Bet/Folding In Pot-Limit Omaha

It doesn’t take long for beginners to figure out that the nuts are out much more often in PLO than in NLHE. With four cards in hand, it’s very common for someone to hit a flush when the board is three-suited, even if it was a backdoor draw. Likewise, a paired board automatically brings threats of full houses, and three or four connected cards can very well give someone a straight.

This means that it is more dangerous to raise someone on these boards if you don’t have the nuts yourself — or at least a strong draw to a better hand — since the risk of drawing dead or very thin is quite real.

Consequently, it is rarer to get raised “light” on these types of board (called “locked down boards” by Phil Galfond, who discussed them in a Bluefirepoker video — site to be reviewed soon). In NLHE, it is more difficult to represent the nuts, and a suspicious villain will often call you with a good hand, figuring that only a very small part of your range gives you a monster, and the rest generally hits top pair or two pair at best, which could still be outdrawn if you happen to have it. In other words, suspicious calls, or simply pot-control with an average hand, are harder to achieve on some boards in PLO.

As a result, bet/folding becomes a serious option on many boards — all the more so when checking would only present the very same choice to your opponent, and you would have a hard time calling his bet.

For instance, if you have AJJ9 on a J83 flop in a 3bet pot; you bet, villain calls and the turn is the Q. It completes a straight, but villain could be on two pair or on the flush draw; since you would not check the straight if you had it. Your opponent can then figure out he has a free hand to steal this pot if you do check. On the other hand, if you bet and he doesn’t have the straight, he can’t really raise, barring some special metagame.

Naturally, you need to pay attention to what you represent, and what the range of your opponent is; don’t pay him off when a likely of his got there, but if he has a pretty wide range, taking a non-committing stab will often be a good move.

The idea also applies to donk bets, which put your opponent in a difficult spot if a large part of his range missed the board. But let’s leave that for another post.