PLO Tourneys
There hasn’t been much written on PLO tournament strategy. Trust me, I’ve looked. So, I’ve been doing some strategizing on my own, which has made me realize how much harder players had it before Super Systems and Card Runners.
This past weekend, I played twelve hours to cash for a whopping $150 profit in the Venetian PLO event, but it was worth it because I managed to figure a few things out.
1. If the tournament is structured like a typical hold’em tourney or stacks aren’t deep enough (you should get substantially more starting chips in a PLO tournament than in a hold’em event) then you pretty much have to win your first pot to have a decent chance at going deep.
2. If you’ve got chips, calling raises from tight players is very profitable. Any time during the early and middle stages of a tournament when you’ve got good position and you think someone is raising with a big pair, call them with a very wide range of hands, because they will inevitably overplay their hand. You can knock them out with as little as two pair or float them on the flop and steal after they fire a second bullet on the turn. People over play aces much more often in tournaments than they do in cash games.
If someone else has already called the raise, you should narrow your calling range substantially unless you have low cards, like 7654. If there are one or more callers and you have a hand like this, go ahead and play the hand because you know a lot of the high cards are out already and are therefore less likely to flop.
3. It’s okay to bet big wraps with position, but better to play them slow out of position. I unfortunately built a couple of really big pots by leading out with 12-16 card draws from early position, only to have them not come in. You can, and often should, weather this in a cash game, but in a tournament, where chip retention is just as important as stack building, it can be disastrous.
4. Changing your style of play based on your table is even more important than it is in hold’em tournaments. The guys at my first table liked to see cheap flops, so I potted preflop any time there were three limpers ahead of me, and I won several hands without ever being contested. Later, I had a much more aggressive table, so I waited for good hands and limp-reraised preflop (Rolf Slotboom style) more often instead. People seem to be less suspicious of late position raises in PLO tourneys than they are in hold’em events, so depending on your table, you might be able to take advantage of this as well.
I know none of this is earth shattering, but hopefully it will inspire someone out there who does know a thing or two about PLO tourneys to do some writing on the subject.
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Hey, amarillosb. Just read yr post, then happened to see a thread had popped up on 2+2 in which someone is also asking for a PLO tourney book: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/33/books-publications/best-plo-book-tourney-play-416563/
Perhaps something useful will turn up there.