Rhythm and Stealth
By Chips_Middle | March 6, 2008
Finding the pace of the game.
Rhythm and Stealth is the name of an album by Leftfield that I bought several years ago. I hate it. Only managed to listen to it once so I can’t claim to have given it much of a chance. It just isn’t my kind of noise. Great name though, which is probably why I bought it.
Anyway. What has this got to do with poker? Basically, I wanted to talk about finding the pace of the game and the title popped into my head so here we are. Rhythm and Stealth, two crucial concepts.
The stealth part should be pretty obvious. Most of poker is about deception. Making your opponent think you have something other than what you do is written about constantly. No doubt I’ll write about it many times but not today.
Today we are talking rhythm. For me, a poker game, or session, or collection of poker games if I’m playing several tables at once, has a rhythm. In fact it sort of has multiple rhythms. When the action from other players is fast and furious that provides a kind of pace or rhythm that effects me. It is easy to get keyed up in response to lots of action. When you do, that is the pace of the opponent’s game effecting your mental state (probably negatively).
When I am multitabling (which I don’t do well), I sometimes get in situations where windows are blinking at me and beeping and decisions need to be made in two pots at once and everything is happening too quickly. That is another rhythm that occurs and can effect my game (usually negatively).
For me, problems generally occur when these factors are speeding me up and getting me keyed up and making me play faster. For some, it may work the other way round.
Now. When I talk about playing faster, I don’t mean that the decisions come too quick for me to handle. That may be true but it’s a much simpler problem. I mean that I get lulled into the pace of the game and get into a Rhythm in terms of how often I am playing hands and how much action there is. When I say I end up playing faster I mean looser and more aggressive.
For me, there is always Rhythm to the play of a poker game and what I need to do is slow down and find the pace of the game. Not the pace of other people’s play but the pace of my own game. Frequently this means that when 3 numpties are getting stuck in to every hand I actually slow down to a crawl and simply wait for the spot I need to come to me.
I recently watched an interview with Mike Matusow. I can’t remember what he was talking about but at one stage he said something to the effect of this. When he is playing his best, he lets the game come to him.Â
I have thought about this a lot and found that many of my mistakes come when I am forcing the play. For one reason or another (and sometimes it is as simple as being out of touch with the rhythm of the cards and my own game) I am trying to make something happen. Often when the pace of other people’s play leads me down the road of trying to make something happen, I end up ignoring the signs that should tell me what is actually happening.
So when I sit down these days I spend a lot of my time finding the pace of the game. Letting it come to me and reminding myself that I don’t need to raise this junk on the button just because I haven’t seen a hand in a while. I sure as shit don’t need to call with this mediocre hand just because my opponent is raising loads of mediocre hands.Â
I just need to tune in to the pace of my own game and trust that cards and spots will come to me when they come and in the meantime I need to be ready with the information I will need to extract the maximum from my opponents.
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Swings and Roundabouts
By Chips_Middle | March 3, 2008
Well, pot limit omaha is a swingy game. That’s what I’m told and I don’t have any problem believing it.  February was a very swingy month.
Some of that was undoubtdedly due to variance and some of it was certainly to do with bad play. After the spewfest that was my play in the middle section of the month, I had recovered to somewhere approaching reasonable by the 28th. If 2008 had not been a leap year, I would have ended February having played about 4,300 hands. I would have had a win rate @ 7.5 ptBB / 100 which, after the losing sessions in the middle, would have been OK.
But 2008 is a leap year and February 29th was not good to me. Two hundred and forty four minutes of play and two hundred and thirty hands were all it took to get rid of most of February’s hard fought gains. Poker can be cruel.
Eight hands into the session, I limp with
from under the gun.
The player behind me (who is fairly aggressive but quite good) raises. It is called by the cutoff and then the button raises. This is 10c - 20c and so the button’s raise is to $4.10. The button is an idiot. I call, as does the original raiser.
The flop is 
It gets checked around. The turn is 
 I bet the pot ($13.50). He calls. Right at this point we have a $30 pot and he has $4.50 left, so the betting is essentially over. I have bottom 2 pair, a flush draw and an open ended straight draw. He has ….. KK. I told you he was an idiot. Anyway. All my draws miss on the river and the board pairs giving him top 2. We got the money in with me as an 80% - 20% favourite.
