Book Review: The Pot-Limit Omaha Book – Transitioning From NLHE To PLO

Good Pot-Limit Omaha books are few and far between as of this writing — in my opinion, you can even count them on one hand. Thus, each new publication is eagerly awaited by the student of the game.

But this one is special in several way. Firstly, it’s an ebook, sold directly by its author, Tri Nguyen a.k.a. SlowHabit, so you won’t find it at your local bookstore or on Amazon. As a matter of fact, this is not Tri’s first ebook, since he has also co-written a NLHE book Let There Be Range with Cole “CTS” South, a very strong player that made many videos for the CardRunners training site (in case you haven’t heard of him yet). There has been a lot of buzz about that NLHE ebook, and its high price tag — $1,850 when it came out — has been thoroughly commented in many poker forums.

So, this second book published by Tri on DailyVariance clearly targets the high end of the market. This means it won’t be a $30 book, but most important you can expect premium content.

So, What’s In The Book?

The book comprises eight-one pages, divided into ten chapters. As its title suggests, an average understanding of NLHE is enough to take advantage of it, and no particular experience of PLO is required.

It starts with a study of the preflop play, which covers the fundamentals in a good, practical way. It suggests what hands to play according to position, and what your VPIP should be. The important points are detailed shortly and accurately, underlining the differences with NLHE when appropriate. The discussion includes many equity analyses, concepts like the playability of a hand, and it emphasizes some important structural strengths of starting hands, as well as the deficiencies of frequently overplayed weak or “trap” hands.

The author also talks about preflop 3bets and 4bets, and how to defend against them. In particular, it includes an interesting graphical method to analyze 4bet calls; it has been mentioned on the 2+2 and CardRunners forums, and although the ProPokerTool graph function falls short in its current implementation, the rough estimates still come in useful.

This first chapter makes for an easy introduction for those with no PLO experience; if you already play for some time, you could be familiar with most of it, even though there are always a few tips to pick up.

The three following chapters, Key Concepts, Common Mistakes and Common Situations, list several concepts and situations, again in a concise and pragmatic way (about four or five paragraphs each). You will learn about position, slowplays, freerolls, bluffs… You can tell that Tri/SlowHabit did a good deal of coaching, as these are the kind of advice that address things many players don’t understand or don’t do right at the tables. The numerous examples are quite clear, and Tri puts his ideas across well.

The content progressively shifts from basics towards more advanced topics; the Looking Ahead section and the Common Situations chapter, for instance, provide elements to answer the frequent question “should I jam it or peel/take a safe card?”.

Chapter six, seven and eight deal with the postflop play, for the flop, turn and river respectively. They explain how to estimate equities, how to put one’s opponent on a range, and how the flop texture can provide opportunities. This should be a real eye-opener for the players who follow a tight, serious style that actually turns out to be too “ABC” and on the weak side — an all-too common case at the low stakes. Again, several comparisons with NLHE are made to highlight decisions specific to the game. These thirty pages are going to help a lot of readers for sure.

The concepts and the plays advocated in these postflop chapters contain several notions I touched on in this blog, like Bet/Folding In Pot-Limit Omaha or the donk bets. It actually took me several months to figure these things out, watching videos on training sites and taking part in the forum discussions. Of course, you may be brighter than me, more dedicated or whatever, but this book still provides a great shortcut to an effective style.

To me, this is clearly the best PLO book on the market

If you’re coming from NLHE and you’re relatively new to the game, I would say the content of this book is probably exactly what you need. The book is sort of designed on that purpose: if you were a good friend of Tri and you asked him to teach you winning PLO, he could have come up with the content of this book. Everything is concise and to the point. When you finish the book, you will really have learned something, and you will be ready to put your knowledge into practice. This contrasts with some other books written in a more traditional, academic way, that often fail to give you clear advice on what you can do to improve your game. Not so with The Pot-Limit Omaha Book – Transitioning From NLHE To PLO. To me, this is clearly the best PLO book on the market.

If you already have some PLO experience, but you don’t feel comfortable in many situations and you are unsure about your edge, then you will certainly benefit from reading it. You will know many things from the first chapters, but the last four ones — that is, over half the book — will likely give you several aha moments.

Should I buy it?

The content is great, so on that side the answer is yes unless you’re already quite experienced. However, the price isn’t cheap, at $300 apiece. If you’re a small or micro stakes player, this can seem just unreasonable — but one should not forget that it could make you win money. After all, many “professional” material is quite expensive too, like advanced computer books or software. So it is pointless comparing it to some novel, or even to a cookie-cutter poker book that won’t teach you anything beyond absolute basics. It would make more sense to compare it to the hourly rate of coaching sessions, or more precisely to an edited, well-written collection of notes, explanations and summaries of many coaching sessions. How many hours would it take to touch on all these subjects while playing, and what would it cost?

Naturally, if you don’t have the bankroll, then whatever perspective you take it’s going to be out of your means, but then you’ll probably don’t have enough funds to play PLO either except from nano stakes. It is worth repeating that even tough this is a very good book, it is not a grimoire that will turn you into an instant winner, and no book will — so don’t spend all your savings hoping to learn magic formulas!

But if you have the means and you want to get serious about learning and improving your PLO, then this book is certainly recommended.

Note: in addition to the book, buyers can access a private forum to ask questions and discuss about the book. I didn’t get see it, but I have access to another ebook private forum (that of BobboFitos), and it is a nice feature; it may feel like some private study group, and the author sometimes answers questions about whether a hand has been well played etc.
I should also say I received a review copy of this book, but I would have bought it otherwise.

The site of the book, DailyVariance.com