Sean Poker

This comes from a post I wrote on CardRunners, the PFR part having been adapted from Rollover2k’s comments.

As a rule, your VPIP (number of times you Voluntarily Put $ In the Pot, as a percentage) should be between 15 and 35, and your PFR (PreFlop Raise %) between 15 and 25. Some players manage to play a winning style with higher VPIPs against decent opposition, but it takes a lot of experience.

You can generally assume small stakes players spew when their VPIP is higher than 50.

The Aggression Factor — (Bet % + Raise %) / Call % — just gives a broad idea of how aggressive a player is, and you shouldn’t rely too heavily on it. Aggression Frequency is reported to be more accurate; I haven’t looked for them in my database, but I might provide similar estimates for it later on.

This book broke some fresh ground when it came out in 2006, as they were little PLO material available back then. Its author, Rolf Slotboom, started playing poker for a living in the late 90s’; he firstly focused on live limit holdem games, then he turned to PLO in 2000. He’s known for his very tight style, which earned him the nickname “Ace”.

The book is about two hundred pages, divided in two parts: in the first hundred pages, the author explains his general style and how it evolved as he moved from game to game, and rest of the book contains several PLO articles he wrote earlier for various magazines, in addition to some practical studies.

His core strategy is based on the infamous shortstack game, consisting in coming with the minimum buy-in and committing all his chips preflop with a premium hand, when the other players generally have a pretty wide range, including semi-strong and speculative hands. When this happens, he naturally has an edge, and while the other players contend for the side pot, he can often gain protection. He advocates a lot of minraises and limp/reraises, and he chooses his seat so as to profit the most from the more aggressive players that will help him build the pot and trap other opponents.

While this is simple, sound strategy — that allowed the author to come out as a big winner in his games, according to him –, it works at the expense of the game, in that it exploits the loose aggressive style in a brutal manner and this tends to make the games much tighter when others try to counter it. Furthermore, it is not great fun to play this shortstack style (even though it could be said that it’s a matter of taste), and it does nothing to help improving one’s game on the later streets, where “real” poker is actually played. By real poker, we mean reading your opponents, putting them on hand ranges, working out your equity, throwing bluffs, making good calls etc.

The author is fully aware of these shortcomings actually, and in the second half of the first part, he explains that as several players began to copy his style, the game became significantly worse, which led him to develop a full stack game as well. The presence of bad players with big stacks was also a strong incentive, since it is much better to play with as much money as you can when you have a significant edge, obviously.

So, the first part of the book is about fifty pages on shortstacking, and fifty pages on switching to a full stack game when the conditions are right — including some online games and sessions against soft opponents. Yet, even fully stacked, Slotboom sticks to a kind of smallball game, with lots of small opens and tiny raises. This can be justified by his playing with an intermediate stack sometimes, or because he essentially plays in full ring games (I don’t play full ring, so I can’t say whether it is good in these games). But in today’s 6max games, this would be a very peculiar style, and as far as I’m concerned I don’t care much for it.

Apart from the remarks on shortstacking and the odd smallball style, his general comments are to the point, and he covers most crucial aspects of the game, ie. the power of position and aggression, the danger of big pairs and revealing one’s hand too soon, the importance of hand selection, the structural deficiencies of some good-looking hands etc. So overall, there is a good deal of solid material for the beginner.

The articles from the second part of the book deal more specifically with several aspects like common misconceptions about PLO, reviews of some key points, how to snap off aces, blockers, and many hands the author played in his game. Each article is between three and five pages, often with practical examples.

The book concludes with some forty pages of quizzes and match-ups analyses, with the same bias towards small bets in the answers, but this is consistent with the first part of the book — which is well completed by these practice hands.

All in all, “Secret of Professional Pot-Limit Omaha” is a good PLO book, rather oriented towards shortstack strategies and full ring games — but not exclusively — and the numerous practical cases help the reader in assimilating the various concepts discussed in the book. Another good point is that Rolf Slotboom seems to tell “the full story” in his analyses; he doesn’t give the feeling of holding things back, like, you get only that much for the price of the book. The book lacks advice on today’s predominant games, 6max and HU games, but Slotboom has another book coming out mid-2009 that is dedicated to short-handed PLO games, so — stay tuned.

Rolf Slotboom’s page about the book

1. Play too loose preflop. You can play more starting hands at PLO than at NLHE, and there’s the old saying “Omaha is a post-flop game”, but this does not mean you can play three hands out of four profitably. Playing more 50% of your hand without hurting your EV calls for solid skills, and anything above 60% is certainly spew. Poor starting hands miss the flop very often, and when they hit they make weak hands that can’t stand much pressure – no good.

2. Not being aggressive enough. Limping and calling so as to see a flop and fold if you find no help is a recipe for getting totally exploited. Sure, sometimes you want to see a cheap flop, but your overall gameplan should include a lot of raises for isolation and seizing the initiative – this lets you take down a lot of pots with cbets or second barrels. In a limped of single-raised family pot, you won’t be able to do so. Besides, raises decrease the pot-to-stack ratio, which often works in your favor.

3. Overestimate overpairs. This is the prototypal mistake of NLHE players coming to PLO: an high overpair – especially aces – is a strong hand in NLHE, but it is a fairly weak hand in PLO if there is nothing to go with it (like a straight or flush draw). With four cards in hand, it’s all too easy for an opponent to hit two pair, and if you go wild with overpairs, he’s going to call you off profitably since your range is so unbalanced.

4. Reveal your hand prematurely, especially out of position. This specifically involves making raises or reraises that let everybody know that you have aces, while there is still a good deal of money left to play. Most players still in the hand are going to call you, and you’ll generally be left with a bare overpair facing several unknown quantities. This is a great spot – for them.

5. Chase with non-nut draws. Pouring money into the pot while drawing dead or extremely thin is a terrible mistake; it often happens when people draw to the 2nd, 3rd or worse nut flush, while the nut flush draw is much in someone else’s range. This can also happen with dominated straight draws. Non-nut draws can be played sometimes, but they’re generally part of some combo-draw, where it is difficult for an opponent to cover everywhere. Those cases excepted, it is best to steer clear of non-nut draws.

6. Tilt. PLO is going to take it to a new level – like, you’re going to be seriously pissed. This is a high-variance game, and it hurts when you see donks rake pots with ridiculous holdings played as poorly as possible. The mistake is obviously keeping playing while you feel like murdering someone: you’re going to chase, to spazz and to bury yourself.

7. Insufficient bankroll. With the inevitable ups&downs, you need a solid bankroll to play PLO if you want to avoid going broke. Forty buyins is a sort of minimum; you can always play with less if you can deposit next month, but if injecting fresh money is not an option, you’d better choosing the smaller stakes.