The flush is less than 1 in 5 to hit on the turn, but going up to the river it's only about a 60:40 underdog. Given your chip stack size, and the fact that you're not going to be able to bet more than 60% of the final pot size on the turn/river (due to the small stacks and pot committed nature of it all) he may actually be just about correct to call, or at the very least not significantly disadvantaged by doing so. It therefore becomes a chasing man's game.
The less money you have to bet post-flop, the bigger advantage the weaker players have because there's less for them to lose by calling bets on non-nut made hands or chasing draws. You will also find that crucially with PLO the structure of the game on a loose table is such that you'll usually have bet 30+BB's by the time the turn comes round. On a 100BB table that leaves you enough to make another decent sized bet on the turn, but when you have so little left to bet it means you only have one real decision in the hand quite often - whether to call/bet/raise the flop. There is little play on the turn or river until you build a big stack (and are up against other big stacks) and so even seemingly tenuous draws cannot be charged the max to chase you. This plays into the hands of the gamblers, who are manifold in these games.
The play at Party/Empire PLO is wild and crazy, and there is much money to be made there. However, you need a collosal BR and a very steady heart to survive the astronomical fluctuations caused by this horrible blind system. I personally hate it with a passion because drives every last drop of skill and creative play out of the game and turns it into a highly-variable exercise in nut-peddling and chasing big draws. I have made money at these tables but I prefer the more steady (lower-variance) wins I find at Prima, Cryptologic, UB and Stars and, given I make somewhere in the 25-30BB/100 range in these games anyway, I'm not losing too much by not playing party.
Suffice to say, Party/Empire games are profitable and if you play very tightly the variance may not be too collosal, but I personally feel much more in control of games with a bigger buy-in, and for me you can't put a price on that. You will need a bankroll of at least $3000 to play the $100PLO at party, and to be honest I would prefer $4000-5000 because swings either way of 10 buyins will be very common. To me, these games shouldn't really be called "poker" but if you have the psychological fortitude and (relatively simple) skills to play them you can make good money. For me though, 100BB's is a small stack in a PLO game and 50BB's is a joke.
Hope this helps.
Monk
xxxxxStatistics: Posted by Felonius_Monk — Mon Feb 14, 2005 6:21 am
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