Day 1

Recent trends continue, drawing with underpairs to the board, calling down with overpairs on straight boards, bluffing with bluffcatchers, and so on. This is standard. There also appears to be a directive from fish leadership to ignore all pot odds. That stuff is bogus anyway. Fishes have also been informed that if an opponent checks, then he no longer has any cards. So at that point you can do whatever you want, he will fold eventually. A new development is 3-betting tight UTG opens with Q752, or 4-betting BN vs SB 3-bets with KT77. Cards don’t matter really, because if you just do it consistently you’ll eventually hit something big and cooler your opponent who plays trash hands like AAxx and such. Everyone knows that aces suck in PLO right? They get outdrawn all the time.

The first day ended up ~13 BI after 3200 hands. Pray for downswings, or this will be a short mission.

I can relate to the call 4 bet part. There is also some cold cing 3bets from sb with 8743ss or qt87 all same auit stuff i hope you will encounter

Day 2

Rain. Mud. Shell cases flooded. Sandbags broken. Enemy had reinforcements. Snipers were shooting 1- and 2-outers all day. Special forces had been called in. The dangler mining teams were causing us a lot of trouble. The magical flop teams set up things well, so every SPR 1 situation on safe looking flops ended up being quite damaging.

The limp-reraise team were doing their thing, but not with AAxx as in the old days, but with hands like KT79. When it’s instead actually our hero who has the aces, it seems like we should be in a good spot, but not so today. Flop came QJ9 and SPR was 0.05 (!). We also had stacks in with AA vs AA several times and lost. The raise-for-deception teams were also out. Flop is QJ6dd, hero has a set and bets. Villain raises with T568dd, so bottom pair, a gutter to the sucker straight, and an 8 high flush draw. Thankfully, intelligence command had provided us with the max exploit line so we could deliver a damaging blow on the turn.

Maybe the lightest squeeze we faced after raising (AAxx) UTG was rainbow KKxx. That’s 72% equity when the money went in, possibly the most you can ever have in PLO. The prize for lightest call probably goes to the opponent who called with 7654 on K3Jr. But hey, he had a backdoor straight draw, a backdoor 7 high flush draw, plus a backdoor trips draw. Can’t fold 17% equity for sure. Beyond that, the backdoor draw teams were also causing further trouble. We’re barreling sets on dry boards, they call with gutters and backdoor draws, and somehow magically spikes the perfect runout.

Oh, and the backraisers were also out. CO opens, BN calls, hero squeezes KKQQ with suits in the BB. CO 4-bets, and BN 5-bet shoves JJ78. At least we got out of the situation with just a flesh wound and could watch the villains tear each other apart. As far as weird hands in 4-bet pots, today was no different. Maybe weakest hand was 3356, but when the flop it T34r it’s not the worst play.

Still, we’re up 4.5 BI for the day. Not too bad considering how bad it could have been. Win rate down to 17 bb/100, but for tomorrow we’ve been promised better weather and reshuffled ranges. We've also heard rumors of enemy metal landships (tanks they call them), but surely there can be no such thing.

Support!

Still using a won't bluff for the life of me strategy?

Tanks were spotted in the early morning hours. We're taking heavy damage. They are equipped with 3-, 4- and 5-outers. Our ammunition is too weak. Turn bets with set + flush draw vs two pair + gutter, not stopping them. Nut straight + flush redraw vs set, not stopping them. Our defenses our down. Need to get back behind enemy lines. Request artillery support, or a fifth card.

Go JonnaGo!!!!!
In for lolz :o)

As a holdem player transitioning to PLO I'm definitely finding these games a challenge as all sorts of bizarre situations arise. 3bet from +1 vs UTG then end up 4 way on the flop, I've had my tight UTG open 3bet by the BB with a rainbow small pair. It appears the fish school has taught that any pair is good to call and set mine from any position, any suited hand is playable, and that you should bluff raise with your bluff-catchers as calling sucks. Any hand that is DS is basically the nuts so shovel as much in pre as possible. If your opponent checks any board regardless of texture and SPR then it is OK to just bet until he folds.

In comparison, fish in NLHE tend to have more order and general idea to key concepts such as: preflop selection, position, hand strength, etc. Whereas in PLO these concepts are non-existent. Whilst bluffing is of limited use the only spot I have found that looks consistent is raising every ≤ halfpot cbet as it seems to work more than you would expect(although it could be variance as my sample is worthless).

I've enjoyed following this experiment so far GL & HF.

Day 3

We had no defenses. Artillery support never came. Tanks caused massive damage to the good guys. We had stacks in with 60%, 70%, 80% and even 90% equity, and yet they could not be defeated. Still we fought on well for a long time. Right before midday it even looked like we were getting slightly ahead, but then they deployed some Mark IV tanks. Our men had no time to escape. We took massive losses, and had to abandon the trenches. The few survivors regrouped and gathered some strength for a final battle in the evening. It swung back and forth, massively. At times it looked like we were getting quite a bit ahead, and then they contaminated our flops and we missed one after another. Not just marginally, but utterly and completely. Think AKQJ on 742 without our suits. Not once, but for 500 flops. Finally, when we actually started hitting a little, they brought out the feared weapon: top boat vs under quads in a deep stack situation. We recovered a bit again towards the end, to finish a bit ahead again for the final battle, but in total, the day saw heavy losses. Well, -5.5 BI is perhaps not so bad for this crazy game, but it was a sharp contrast to previous days.

