[quote="Aisthesis"]

a few thoughts

I think 34% is too loose in a fullring game, unless you are very good with postflop decisions or others are particularly bad. given that you were playing at new higher level it is very likely too loose. THo many styles can be correct in omaha games, once you get over 30% or so you are playing sub-optimally but it can be correct as exploitive strategy (ie. only because opponents are making larger mistakes)

I would not rely on Reuben for advice on what hands to play preflop. he is presumably very good with post flop decision, and he has both live reads AND knowledge of frequent opponents, so you have 1 of 3 at best there. However, Reuben is good for learning postflop decisionmaking processes.

Your 5% preflop raise I think is too passive. But there are many successful styles in PLO that can work, so your style is not wrong, but just less optimal, imho.

Raising in PLO is usually done to build a pot up for times when your hand hits (and to get position). if you are playing better hands than opponents that will hit more flops then you'll make money. This is very different than the reasons you raise in NLHE, btw

I think his flop play is likely b/c he has hit the flop either made hand or decent draw, or good bluffing oppty. I don't think his image does that much for him at lower limits.

IIRC, Darwinism/Stars=Parabola/Party and if so I've played a lot of PLO8 with him, where he was a good winning player but not earthshattering. He raises with good hands, makes good reads, can be tricky, etc.

Just a few thoughts, I'm still learning PLO, tho have been winning upto $3-6

Ok, well, I agree that this focus on Darwin has its problems for exactly the reasons mentioned by Monk--probably also the readin of Reuben, which I think tends to screw up my PF play anyway rather than help it. Also, this manual review of hands is really tedious, and it's definitely going to be a while before I can make it back to the 400, so I'm not sure whether it's worth it (I'd really rather spend my time building my bankroll back at the 100).

Then, aside from all the bad beats, tilt, etc., I see 2 issues here that I think are important:

1) JJ-KK in potentially 3-way pots. That one just continues to bother me, and I don't have much of a solution. Even at the 200, an easy solution is just fold them because you don't have odds to set. And everything else seems to go profitably enough that, if it's a leak, it's one that doesn't matter--and I obviously don't fold KKQJ to a raise even HU, but I may not be playing even that optimally in that situation. The real question is what it takes to bet in those kinds of situations. If you know that, then you can just figure out whether you can play them.

2) Raising significantly more than 5%. That one is related to that whole study I did a few weeks ago, which definitely increased my profits (before that, I was raising just a little over 1%). What I like about the particular 5% I came up with there was that the vast majority of those hands can handle a re-raise; there are a lot of limped premium hands (just a bit weaker); there are few JJ-KK hands in there, which allows you not to get blown off of those.

I think those are really the 2 issues that are giving me some trouble.

A few more random comments:

The focus on Darwin has been somewhat interesting because I've discovered that he doesn't play really all that different stylistically from me or Monk--a little looser than me at the 400 and more raisy, less inclined to call rather than raise, too (at least in comparison to me--and I'm not sure that I don't still LIKE some flat calls rather than raises). If it had turned out that he just has a completely different style, I might still be inclined to study his game, but less with the idea of emulation than with the idea of figuring out vulnerabilities in it.

As to the boredom issue, that just doesn't really effect me much. If I consider 15% play optimal, I'll just do it, as I have a pretty good routine of that from casino NLHE. Admittedly, casino PLO, where hands just aren't dealt nearly as fast, gets very tiresome if you play less than 20%. But I could probably even bring myself to do that if I thought that was the best way to play.

Anyhow, I think the 2 issues above are actually the ones that are really still bothering me. On the JJ-KK, I'm just not sure what's bettable when in short-handed spots, and on the raises, for getting up close to 10%, I don't understand where they're supposed to come from and why. The 5% strategy with what I consider generally solid post-flop play seems to buy me about 30 or so (real, not pt) BB/100 at the PLO200, and that seems at least adequate.