Experiment: Starting with $2500
Posted by jonna102
Posted by
jonna102
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Low Stakes
Experiment: Starting with $2500
Hey guys,
You've now had 10 months to grind 25 PLO since the previous experiment thread, so let's do 50 PLO. It's not so much an experiment anymore, neither is it a challenge, it's just a fun thing to do. Starting with $2500 exactly isn't necessary, but it's a nice number to aim for if you want to play 50 PLO regularly. You can of course take shots with less.
In December and January I've taken short breaks here and there (from the course work) and played some 50 PLO Zoom. During that time I played 26,276 hands and won $1160. That translates to a win rate of around 9 bb/100. I've calculated a 70% confidence interval to [0,18] bb/100, which tells us that there's a good chance that a a winning strategy was played over this hand sample. I also paid $1779 in rake, so before rake the win rate is around 22 bb/100. FWIW, I also ran just about even with respect to all-in adjusted EV.
Here are some of my findings:
The games are hyper-aggressive
I've seen an almost shocking amount of terrible play. People are 3-betting and squeezing hands that shouldn't even have put chips in at all. Flops get called by naked gutters, or bottom pair and undercards. C-bets happen way too often, and few seem to slow down just because someone called and the most obvious draw hit. Most players auto pot it when checked to. 3-bet pots will often go 3- or 4-way and many will pot lead any marginal hit. Some say that the Zoom games are very tight and passive, but I see very little evidence of that. More than half the player pool appears to be borderline maniacs, and even the (presumed) more sensible regulars are making completely crazy plays.
This is fine though. When play is this bad the opportunities to win chips are great! You just can't go in expecting the games to be tight and passive, because you'll get massively run over in no time. And you need to arm yourself with a healthy bankroll. Variance is going to be quite high.
It's possible that you end up with tight and passive stats if you just run averages across the whole player pool, but I don't think that represents actual play very well at all.
Rake is your toughest opponent
The rake is 5% up to a cap of $2. That's 4 bb. Compared to the rake cap at 10 PLO which is 15 bb, this seems much lower. However, it's still almost 8 times higher than at 500 PLO. But the magnitude of it really shows when you look at how you've paid over a hand sample. In the hand sample here, I paid a 60% rake tax. That should make you all stop and think. Seeing flops is expensive. You really have to adjust for this in your strategy, otherwise that will be your biggest mistake. Players are bending over backwards in all kinds of situations just to see flops. You can't really get away with playing weak hands. Once you get to the flop, you have to win quite often. I won't go over all the strategy adjustments here, but if you aren't already asking the video coaches for rake adjusted strategies, then you most certainly should.
Solid play is likely to be the best base strategy
Given the findings above, the hands you play will need to stand up to a lot of aggression. You will end up having to show down your hand quite frequently, and given the rake you also have to win those showdowns quite often. You can still fold out hands a fair bit, but should probably expect to have a negative red line. I've played pretty snug pre-flop, quite aggressively post-flop, and I still have a slightly declining red line. That's fine though, because the showdown winnings more than make up for it. It's a tough balance to strike though. For beginner players I would very much recommend playing solid hands and relying primarily on showdown winnings. We talk some about hand selection, range construction and strategies in the PLO Fundamentals series of courses.
Nobody will notice if you exploit
It's amazing to me that even micros players talk GTO and blockers now. That's all fine, except it's not going to help you to the highest win rates in these games. If you don't know very precisely what you're doing, those concepts are actually more likely to lead you wrong. During this period, I've taken crazy exploitative lines over and over, and nobody seems to notice much. If you can get away with exploitative play, then I absolutely think you should. In fact, unless you run crazy good, I don't know that you'll end up winning much unless you go for max exploit at all times. And I've been amazed at what exploits I've been able to get away with here.
Previous threads:
Experiment: Starting with $100 (2013)
Experiment: Starting with $1000 (2016)
In summary, play is really bad in these games for the most part. It might actually be worse than a few years ago. The level seems to be roughly the same compared to micros games. It doesn't take a very sophisticated strategy at all to win, but it does require a very high level of discipline in execution. You can't really afford to make many mistakes at all. You have to be very resilient, and not let it get to you if you lose 5 or even 10 all-ins against worse hands. The rake and variance act as a sort of a trap, which keeps players playing at low stakes. It's easy to underestimate how much you need to crush the games in order to win much of anything at all. Or you can get lucky. That's also a successful strategy, just a less predictable one.