Well, that's going to be the end of this story. Hope you guys enjoyed it.

Final results after 22772 hands are $290.68, or almost 12 BI. A bit less than one might expect, but whatever. Swings are pretty crazy in this game. I think I probably ran slightly good during the first third, and then slightly bad during the last two thirds. Rake paid was $594.15, so pre-rake the win rate was around 15.5 bb/100. It's probably possible to achieve 16-20 bb/100 or so, but rake will take off 2/3 of that.

I've seen a lot of craziness. Every couple of hands or so, you come across something that just doesn't make any sense at all. It's also clear that the skill level for the population is very low. There's hardly any hand selection, even from seemingly tight "regular" players. Bet sizing tells are insane, as are timing tells. Nobody seems to understand equities. It's basically: a set, any set, is the nuts regardless of board texture. Draws are draws, they are never the nuts. Frequencies of events also appear to be largely unknown, as are any understanding of board textures. Some players will cbet 100% in HU pots with any hand on any board texture.

There are a lot of things that can be exploited. Passivity is one thing, and I've successfully used fairly aggressive checking to showdown with marginal hands when I'm fairly confident that I'm winning most of the time. But characterizing these games as just passive is a massive oversimplification in my opinion. Players will squeeze A863r from the SB vs UTG open, MP call, BN call. They will force stack-offs with extremely marginal holdings. I've been check-potted all-in with A high no draw more than once. People will raise 8 high flushes on monotone flops. Or call a monotone flop with air, c/r turn with the same air and pot lead river. That's not passive at all in my mind, and using a strategy that works well in passive games will get you pretty owned. It's also not fair to say that people are generally folding too much. In some spots, yes, but in other spots not at all. Players are all over the place, and it really varies a lot from player to player. Some fold 80% in BB vs SB steal, others fold nothing at all.

For myself it's been interesting. I used an alternative strategy that was intended to cause some shifts in opponent ranges and lines, and to bring them deeper into the hand. It could not possibly have worked any better! In many spots it induced exactly the response that I was looking for. I've been c/r bluffed OTR several times, something that NEVER happened to me before in these games. I've picked off more river bluffs than I can count, from player types who never seem to bluff otherwise. I was also able to get calls when I had it and folds when I was bluffing (word on the street is that I never bluff), and with some other strategies it ends up being exactly the opposite. Kinda funny how that works. I don't know if it's just lucky variance, but my adjustments appear to have had exactly the intended effect. In terms of results I'm not sure it makes that much of a difference, it's just interesting to know.

And also, I'm not so sure that these games are quite as easy as some players seem to imply. Sure, it doesn't take a very sophisticated strategy or anything, you'll easily have a skill edge over the field, and it's easy to get your money in good. I think I had stacks in a bit shy of 60% on average in HU stack-offs, and maybe 40-45% in 3-way stack-offs. And while there are certainly better players than me, those edges already are quite massive and yet apparently only barely enough. But you also end up in LOTS of bizarre situations where any skill edge is effectively erased. Either preflop multiway all-ins, which is basically suicide thanks to the rake. Or you'll be in with AA vs AA, which is equally bad. Or you'll squeeze a good hand vs a loose opponent, get 3 overcallers, and someone pot leads into the field with SPR 1.3, two players shove and you have top two pair. Like... whatever you do there, your skill edge is gone and the best you can do is break even.

Anyway, the search for fish school continues. Who knows if there will be a "starting with $2500" thread in the future. Entertainment only, of course.

That was quite entertaining, thx very much. I agree that you have to pay close attention what everybody is doing, since the "average player" only makes up a small fraction (maybe 20%ish?) of the player pool.

Probs for casually playing out 20k hands for this challenge in just 3 days. Usually that isnt the case

Well done!!

We are going to have a parade when your soldiers return home

With a Medal of honor

Cool thread ! :D

Thx guys, glad you liked it.

If field was smaller you'd have double or tripple the winrate. So many fish can hit n run so to speak and all that valuable info about how clueless they are goes to waste.

Epilogue

I ended up playing some hands after the final battle and instantly went on a 13 BI upswing. That just goes to show how results in this game will be extremely dominated by variance over even a medium sized hand sample. I've updated the results graph, final results are $471.62, with rake being $682.05. This gives a pre-rake win rate of 18 bb/100. I wouldn't be surprised at all if it's possible to win more, but I don't think anyone's going to double or triple this win rate.

I did calculate a 70% confidence interval for this sample, and it ends up being roughly [11, 25] bb/100. This basically just tells us that the games are likely beatable after rake and that the strategy I used is not a losing one, but it doesn't tell us much more than that.

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If any of this is true, why do I always see you at the PLO10 tables (usually two tabling) and never higher?

This was really entertaining, very well written

Props to you for doing this! Just curious, what stakes do you usually play besides 25PLO?