I won a $13.50 pot in there somewhere and then threw away a buyin trying to push an over aggressive player, who I was certain was bluffing, off a paired flop. 3 barrells and a full buyin later, I finally figured out that he wasn’t going to lay down. He had flopped the top full house. Doh!
I lost $20 in 2 separate pots (within 4 hands of each other) making river calls to big bets against a guy that bluffs way too much. Wasn’t bluffing either of these times though, - another buyin.
Well. I’m tilting a bit at this point and I’m not getting fantastic cards or hitting flops but I kind of grind it out. Some while later, I have $28 in my stack and get AAK8 with the K8 suited in diamonds. I limp from middle position. The button (big stack) raises. Under the gun calls, as do I.Â
The flop is 
At last, something goes my way. I check to allow the pre flop raiser to hang himself. He bets pot $3.60 and I raise to $14.40. He re-raises. Hmmm. This is interesting. Top set and the nut flush draw and I’m getting re-re-raised, that sounds profitable. I call off the rest of my chips as a 90% favourite. He has the Queen high flush draw and a gutshot. I think only a Jack can save him. The turn is …… You guessed it …. a Jack. And even after that I still had a 35% chance of winning on the river. Which I didn’t.
OK. So reviewing my session up to this point I had had some bad luck and some borderline play and was tilting a little but held it together, waited for my chance and then got it in as a 90% favourite. That $28 would have brought me back to somewhere around evens as far as I recall.
Looking through the session in poker tracker, I follow this pot with a lot of hands with small red numbers where I see the flop and have nothing and fold. Then several rounds with no hands except for posting the blinds. I’m not getting cards but at least I am smart enough to stay out of the way of marginal crap while I’m steaming.
After a long stretch of nothing special, I lose 3 fairly nondescript hands that just don’t go my way. They add up to another buyin. I ran into some muppet who slowplayed top set all the way to the river and then flopped trips with a lower kicker and lost half a buyin (as usual).Â
February 29th. One session. Minus $104.40.
The two big pots that I was 80% and 90% to win add up to roughly -$50. Had they gone my way, the day is breakeven. Had they not happened, the day is -$50, although you would have to factor in tilt etc. and say that without variance, my expectation in this session is probably around evens. Pot limit omaha can be a swingy game.
So the month ends. The month ends and the bankroll is now €628.71 (app. $942). So I’m up around $60 on the month. It’s not going to set any records but it’s better than losing.
I made February 29th’s losses back on March 1st, but that’s another story.
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More PLO Strategy Stuff
By Chips_Middle | February 26, 2008
No more updates on my woes at the table for now. There are 2 new articles on Pot Limit Omaha up on the site though.
The first one deals with suited and double suited starting hands and the impact they have on your pot limit omaha strategy.  You can find it here.
The other is the first article on the site to go beyond starting hand selection and covers the importance of position in pot limit omaha high.
It looks like it’s time to start considering post flop decisions. I’m still not clear how I want to organise the content on that but in the meantime, if you have an interest in PLO then have a look at these two.
Also, feel free to register in the forum. I’d really like to hear any comments people have on the content of the articles or on alternative strategies when playing pot limit omaha.
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Progress Report
By Chips_Middle | February 24, 2008
Alright. Last time I posted about the bankroll, my cash play was up roughly 1 1/2 buyins. That was the 19th, I think. So how have things been going?
Well the 18th had been an interesting day. I dropped $72 in the afternoon session and these are my notes:
“Right. This is it. They don’t f*%king raise. Stop shoving for stacks when you are behind or stop playing poker.”
It was this session that finally led to me working on cutting out the errors. Mistakes had been slowly creaping back into my game for a while but I had been making enough on other plays to keep me winning. Time to focus on what’s important. Anyway. I recovered with a $42 win that evening and here are the sessions since:
19th - $18.70Â - Errors: 0
19th - $43.65 - Errors: 0.5
20th - $8.34 - Errors: 0
20th - $36.40 - Errors: 0
21st - $19.04 - Errors: 1
21st - $15.46 - Errors: 0
21st - $53.22 - Errors: 0
Just in case. The error count is only supposed to be for major errors that are played for stacks. Each session, doubtless contains hundreds of smaller mistakes.
So, right now I’m up $143.30 on the cash game play for the month. That’s a win rate of 8.86 ptBB / 100. It’s not great but given the various sessions of spew that hit in the middle of the month, I’m happy enough and the recovery has been good.
