus these maniac guys on early streets it will make their aggression more effective. Making aggressive lines can work if villains are capable of folding. But in some of these there are indication that villain is probably not best kind to make big moves against.

1: I suppose fine to 3bet in HU though I doubt call is bad option. Flop just fold. Even non AA, KK hands will have plenty of equity with likely multiple overcards and potential fd.

2: Villain likely rarely has nut fd at least with A+ as those are more likely using smaller sizing. Dry sort of AAxx should heavily prefer potting so there are good amount of those on drawy flop like this. Some less than Ax nfd combos might go for pot. I doubt we are making profit with flop call unless villain is pretty crazy or willing to overplay heavily. Turn is indeed call but on river its very optimistic to call even with those pot odds.

3: Not sure if efkay read hand wrong? We obviously wont fold KQJ6ds preflop. I think flop is pretty nice for x-r. Multiple components make hand strong enough.

4: Clear fold on flop. There is not a single turn card we are happy to face second barrel and we are drawing really thin versus straights and sets. Semibluffs and straight blocker bluffs can also push us off very often.

5: Yeah turn call is problematic as again can we get implied odds and potential negative implieds. If we had nut fd and nut gs then fine call. River is indeed very optimistic.

6: 5way pot make this awkward. I suppose its fine but facing that turn x-r is ugly. Would villain try to semibluff with draw? Usually not imo so very often we are versus set or AQ+draw.

7: Would just call pre. Flop we heavily block draws with JJ so I would just x-f. Versus pot size bet from opponent that is likely going to continue aggression we will just burn money in long run. Would likely just go for 1/3 cbet and fold to raise.

8: Not 3betting this. Classical trashy ds hand. Why to bloat pot with this? I dont actually mind bluff catch here. Villain check flop so nut fd combos less likely and same for boats. Its pretty weird to pot TT on turn when there is bunch of straights and flushes available. I suppose its sort of bluff from villain. You also block boats with KT.

9: No point to cbet really. As played I would fold to x-r. On turn hand should be bluff catcher versus sensible player but I suppose this guy was crazy. Point being it might be better to call and call river.

10: Just fold flop imo.

11: Total junk in SB, time to fold.

12: Yup very very bad flop for our range and even more so for our hand.

12-2: Seems pretty unnecessary again. Also its noteworthy opponent here is just potting and calling off turn when flush completes. Also when we block nut fd flop x-r range is more toward trips+

13: Again not fan of 3bet pre. This hand is likely not that great combo to barrel. Should we even shove river with AA or x-c?

14: Turn call is indeed weird.

15: Easy fold on turn. He needs to call flop with some 8x top pair and turn it into bluff.

3: yes I thought it is SBvBTN sorry. so this is at least a call preflop, I just dont like the dangler for 3betting this. since I also dont have to isolate a player BvB or have to play OOP I still think call > 3bet preflop

Yeah 6 is not greatest but when we are playing HU versus aggro player his BU/SB open range can be easily like 80% of hands imo. So its not really comparable spot compared to any 6max table spot. Villain has position and is facing only one opponent. So I would imagine 3bet range is fairly wide but yeah HU is not something I would have studied so far.

In HU BB 3bets 17% or so. KQJ6ds is a 3bet. Every KQJx ds is a 3bet, rest of KQJx is a call. Versus that 3bet 9984ss is a call. Button folds 19% to 3bet HU in solver. And in that fold range there are some hands most would never fold, like some ds stuff. If we call with ds hands, we fold 17% or so.

Originally posted by ghaleon

1: I suppose fine to 3bet in HU though I doubt call is bad option. Flop just fold. Even non AA, KK hands will have plenty of equity with likely multiple overcards and potential fd.

Agree. I sometimes use the toppair to bluff-raise. But against him it´s a bad play and continuing is even worse.

2: Villain likely rarely has nut fd at least with A+ as those are more likely using smaller sizing. Dry sort of AAxx should heavily prefer potting so there are good amount of those on drawy flop like this. Some less than Ax nfd combos might go for pot. I doubt we are making profit with flop call unless villain is pretty crazy or willing to overplay heavily. Turn is indeed call but on river its very optimistic to call even with those pot odds.

Sorry but your range perception is nonsense. As described villain is a maniac and I saw him going broke with 4-high flushdraws for 100bb+ in a raise-reraise scenario. I am wondering here if I should have folded otr or maybe shove turn? I don´t think I can get out here earlier with such a good combo draw.

3: Not sure if efkay read hand wrong? We obviously wont fold KQJ6ds preflop. I think flop is pretty nice for x-r. Multiple components make hand strong enough.

I agree that check-raising otf would have been best.

4: Clear fold on flop. There is not a single turn card we are happy to face second barrel and we are drawing really thin versus straights and sets. Semibluffs and straight blocker bluffs can also push us off very often.

Agreed, pretty terrible to continue here.

5: Yeah turn call is problematic as again can we get implied odds and potential negative implieds. If we had nut fd and nut gs then fine call. River is indeed very optimistic.

Agreed. Lack of nuttiness.

6: 5way pot make this awkward. I suppose its fine but facing that turn x-r is ugly. Would villain try to semibluff with draw? Usually not imo so very often we are versus set or AQ+draw.

Yup. Well, but I am not so concerned about this one, since it´s such a rare spot. Hard to say what to do here, with wide ranges he could have called tons of hands otf and the turn is very inviting for made hands to check-raise. But on the other hand, villains are passive too and loose ranges are more likely to include lower sets and combos that should not be in a preflop range.

8: Not 3betting this. Classical trashy ds hand. Why to bloat pot with this? I dont actually mind bluff catch here. Villain check flop so nut fd combos less likely and same for boats. Its pretty weird to pot TT on turn when there is bunch of straights and flushes available. I suppose its sort of bluff from villain. You also block boats with KT.

Agreed, pretty tilt.

9: No point to cbet really. As played I would fold to x-r. On turn hand should be bluff catcher versus sensible player but I suppose this guy was crazy. Point being it might be better to call and call river.

Agreed..

12-2: Seems pretty unnecessary again. Also its noteworthy opponent here is just potting and calling off turn when flush completes. Also when we block nut fd flop x-r range is more toward trips+

I did not expect him to stack-off trips.

13: Again not fan of 3bet pre. This hand is likely not that great combo to barrel. Should we even shove river with AA or x-c?

Shove it. no hands bluffing at that line. Agree that preflop is clearly not a 3-bet.