For those of you who play in these games, what do you mostly find challenging? Maybe the combined wisdom of RIO posters can help clearing some of that up. This thread is a good place to discuss how the games play, and how you think you should be setting up your strategies.
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Good work Jonna,
I enjoy reading your posts. I have always wondered if these stakes are actually beatable; this just goes to show how solid theory and work can massively help for those learning PLO and moving up in the stakes.
I think one of the most important things for people playing these stakes as you said is to be resilient. Learn how to minimise the effects of downswings. You had some pretty big swings there (as everyone has in PLO), and if you cant handle these and stay in control it will be hard to progress.
Thank you David!
There were indeed a cpl 10+ BI downswings during this period. Hands where you get it in and lose to some 1-, 2- or 3-outer. Or just regular flips that end up losing again and again. You still don't get to slip up and start making mistakes! This happens all the time, and is very possibly the toughest part of winning at these stakes. Strategies are easy, but between rake, variance and tilt, it's still very tough in execution.
I still can't say for sure whether these stakes are beatable. The players are easily beatable, but you have to monster crush in order to end up even slightly positive in the end.
Look forward to railing, be sure to share some hh's!
Thanks!
I've played all that I intend to play for this run, but I'm happy to share some hands if you like. Any thoughts on particular situations you'd like to see? Crazy hands? Marginal decisions? Blatant exploits? Or something else?
Absolutely! Keep those hands, situations and decisions coming! Also the hands where you think you could have played little bit better!
Alright, here's a hand that exemplifies a lot of the craziness that goes on. It's from 100 PLO, but the same things happen in 50 PLO all the time.
A weaker reg opens from UTG. His stats are 24/19, but still manages to open 22% from UTG. Slightly wide, but nothing crazy. MP folds and CO 3-bets full pot. CO stats are 29/19, and on my sample has only 3-bet 3% vs UTG opens. He 3-bets J875ds on a short stack, for reasons I just cannot explain. Could be a massive misunderstanding of positions and hand values, but as the hand was played on a Friday evening, he might also just be drunk. Anyway, that hand has no business putting chips into the pot at all. BTN then overcalls -- he's a maniac and will pretty much call any time he has four cards or better. SB also overcalls, don't know too much about him. With almost 200 bb behind we're pretty happy to look down and find AAxx in this spot :)
The 4-bet is mandatory, UTG folds. CO now calls, leaving just fragments of a stack behind. BTN obviously also calls, because that's what maniacs do. SB ends up folding. Flop comes A93r. So we're going to get our stack in good no matter what we do, the job is basically to get the others to put chips in with absolutely nothing. Best play may be to bet something like $30 (15% pot) here, but that's not the bet size that I chose. Doesn't really matter all that much. The point is really just to get them to call with air, pick up a draw on the turn and then call off the rest. CO ended up calling with J high no draw, and BTN ended up folding, and the rest obviously went in on the turn and we won the hand.
This was more amusing than anything else, but it does show some of the oddity that we face in these games. Overcalled 3-bet pots are super standard, but now people are also overcalling 4-bets. The first 3-bet from CO is of course insane, but it happens all the time. And the flop won't always come A93r. Sometimes it will come K58r, you get it in and they have outflopped you. So variance will just be crazy also. Solid play does still end up winning in the end, but it can take much longer than we're comfortable with for the results to come.
I am double suited, I dont need an ace to make a hand = Allin-Preflop. Even worse in lower stakes.
Here's a situation that's actually quite tricky:
UTG opens, and I make a very aggressive 3-bet. But looking at UTG's hand, you probably know why. (I wouldn't normally recommend 3-betting much from MP at all, if you're up against good players.) Just as so often, BTN overcalls, SB overcalls and UTG also calls. Nobody seems at all worried that I should have a super strong hand range here.
