In this hand I want to highlight a principle that I use in other forms of poker and especially limit hold’em and no limit hold’em. This principle is to raise apparent weak limpers in an effort to get dead money in the pot. I like to do this in PLO because of the fact that most hands in PLO are not that much better than any other, If I can raise or re-raise and drive out blinds and limpers then I will do so as this will get extra dead money into the pot and it is this dead money that will help turn a marginal hand into a profitable one.

All this supposes that I play my hand well from the flop onwards of course as any equity that I had would be very quickly evaporated by poor post flop play. But I make plays like this in limit hold’em and no limit play and it once again highlights the fact that you can use tactics in one form of poker and transfer them to a totally different game and they will still be successful.

The game had gone five handed as one player had taken some time out to visit the bathroom and another player was down in the pit area betting on roulette. It always amazes me why poker players do this but then again I ought to be grateful that such avid gamblers were present in my game. I held the Ac-Ks-10d-9s which is a fair hand and especially five handed.

The player who was under the gun limped in and the player to my immediate right raised the pot. Now a few years ago the way that I would have played this hand would have differed greatly to how I have played it here. When I first started playing PLO in full ring games then I would have folded a hand like this as I would have assessed that many of my cards that I needed to make my hand would have been dead. As I played Omaha more and more and played in games that were short handed or semi-short handed then it became apparent to me that this type of play was too tight. It also became apparent to me how much gambling that there actually was in PLO and that the better players accepted this as part of the game. I also think that another factor in how certain players play their hands is in how big their bankrolls are. I have a far bigger bankroll these days and a much different attitude to risk.

The only problem with taking aggressive action with hands like these is that sometimes you can be up against passive players who have limped in with aces.

Many players don’t see the point in raising pre-flop in Omaha or don’t like raising pre-flop. I can understand this philosophy if they have poor position but having position on your opponents is a different story and I don’t agree with this line of thought at all. In my mind, when I play PLO then I treat it the same as when I used to play blackjack and this is that I am basically gambling but with a slight +EV. I really don’t think that my ROI is all that high in PLO but this is compensated by the fact that I am putting more money into play. Look out for part two coming soon of this article.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson
Author – “Winning Cash Game Poker”
Why not come to bwin and play poker tournaments?

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