Pot Limit Omaha
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How to Win at Pot-Limit Omaha

PLO top player If you are starting at PLO, here are two great tips for winning at pot-limit omaha.

There are two main ways of making money playing PLO8 and those are:

- stealing pots and creating fold equity,
- big "home run" pots.

To be able to create the situations where you can make money there are 3 important concepts:

- position is paramount. A VP$IP IP of 40-60 and OOP of 20-40 is excellent,
- you need to figure out your opponent and get a very good read on him,
- you can't be a long term winner without aggression.

The last point is important: you need to be able to steal pots. However, you need to be good and disciplined enough to fold when you are played back at.

 

Fold equity

The majority of the time the flop will miss everyone and these pots are up for grabs if you can realize when it happens. This is where the 3 concepts come into play:

- Position: You need to be IP to gain information before you act,
- Reads: You need to know your opponents in order to know what checking means and how much fold equity you have,
- Aggression: You need to be aggressive enough to bet with nothing.

Even past the flop aggression becomes important. If you know your opponent well you can make a lot of money on river bluffs when you know their draws missed.

Another important aspect of aggression is that it will annoy your opponents.

When your opponents are annoyed they will make more mistakes, and be willing to "make a stand" with a much weaker hand then they usually would. That prepares the way quite well into "home run pots."

Home run pots

The majority of money that can be made playing PLO is through home run pots. Home run pots generally happen when both players like their hand enough to put large amounts of money in.

The most important think to remember about home run pots is that if you are playing well you should very rarely be on the wrong side of one of these.

That may sound obvious but it is one of the hardest things to learn about playing PLO. This means that you have to be incredibly disciplined and you have to be willing to fold marginal hands when the pot is getting large.

This is where the 3 concepts come into play:

- Position: you should rarely play big pots out of position; in position you are going to be able to better figure out if your opponent sucked out on you and you will be able to limit the damage if they do; furthermore, you are going to be able to better figure out how much your opponent likes their hand,
- Reads: how large a hand does your opponent need to go push it all in?
- Aggression: a raise is a stronger statement then a bet, so by playing aggressively you can get more information about your opponent's hand.

It can't be stressed enough to fold marginal hands (and even good ones) when your opponent plays back at you. As was said earlier this is one of the harder things to learn in PLO. The difficulty may be even harder if you have good overall aggression, and finding the ideal mix between your aggression and your discipline is the key.

Avoid getting into too much of an aggressive mindset so that you to want to raise, raise, raise, and you wouldn't be disciplined enough to fold when you know you are beat.

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