Saturday
October 03, 2009
On a day when most of the familiar faces took some time off from the games, it was interesting to see that one of the regulars, POKERBLUFFS, has decided to broaden his repertoire by playing PLO. I have no idea of how experienced he is in this game, but if our database is any indication, it is not all that much. He played about 18000 hands of NLHE before his first hand of PLO, but I am sure that he has played a bit before at other venues.
Regardless of this, it is quite special to make your debut at the $300/$600 level, but on the other hand, when you are used to playing at a particular level you don’t drop down regardless which game that happens to run at the time. It will be interesting to see how his aggressive game translates to this arena. For now, he is a marginal loser in the game, but hopefully we will see him back, and with a greater number of hands under his belt, we will better be able to assess if he will be as successful at PLO as he has been at NLHE (won $2M over the last 11 months).
458854 flops a straight and takes down a $323K 3-way pot.
Regardless of POKERBLUFFS’ entry at the PLO scene, he has not been involved in any of the larger pots as of yet. The three players involved in the above hand, however, are no strangers to big PLO action. The hand is quite interesting, because the eventual winner, 458854, is on a quite high wire act with a hand that has to figure is third best before the flop. It is not a bad hand by any means, but a hand that can easily be second best and therefore cost a lot of money.
People have a tendency of hiding behind the term ‘Implied Odds’ when they make marginal calls before the flop. Granted, there are a lot of situations where you can get your opponent to pay you off when you hit your hand, but a lot of players seem to forget that there is also a term called ‘Reverse Implied Odds’. This is coined for the situations where you are going to pay off your opponent when he hits a better hand then you, and in this hand, I think 458854 was in a situation when he was more likely to be in the former predicament than the latter.
The flop in this hand is a good example. It is true that as it were, 458854 was a 7-3 favourite to beat OMGClayAiken after the flop, but based on the pre-flop action, OMG’s hand was a true best case scenario for 458854. He could very easily have been up against a higher straight where he would find himself with virtually no winners. He could also be up against a number of straight and flush draws, possibly with a set or two pairs on the side, that would make him a severe underdog. I am not saying that he should not call the all-in bet on the flop, but I don’t think he should have seen the flop in the first place.
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