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More on Mistakes
By Chips_Middle | February 22, 2008
OK. I’m going to go back a couple of days here. I’ve been tracking the stack level errors. That is, mistakes I make where I get over excited and play for stacks with an obviously worse hand than my opponent. The classic would be pot betting the flop with a flush draw and no help, my opponent raises the pot and I shove over the top. I’m capable of worse than this when I think for some reason that my opponent is just having a go at me.Â
There is no prospect that 99% of the people I play against are going to fold after they have raised. So if I’m behind, I’m just behind and that’s that. Very few of them are capable of raising without a hand and even if they don’t have the nuts, they aren’t likely to lay it down to a raise. After several sessions of repeatedly getting all in on the flop with maybe 35% equity, I instituted my error count.
On with the story. After 2 error free sessions since instituting the count, I was up 3 buyins. Early on Tuesday evening I was playing $0.25 - $0.50 pot limit omaha with a half stack (I bought in for $25 instead of the $50 max). This game is too high for the bankroll I currently have on the site but I take occassional shots when there isn’t a $20 game going.
Anyway, the stack level error count for this session was 0.5 so I thought that since it’s the first cock-up since starting the count I should take a look.
I was Under the Gun with K977 single suited and for some reason decided to play. I min raised and was called by the 3 players behind me. The flop was an 8 5 5 rainbow so I decided to continuation bet. I should be taking this flop down the vast majority of the time because it’s difficult for my opponents to call without a 5. I bet $3.50 into a $4.75 pot. In hindsight, that was either too much or too little and looks like a cheap attempt to steal.
2 players fold and the player on the button, who has a massive stack but is a bit of a donkey, calls. The turn is a blank (2). Now, I’m a little upset with myself. My bet kind of induced a call from any number of weak hands. I am certain that he doesn’t have a hand that can sustain any real action here so I decide to have another go at it. This time full pot and he should fold whatever weak crap he has in his hand. He calls. Uh oh.Â
A queen comes on the river so there’s no straight or flush possible. I’m totally certain that he doesn’t have a third 5 because he would have raised. I’m also not in anyway entertaining the possibility that I have the best hand. I don’t. The pot is about $35 and I have $13.25 left in my stack. He doesn’t have a hand and I know I probably don’t have enough left to fold him, but. Anyway, I bet what’s left. He goes into the tank for a long, long time and eventually calls with AAxx.
Why’s it only 0.5 of a stack level error. Firstly, I’m less concerned about errors where I’m betting than the ones where my opponent makes it crystal clear that I’m beaten and I still try to force them off the hand. Secondly, there are mistakes in there for sure but most reasonable players are going to fold in my opponent’s spot. If he had a read on me, it’s possible that my opponent played me perfectly. Either way, take a note not to bluff him and move on. His massive stack dropped by over $150 in the time that I was watching him so I’ll stick to my read. He was pretty poor.
This is one of the problems with making stack level errors. If my opponent is just a random muppet who can’t let go of his aces (a pretty classic mistake), then I’ve just run my mistake right into his and rewarded his bad play with $35 of my money. That’s $35 I have to make back and if he’s making mistakes, there was no need to try this hard to win a pot.
Later in the same session, I have $66 in my stack (I think I bought in for the full $50 after getting busted). Everyone has drifted away and we are down to 2 handed. The opponent is another big stack and has me well covered. This one, though, has been playing good, solid poker.
I have Q 
T 9 
8 in the big blind. My opponent completes from the button and I raise it to $1. He calls.
The flop is 4 
K 
9 giving me middle pair and a gutshot. I bet the pot ($2) and get called. The turn is 7 giving me a few more straight outs. I bet $3.60 which is just over half the pot. My opponent raises to $8. So, now I know I’m behind but I don’t know by how much. That’s a pretty weak raise, so my opponent is either pretty weak (but better than me I’d guess) or very strong. Either way I have some outs and I reckon it’s worth seeing the river, so I call.
The river is J , my dream card.
I bet $16 into a $22 pot. I reckon my opponent has something and may call. He raises to $55, putting me all-in. I call, obviously, and he shows top pair decent kicker. I mean seriously, what is going on with the world today?Â
I would have thought that heads up he may have decided top pair had me beat. I could understand a call on the grounds that he wasn’t going to let me just rep the straight and steal the pot. I suppose his raise might fold a number of 2 pair hands that might be beating him. I’d have thought, though, that my call when he raises the turn would smell like a draw. Given that the draw hit on the river surely the raise is out of the question with top pair. The combination of the possibility that I have the straight or that I have hit 2 pair on the river or have any kind of hand I’m not good enough to lay down must be too big.
