Slotboom’s Secrets of Professional Pot-Limit Omaha

Honestly my blogging efforts have been all over the place on three other blogs, so I haven’t really been motivated to write too much about poker. Like most of my interests, I’m sure the poker blogging will come and go in spurts. (That’s why RSS syndication is very handy if you want to follow my occasional comments, although I have no illusions that there’s anyone much out there reading!)

Last week I received Rolf Slotboom’s Secrets of Professional Pot-Limit Omaha in a shipment from Amazon. I had thrown it in as an afterthought to get to $25 for their free shipping, but I had been thinking of ordering this as my second PLO book. Jeff Hwang’s Pot Limit Omaha Poker: The Big Play Strategy greatly broadened my understanding of this game, and I’ve been trying to play as much PLO as possible, even crowding out some expectation from time lost to play NLHE, now that I’m playing around NL50 with a little NL100. But the great thing about poker is that I can jump from variant to variant as I please, and I’m not going to let a little lost profit stand in the way. In the long run, learning new games is +EV, especially as the poker boom dies out and the bread-and-butter NLHE gets tougher.

I’m about 70% of the way through, everything except the hand quizzes, and in general I like the Slotboom book. But somehow it’s a little different from what I was expecting. It certainly talks a lot about short-stack PLO, a topic pretty much ignored by Hwang, and one I wanted to get a better grasp on. But I guess I was expecting a cookbook-style approach like Ed Miller’s short stack material in Getting Started in Hold ‘em. Slotboom’s book isn’t quite like that, although it certainly sketches the outline of a successful short-stack game, and also has some material on deep-stack and other topics like online play and 6-max.

The big problem with trying to put Slotboom’s short-stack ideas into practice in your typical 5c-10c or 10c-25c online full-ring PLO game is the preflop passivity. Using the table maniac to set up reraises, ideally trapping the field and creating a lot of dead money, is hugely profitable — in games with a predictable maniac, or games where the table PFR is 20% or so. Online small-stakes games tend to have PFR more like in the 1s and 2s — meaning people are not even raising aces that often, let alone anything else. So obviously whereas Slotboom claims you can play a short-stack game with anything under 50 BBL, if you try that in these games you’re going to be waiting around for a lot of preflop raises that never happen, hence playing deep-stack poker with your big pairs. (You’ll probably wish you’d bought Hwang’s book then!) The idea of making a standard minimum raise both with your aces and with limping hands is interesting, but equally useless if it never actually induces any raises from behind. Therefore, even though I’ve long been an advocate of NLHE beginners using Miller’s short-stack approach, I’m almost inclined to think it’s more trouble than it’s worth in PLO. I did in fact start out by playing short stacks, reducing the magnitude of mistakes I could make, but I think I may have been playing too loose for my stack size. (Compare the idea of playing small pairs for a raise in a short-stacked very loose NLHE game; you’d be making a mistake based on your lack of implied odds, but it might not be a huge mistake in any one case. Over time it would be a substantial leak, though.) Slotboom doesn’t give much direct advice on which hands you should be playing at what stack sizes.

So in summary it’s certainly worth the $15 that Amazon charged me, because good PLO books are still pretty rare, and I found this book still a lot more substantive than others (like Ferguson’s Full Tilt chapter). However, if you’re seeking to buy one book to learn all of PLO, I’d still go with Hwang. Hwang’s advice is mostly for deep-stack PLO, though, so you might still want to experiment a bit with short-stacking. You’ll still find odd chances to go all-in with aces and quadruple up.

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~ by akqj10 on February 11, 2008.