General advice needed: Want to study more

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General advice needed: Want to study more

Hi.

I started playing PLO in August (haven't played any form of poker before besides a month of MTT and a little bit of NLHE before switching to PLO), so all my (or lack thereof) poker abilities comes from PLO.

Over the course of those five months I've played around 200.000 hands (was 1-2 tabling in the beginning to give a lot of thought to each decision, am 4 tabling now) and have moved up from 10PLO to 50PLO. I am currently beating 50PLO but don't have a big enough sample to know by how much or if I'm actually beating it. I've been running pretty good lately.

The way I've been learning besides playing, and reading and posting on various forums, is having watched all of Phil's PLO videos from BlueFire and of course I'm a member of RIO and watching all PLO videos here. I have watched some other video series too, like the Vanessa Selbst 2x6 series.

I think the time has come to start studying more off the table, but I don't really know how to approach it. I bought the Pro PokerTools app and have played around with it a bit, but I really want to approach it more systematically or have some kind of a study plan.

Since I haven't played NLHE and gone through a learning process with that game, I'm pretty much at lost when it comes to where to begin.

How do you guys study the game besides watching videos?

Any help is very much appreciated. Thanks in advance!

4 Comments

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NoobYourself 12 years, 2 months ago
Exchanging with other players, some PLO Study group, to sweat eachother during sessions etc is good.
Videos/Forums are really good an d you already do it. You can hire a coach too.
Viktor Luis Larsson 12 years, 2 months ago
Generally you should look at what good players have as their standard and copy them. Theres alot of valuable tips in 2+2 PG&C threads and alot of good stuff in poker blogs. I think getting into good routines around/with poker will help you alot. For example, you want to be able to discuss hands with people trough skype on a daily basis, posting random hands on forum isnt enough. Being sweated by anyone, good or bad PLO player, is also very good because it gives you a different perspective about your game.

Always try to keep looking for small things to add to your game. Maybe warmup, session reviews, posting/commenting hands every day etcetc. Once you start doing this, its becomes natural for you and then you can add something more. Just keep your eyes open and try it out!
ZenFish 12 years, 2 months ago
Learning ProPokerTool Odds Oracle in and out will be useful for you. When you know what this program is capable of solving (and that's a lot), you'll have a new "language" for thinking about poker problems. This will enable you to ask lots of good questions that can be answered via Odds Oracle, and then you have a good learning cycle going.

There was a good 2+2 article about advanced Odds Oracle use a while back: (written by the PPT guy himself):

http://www.twoplustwo.com/magazine/issue93/daniel-hutchings-pot-limit-omaha-poker.php

The article provides a good example of how to formulate a specific PLO problem (4B pot AA** flop-shove scenario) and then attacking it using Odds Oracle. The method is easy to generalize for other types of problems.

To get a structured study routine going, begin by scheduling regular study time (I use the first 2 hours after breakfast every day). Then sit down at those times and just begin digging. Maybe you don't really know what you're supposed to be doing to get better, but just do SOMETHING, and the ball with start rolling.

Personally, I like to spend 1/2-1 hours browsing forums, then 1-2 hours of reviewing yesterday's sessions + studying individual hands. I sit down with a difficult hand, start with (what I perceive to be) the most important question, try to answer it, and see where that takes me. You'll often end up with both a solution, a general method for solving similar problems, and new interesting questions you can ask and solve for.
Rasmus Fahrendorff 12 years, 2 months ago
Thank you all of you. I started going through hands and quickly began to use OddsOracle while doing so, and I'm sure it will really help me out. Again thanks for your answers.

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