Anyway. My opponent had worked hard and played well over the course of a session and built his stack up to $120 only to lose most of his profit with that one play. I end the session up $43 and re-enforced in my belief that poker is all about mistakes. Cut yours down and be around for your opponents’ and you’ll come out ahead.Â
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Making Mistakes
By Chips_Middle | February 19, 2008
Poker is all about mistakes when you think about it. If there were no mistakes, there would be very little going on except the passing around of chips based on the random distribution of cards. A winning poker player makes less mistakes than their opposition. They also play in ways that encourage mistakes from their opposition and they take the maximum advantage of those mistakes.
There are a lot of clever little things that you can do when you are playing poker and you can be a math’s genius in terms of the probabilities and odds but at the end of the day, no mistakes, no money. The opponents in my game make plenty of mistakes and I can sometimes identify the kind of mistakes each opponent makes and sometimes I can find some clever way to exploit them. I must be good then, no?
“Seventy-five percent of all poker players think they play better than the other seventy-five percent.” — Tommy Angelo
I read this quote on Tommy Angelo’s site when I came across his book and looked into it. I love this quote. It has everything. It’s smart, it’s funny and it is so true.  I’m sure we’ve all come across many, many players that this quote was made for. The trick for me is to not be one of them. Let’s face it, we all feel like we play better than most other players. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t play. Probably most of us even have our days when we are genuinely quite good. What we don’t want to do is look at our games on our best day and decide “That’s how good I am” but then play an entirely different game.
I have an A game that has the beating of the games I play in, for sure. But I also have a C game that swings all over the place. Poker is all about making mistakes. For all that we feel very clever when we’re winning, we are winning because of the mistakes our opponents are making. I have an A game that I like very much but I make way, way too many mistakes.
When I make those mistakes, I give chips to my opponents at a rate of knots. We aren’t talking small mistakes here. I make the kind of mistakes that see me building up a chipstack over 3 hours and then blowing 2 or 3 buyins in one pot. I make the kind of mistakes that involve ignoring reads that are so obvious, so all pervasive (in the game I’m playing), that I actually have them written on stickies at the bottom of my monitor.
Poker is about capitalising on the mistakes of others. It is also about having the patience, discipline and focus to avoid making mistakes yourself. I can’t consider myself a good poker player while I still make these huge mistakes with such regularity. A good player would have the focus to avoid them.
These mistakes have led to some rather swingy sessions recently and I have been working on cutting them out. To that end, each session now comes with a count of the stack level errors that I have made. I’m going to cut these mistakes out, one at a time, or I’m going to quit.
Still hovering around even on the cash play for the month. I think I’m up around a buyin and a half after my big spew and then some recovery.
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How Aces Saved the Day
By Chips_Middle | February 18, 2008
Right. I was supposed to get on with the update on how the bankroll was going.
As I mentioned in Expecting to Win, I had been running well early in the month. But then over confidence was about to bite me in the ass.
After being up and winning at a good rate for the first 8 days, the 9th saw me drop 4 buyins ($76) in a single session. In fact, in 68 minutes of madness. I’m not going to bore you with how.  I followed this up on the 11th by dropping another $44. I didn’t even take notes on that one which either means I was playing ok or I was so disgusted I couldn’t face it. I played another session that night and came away up $10.Â
When you stick a couple of decent sized losses back to back that first winning session is important (at least for me). It isn’t the $ amount that counts so much as reminding myself that I can play decent winning poker. Seems to help me get some control back in my game.
I’m not one of these people that talks about variance a lot. I mean, I know it plays a part but when I lose multiple buyins and then repeat it in multiple sessions, variance has generally played a part but not as big a part as bad play.
Anyway. The next day I’m playing too loose. At one point I am down over $60 and between these string of bad sessions have eaten up the gains from the first 8 days of the month and am losing for February. I had managed to get my head together somewhat and recover some of my loses when aces saved my day.
In the small blind I am dealt:
I have built my stack back up to $38.92 and this is just what I need to see after a bad day at the office.
4 players limp and I raise the pot. Maybe someone will re-raise, that would be fun.
My raise is called by the Big Blind and then I start to rub my hands in glee when I get re-raised by the cutoff. The button calls, making life even sweeter by allowing me to stick them all all-in pre-flop.Â
The cutoff and button both call and my aces hold up, netting me a buyin and a half. This recovers my session to a manageable loss of $15 and leaves february back in the green (not by much).
