Sean Poker

A few new pot-limit Omaha books are going to be available in the next few months:

Advanced Pot-Limit Omaha: Small Ball and Short-Handed Play is the next book of Jeff Hwang, the author of Pot-Limit Omaha — The Big Play Strategy. As its title suggests, it will cover more advanced topics than his first book: floats, SPR, preflop 3bets, small ball style are a few topics on the menu. About 350 pages, due in mid-june.

Secrets of Short-handed Pot-limit Omaha: How to Beat PLO Games with Six or Fewer Players is co-authored by Rolf Slotboom and Rob Hollink. Rolf already published a pretty good book three years ago, Secrets of Professional Pot-Limit Omaha; one of the criticisms I made about it was that I didn’t find it that adequate for 6max games, now the question will certainly be thoroughly addressed. The content will include a study of stack size and bet size, player-specific strategies, advanced plays and moves, as well as many examples from high stakes. About 300 pages, due in August 2009.

Two Plus Two Publishing also made an announcement in their forums that they will bring a new PLO book to the market “in the not too distant future”. No detail on it yet.

Finally, Tom Chambers, aka LearnedfromTV, is currently writing an ebook targeting the better mid-stakes PLO players. Tom offers coaching and his students have had many good things to say about it. He also makes videos for PokerSavvy+, and although I only watched a few previews, they looked pretty solid — I’ll probably take the trial to see how good they are. Tom seems to have done quite a bit of work on the “analytical” side, crunching some numbers and delving into combinatorics.
His ebook will be 300-500 pages, and it will cost $2,500.

It is common wisdom that being predictable is a bad thing. If your opponents can easily figure out the strength of your hand from your actions, then it is all too easy for them to make a good decision with their hand, whether it’s folding their weak hand, valuebetting their likely winner or even bluffing you out of the pot. To counter this, poker players need to balance their range in most situations.

A balanced range contains a certain part of expected winners, that is, hands that are very likely to win barring some unlucky confrontations (referred to as setups in poker lingo). Sets or nut flushes are typical winners if the board texture isn’t particularly threatening — you generally want all the money to go in with these hands.

In order to balance your range, a part of bluffs is necessary. They improve your range in two ways. Firstly, they extend your betting range, creating a sort of halo around your value bets, and given the strength of your range as a whole your opponents must respect it. Secondly, they help making your good hands paid, since sometimes your opponents will try to catch a bluff. The exact ratio of bluffs to winners depends on several factors, like pot odds, implied odds or your opponent tendencies. Now, the question is:

How do you pick the hands you’ll bluff with?

Many players just go with their feelings and throw a bluff when they have a hunch that their opponent is vulnerable, while they themselves have very little or no showdown value. In order to keep a balanced range, they avoid bluffing several times in a row, trying to somewhat alternate their valuebets with their bluffs, and that’s about it.

This method suffers from two shortcomings: 1) the actual bluff ratio is difficult to control when you go with rough estimates while playing, and 2) it pays no attention to your equity when your bluff is called and there are more cards to come. That’s where Randomization by Equity comes in very useful.

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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.

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