Thursday, November 27, 2008

Enjoyable evening

If I were a professional sportsperson, I think the range of preferred sports would go from darts at one end to golf at the other. Triple twenty, Triple twenty has got to wear off surely. That said, I enjoyed my years of snooker. I'd like to say that it was red, black, red, black but it wasn't. (Aside, just watched Sullivan on Sky Sports get 4 out of 5 frames with century breaks one week after 5 out of 5 centuries in Belfast for a best of 9 win. How good must that be?)

So last night I must say that I had the most enjoyable session for some time. I checked emails while waiting for a phone call. Opened the lobby while still waiting and there was a $2 NL super turbo rebuy. I don't mind coin-flippling in these so they can be fun. Long and short, I bubbled 6th out of 30 something.

At the same time, I opened 2 full ring PLO games 1c/2c and 2c/4c. When you can buy in for $5 it is really deep stack which I thought that I could play tightish and run up a healthy profit. Problem is with that many callers, there are a lot of seemingly bad beats. In reality, if you ran the odds calculator, you're often not more than 30% or 40% even flopping the nuts. That's my excuse for losing both BIs quickly. Pleased to report that I more than doubled up the next 2 so left with a modest profit and a bit of experience for the Blindman's PLO game in Perth.

Realising I wasn't going to make a living there and feeling good, I found what looked to be an active 6-max table and vowed to play TAG with a max stack PLO50. The guy to my right was extremely fishy and donked off a couple of BIs. It got really interesting when 4 of us had $150+ at the table and this turned out to be great experience for me.

I'm still the fish amongst the regulars but starting to hold my own these days. Nice profit for the evening but most pleasing was the fact that I really enjoyed every moment and felt that I was learning a lot. Deep stacked, I slow played my AA a lot and got away from most losing hands and cleaned up when flopping an A. I was more aware of position than usual too.

It's funny that the casino just didn't hold any appeal relative to the table that I had online. I will try to get up tonight though which is my last night in Auckland for a while and score 2 goals to turn around the 1st leg deficit.

2 comments:

The blindman said...

Interesting to hear you slow-playing AA at Omaha. The preflop calcs for Omaha are quite interesting. Heads-up, AAxx is no worse than a coinflip against almost any hand (e.g suited two pair or suited rundown) apart from a better AA hand. On the other hand, AAxx plays very poorly against two or more good hands - getting substantially less than it's fair share of equity. My conclusion from this, is that you should raise or reraise with AAxx heads up if you think you have a good chance of getting heads up. Otherwise, you can only limp in cheap and hope to hit a set.

Obviously with better side cards (e.g AAQJ with a suit) I would be much more willing to put in a raise preflop expecting many callers. In general I think bad Omaha players play too many hands preflop, and consequently you need to punish them by raising your good hands for value as much as possible.

TiocfaidhArLa said...

Very good points. I like to vary my game though. I will always raise with AA and 2 broadways.

Some people at this level raise and re-raise with AAxx and KKxx. The problem is that you are essentially playing your cards face up.

I love calling these players because 2 pair is strong if the board doesn't pair and there is no A or K on the flop.

I don't want to be this predictable. There are a lot more hands that I raise with like 9TJQ or KJxxss+. A lot of opponents put me on AA or KK and a favurable flop lets me stack them.

I've picked up a number of things from Adam on the 2+2 pokercast and he once said that there is a case for never raising preflop in Omaha. It's not a bad style and very hard to play against.

Omaha differs from HE in that it is not uncommon for several stacks to go in the middle on the same hand. Not raising allows pot control until you see the flop for better players (which I aspire to be).

There ar more people that agree with you that Adam and myself but that's the beauty of poker.

If I ever get back to Perth I'd love to discuss further over a beer, mate. That's what I like about Omaha right now - it has yet to be solved, like Chess in the 80s.