What better hand to get than double suited aces, all-in preflop, no thinking required. It’s not so much that I am bound to win (because I’m not). It’s the zero stress factor that comes from knowing that you can’t possibly be making a mistake. After playing badly for a while, it’s a relief to get a hand you know you can’t mess up and have other people’s mistakes make you the absolute maximum from it.
In the previous post I mentioned some of those 60% - 40% spots where you are ahead and win and how easy it is to forget what would have happened to your numbers if the big pot had gone the other way. Well. This day, aces saved the day and gave me a no stress opportunity to get my money in good. My opponents hands?
I have a 54% chance of winning this hand, with the best of my opponents at only 26.81%. I got my money in in a great spot here. It’s worth remembering though that I am due to lose this pot nearly 50% of the time and that would have been an entirely different story.
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Expecting to Win
By Chips_Middle | February 14, 2008
I haven’t updated the bankroll numbers and such for a while now. February started well. I was playing winning poker and would have to admit to a decent run of luck. I haven’t been able to put as many hands in as I should this month. Other things just keep getting in the way, including working on this site.
I wasn’t so bothered about not getting the hands in because things were running well. In the first 8 days I was winning at a rate of 34ptBB / 100.Â
Now interesting things seem to happen to me when I am winning like that over the course of a few days. For one thing I tend to play less poker. More importantly though, I get a little cocky.  I tend to stop analysing my play as carefully, which means that I don’t always notice that the whole session hinged on a single big pot. Perhaps I played that pot well but only had a 60% - 40% edge. Maybe it was against the other big stack at the table. So what, right? I was ahead, I won. Nothing but skill. Where are the next bunch of suckers for me to beat?
See when I’m in the middle of a winning run, I tend to lose sight of the fact that 40% of the time I am due to lose that pot. That session would be a loss. I might have semi-bluffed and hit the flush to stack one of my opponents. Any number of things contribute to a winning session and they could (and on some day will) go either way.
I played a session not so long ago against a horrible calling station. He was playing massively losing poker, except he was winning.  Not just winning from me but putting some horrible beats on the table. For that whole session (several hours) I just couldn’t hit a hand. I couldn’t hit a hand and he couldn’t fold one (in fact there were 2 of them calling at the table which made it worse). So for 4 hours or so I would bet my draw, they’d call on middle pair etc. etc. and I ended up down $80. See I bet a lot. Part of the economics of my willingness to bet hard on my nut flush draws is that they are going to hit a percentage of the time.  When the draw hits, we take the money back from the calling station (with a little interest hopefully) and we teach him to fold some, which we can use to make money in other hands.
What’s my point? OK. I go down $80 in the session with the calling station because I just can’t hit a thing. Many of my positive sessions are going to hinge on moments when I did hit. That’s fine. It’s part of the game and an understanding of the chances of these things is built into the decisions we make.Â
What happens when I run a series of winning sessions together is that I tend to forget these things. Forget is too strong a word but they aren’t at the front of my mind. I start to expect to win. This is where the danger lies. I might play the first hour or so, carefully. Maybe I’m down $5 or up $5 or whatever. But the problem is I expect to win.  Maybe I even expect to be winning at the rate I have been winning.  Not only do I expect to win but I am convinced that it is entirely in my power to win and win NOW.Â
So I force something. Make a silly mistake. Usually it’s pretty marginal. It might be a bluff that works a decent amount of the time for me. Often it’s a play that I use profitably but I’ve picked the wrong spot. Not necessarily a terrible spot but wrong. Cause I am looking for an opportunity to do something and I see what I want to see instead of letting the game come to me. Anyway, that will lose me a buyin or half a buyin and that might lead to some tilt or whatever and eventually I check-raise bluff my flush draw on the flop and get called and beaten by top set. Things go like that for a while and eventually I’ve donked off 4 buyins.
And all because I expect to win.
This is getting long so I’ll get back to the bankroll update and how February’s been going tomorrow.
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Discovering Bankroll Management
By Chips_Middle | February 13, 2008
Since I deposited my first $200 online a few years ago, I have learned the importance of bankroll management several times. Usually, right about when my account reached $3.55 or something similar.
