Important PLO tournament concepts

The proximity of hand values pre-flop and the threat of bigger betting on later streets means that poor decisions early on in a hand can ‘lock you in’ later down the line for big losses. If you want to become a good PLO player you’ll have to sharpen your awareness of these concepts, but to give you a head start we’re going to look at the two most important factors: position and stack depth.

Position

As a result of the hand combinations in PLO, position is even more important than in Hold’em. Hands that are treated as monsters in hold’em, such as sets or top two pair, can easily be outdrawn in PLO. If there are two players behind you, that’s potentially 12 distinct hold’ em hands drawing against you. Thus, the presence of a straight draw or a flush on the board represents a genuine threat and you should be more likely to bet to protect your hand out of position. By extension, having position on the opposition in PLO is a very valuable commodity.

Stack depth

Stack-to-blind ratio is very important in PLO. This is once again down to hands being close in value – both pre-flop and post-flop. Because hand match-ups are rarely more unfavourable than 65%/35%, and because no raise can ever be more than pot-sized, it’s rare that you will be getting the wrong odds to call a raise pre-flop.

For that reason, you will have to be particularly careful where your speculative action leads you. If your pre-flop raise gets re-raised all-in by a short stack, you will almost certainly have to call because the pot odds dictate it. Hence you have to be mindful of the so-called leverage of your own bets and those of others.

Leverage in this case refers to the threat of further action that each action implies. If, for example, a player reraises you preflop for 3,000 chips total and they only have another 3,000 behind, you know the remaining 3,000 chips are going in on the flop no matter what. Thus, to continue with the hand will not only cost you the present call, but the extra 3,000 too.
This of course cuts both ways. Remember to use your stack depth and your position to threaten others with your action. PLO is a much more bluffy game than people think precisely because of this. You can bet out of position, call in position and generally create havoc in your opponents’ minds as long as the threat of further action is sufficiently scary.