Flop is T83m with my second suit. SB leads for full pot, UTG shoves for 2x pot with 2 players left to act, and the action is on me. In any normal games, I should probably actually seriously consider folding here. Seeing the hole cards it looks easy, but it's actually very tricky. SB is supposed to have a very strong range here. UTG should know this, and should have an even stronger range, basically nuts only and arguably no raising range at all. (Though at this SPR it's not a big deal)
Instead we stick it in and end up with 73% equity, which is right up there with the most I've ever been able to have 3-way. This is the real difficulty with playing 3-bet pots in these games though. It's super easy to make mistakes on the flop, and it makes a really big difference. It's not because the players are good, but because you can never really know what anyone has. But getting it right often is what allows these very aggressive 3-bets in the first place.
Here's another spot from 100 PLO. I suspect this can also be difficult for new players. Part of the reason is that we're 300 bb deep with villain.
UTG opens to full pot, I 3-bet from the MP (again lol), everyone else folds and UTG ends up making it 2x my raise for a 4-bet. A full pot sized 5-bet is 74 bb here, and that still leaves something like 225 bb left to play for on the flop. Knowing the right play here is one thing, but I suspect that pulling the trigger to actually make the 5-bet can be quite difficult. What helps me is that I've done my homework for flop play in low SPR situations, and I'm very confident to get it right much more often than my opponents.
The flop is also indeed one of the potential nightmare flops, T98s, which is among the very worst for a 4-betting range. But with the nut flush draw it's just a close-your-eyes-and-shove situation. UTG ends up getting it in with the same gutter as me, and a lower flush draw, leaving him basically just backdoor draws to win. Interestingly my single pair ends up holding up.
Anyway, maybe not the most exciting hand, but it exemplifies how it's really important to be very tough in punishing opponent mistakes, even in situations that may seem scary.
Post some hands where you think that you misplayed your hand. Lets analyze those too!
He never does, obviously :D
Well, I do make the play I intend to make pretty much always. Which means, if I misplayed some hand, then either the strategy is wrong or the assumptions are wrong. It's less likely that the strategy would be very wrong. Assumptions may well be, but I haven't marked any such hands so I don't know how I would find them easily.
Post some hands were your assumptions were wrong and you lost 100 BBs or more. I´m sure there should have been situations like that. Nobody plays perfect PLO!
MP opens, I 3-bet. On the flop I have an overpair + Q high fd. Facing a x/r I decide to stack off, and ended up running into a very strong hand and lost the pot.
Maniac squeezes in the CO and I decide to backraise. Flop SPR is about 0.5 and I stick it in with fd and gutter. Both other players end up getting it in and UTG wins with bottom set.
I x/r flop, turn pairs the board and gives me 2nd nut flush. I end up value betting both turn and river, which is lighter than normal for me and I run into a full house.
Most hands where I lost big pots go something like this. Stack-offs where I ran into some unusual hand, a value bet or bluff that ended up being slightly too thin in a big pot. Or hero calls that ended up not working. I don't necessarily think of them as big mistakes though. I'm doing very well with stack-off situations, both HU and multiway, I'm doing very well with value bets and bluffs, I'm doing very well with hero calls (and folds).
That's not to say that I play perfectly. Nobody does, like you pointed out. I think it just means that 50 PLO players are very easy to read once you have some experience under your belt, and you don't really need to make many big mistakes at all.
I did find one bluff that was overly ambitious in a spot where I should just have folded early, and I bluffed when the backdoor draw hit. That's not really going to work in these games, because there's no hand reading going on, and I kinda outleveled myself. But I didn't repeat it again.
Now you post some hands too!
Any spots where you have JJ-QQ in a multiway pot, awkward spots where you have c-bet in to two or more players for example.
Naked JJ-QQ in multiway pots are usually very weak hands and should probably fold to any significant aggression. I don't think that makes it all that interesting, unless you know of a spot where this doesn't apply.