I didn’t know what a bankroll was when I started playing holdem online. I knew that I always used to enjoy playing poker and I knew that Texas Holdem looked like fun. I played the play money games for a few hours and decided that I was never going to learn anything like this. I couldn’t take it seriously and it didn’t look much like anyone else did. I decided I would have to be playing for money if I was to learn anything. It didn’t surprise me when I lost my first $200, or my second. I didn’t expect to be perfect at this without some learning. (there were no micro tables where I started online and I didn’t know they existed elsewhere.  The lowest buyin was $25).
I did learn some important lessons from some of my future reloads though. Once I got to being sort of ok at poker I, like most other people it seems, thought I was a bit better than I was. It’s not so much that I was playing losing poker but I was constantly stepping up to bigger games or playing tournaments for $30 on a $250 bankroll. One bad afternoon or a run of not placing in tournaments or sit and go’s would leave my account crippled. I would drop down in levels for a while but I couldn’t take the game seriously or couldn’t justify wasting 4 hours on a $1 tournament or whatever. Eventually I would either bust doing something stupid or reload.
A couple of times I stopped playing for a couple of months or so. Eventually I’d see some poker on TV and come back and play, just for fun. I’d deposit $200, do allright for a while and then start playing too big for my roll again and “Hey presto” I’d be busto. I knew what bankroll management was by now, I just didn’t really practice any. In my defence, I was playing poker for the entertainment. I always knew there was more money where that came from and reloading wasn’t a big deal. There are other hobbies I spend much more on.
When I started playing Omaha, the game was good to me. I had decided that I simply didn’t have the mentality for cash game holdem, I bored too easily. I did alright in tournaments but have a problem with reaching the money very often but rarely placing well. In $1 to $5 tournaments that is an awful lot of time weeding your way through massive fields just to get twice your buyin back. I could have worked on this of course and perhaps I will at some point but Omaha came along and I was hooked.
At one point in those first few weeks playing pot limit omaha, I won a 4 way all-in pot. When the adrenaline wore off and I was checking through the hand histories to see the cards and figure out how well I got my money in, it occured to me that over 50% of my bankroll was on the table. Time to institute some bankroll management. I left that table and actually stepped down in limits.
Playing underrolled had badly effected my play in the past. I would win a bit, then play 3 $30 tournaments and fail to cash. That’s $99. So I’d get sensible and go back to playing at a level I was rolled for and it would take an age to get back to where I was. Going bust is more or less inevitable in that cycle.Â
When I was playing Omaha, I noticed something else. Pot limit omaha, did not strike me as a game for the timid. I was playing very aggressively but even if I was playing like a nit, I’d still have to be willing to shove my stack into the middle and may be 60 - 40 to win. Pot limit omaha just didn’t strike me as a game I could play on scared money.
So this mission of mine has started from the $.02 $.04 tables this time round and has worked its way up. I might deposit to play poker again but hopefully not as a result of reaching zero. I think most people who discover a love for Pot Limit Omaha do so as a result of running super lucky. So far, my worst downswing has involved losing 15 buyins over single weekend. That $300 was a significant chunk of my bankroll as it was. In the old days, I’d have been bust and probably quit poker for a few months in disgust. Instead, I knuckled down and worked on my game and slowly climbed my way back.
I was hurting after dropping 15 buyins. My confidence was shaken and I found it hard to find my game and get back to winning. I was very glad that I’d discovered bankroll management though.
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PLO Articles
By Chips_Middle | February 8, 2008
I mentioned in my last post my habit of writing articles and then coming across examples of something where I happen to be completely ignoring aspects of my own advice on starting hands.
There’s a lesson in there somewhere, I’m just not sure what it is. Maybe it’s that I play low stakes, online, short handed games where there are many situations where diverging from “by the book” play and freeing up your game a bit is profitable (possibly even essential). Either way, pot limit omaha is a post flop game.
I believe that pre-flop hand selection is important. Probably more important than a lot of others seem to think. To quote Sammy Farha and The Untouchables, you should ”Never bring a knife to a gun fight”. Sammy and Sean Connery couldn’t both be wrong.
Anyway. This post is just to say that if you’re interested in PLO, maybe you’d like to have a look at the pot limit omaha articles. The latest article in the starting hands series is on rundown hands and you can find it here.
It may seem strange to have 4 articles on starting hands in a game that is mostly about post flop play. I decided to start at the beginning. Having begun with starting hands, the topic just continues to expand.  I have little choice but to finish what I have to say on starting hands before moving on.
Anyway.  The articles are there if anyone wants to have a look and they are updated about once a week with new content.
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