I'm former succesfull 400-600 stars reg, ended up losing my 100k br in a business start up, took a roughly 6-7 months break from poker and started from the very bottom(10plo). That was almost 2 years ago and I'm having serious problems moving up. Right now stuck at 50 and 100 games (too deep rolled for 50,not deep enough for 100). So I had shit tons of problems in current games trying to adjust to unusual style. Almost everyone seems to be doing some ridiculous stuff such as too much garbage 3bets,too high cb in 3b pots, calling too much, it's goes on and on and on. Still I am the one with tiny win rate. Could it really be rake fault that much?
I'm not sure about 3b ranges in nowadays games, seem like utg ranges got tighter so mp, co and bu 3bets v utg gets lower, and everyone steals way more loose so sb and bb 3bets vs co and bu goes up.. Still I only manage to get my 3b total to around 6 most of which comes from bu v co (around 9%). Do you consider that a leak? I just don't see the spots honestly, very often isolate a fish or a reg with 17% range with hand like 4689ds is pointless because we have a 60/40 dude behind who over calls with very high chance.. Also I put most of AA combos from bb and sb in a cc range to protect calling range oop vs regs.
So I feel kinda cuffed with usual lineups of regs who tend to do questionable plays often and ransom fishes.
What 3b % you have by pos?
The thing what bothers me is what most regs have higher 3bet than me and I consider that a leak but still my win rates are far away from the great in what seems to be soft games( I select non stop)
The games have definitely changed in some very odd ways. They are more aggressive for sure, but there are also crazy moves like x/c flop with a draw and pot lead turn on a blank. I can see why such tendencies have started happening, and I can also see how they can be difficult to deal with. But as long as we know a few things about the fundamentals of ranges and strategies, we can deal with such things quite easily. I think I posted some other examples of craziness in some other thread a while back. I'd actually argue that the games are much softer now than a few years ago, you just need a different strategy than the mainstream regs have come up with.
Most of the mistakes people make actually punish themselves. You don't necessarily have to do anything too fancy yourself. So my average 3-bet is not crazy high, something like 6% maybe (though vs steals it's more like 10%). Someone always squeezes behind anyway, so you don't really lose much value by flatting :) Though actually, getting squeezed (or 3-bet when OOP for example) would be more of a problem if people actually played well post-flop.
And yes, 3-betting too wide becomes a significant problem because of the high frequency of overcalls. You can still widen your 3-bet range quite a bit -- wide 4-bets are very rare -- but you wouldn't choose hands like low rundowns.
Also, while there are far more maniacs in the game now, the remaining population often plays overly tight instead. It should go without saying that if someone opens something like 12% from the CO, you can't really 3-bet them much at all. So ending up with a lower 3-bet stat is just a property of the game I'd say, not automatically a problem.
Counter against loose-maniac is to play very tight. I guess you will up variance a lot as you get into more close postflop spots/ flip more than you really dominate random hands. I guess variance has you stuck where you are right now if you played that much higher before.
1 hand. What you think about just checking back on the flop?
2 hand. I think I would just call his 3-bet, UTG is never folding after he has called 3-bet and KKxxss isnt too strong of a hand against two opponents.
3 hand. What hands do you hope to get value from?
hand 3 is a semi-bluff, we have K high. If you can win a pot with K high that can't be a bad thing and if we get better to fold thats huge.
Hand 1, you can't check that flop. That's a fairly significant mistake if you do.
Hand 2 is closer. Certainly can't be all that bad to just call. But with the insane mistakes people make a) in choosing squeezing hands, and b) with flop stack-off decisions, this way of playing the hand just ends up locking them in with their weak hands. Though I am counting on making far better flop decisions than the general population.
Flop play is standard, no mystery there. What I meant was why bet turn and river, only hands that could possibly call us are also beating our hand. I guess sometimes we bet turn but when he calls once I like checking OTR. Maybe to c/c or bluff catch but thats it.
People call down with all kinds of weird hands. Without that, turn+river wouldn't be bets. I have quite a few hands that x/c anyway, so that's not a worry. Against normal players I would be playing the hand differently.
I guess we need to protect our hand thats for sure. Sometimes I like to slowplay this kind of hands to avoid x/r and tough spots against KK1010, 771010, Kd9dJ10 or hands like that. Once he raises do you always stack off here or sometimes consider folding? I mean he can always put us on high cards its pretty easy to play back at you on this board.
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