by Aisthesis » Sat Jun 24, 2006 12:46 am
Well, my own experience is simply distorted because I'm just better at NLHE than at PLO. But I think one can also extrapolate a bit from a pretty established solid PLO player such as Monk, who does have downswings of as much as 7 or 8 buy-ins.
I have absolutely NEVER had a run that bad in NLHE. Losing even 2 buy-ins in that game is a true horror story for me that very rarely happens, and I think I may have even been down 3 once or twice, but that's the absolute worst.
In PLO you're dealing with many more 60-40 situations, and I think good players typically don't shy away from them--obviously preferring to be on the 60 end of it, but not worrying horribly about being on the 40. Anyhow, these are very coinflippish, whereas in NLHE a tight player almost always is a very big favorite, and at least speaking for myself, throwing in some big semi-bluffs in the coinflippish type situations, but these are maybe 25% of big bets. In PLO the percentage of big bets on coinflips is much higher, and it's easy to have a string of those go the wrong way.
Also, just speaking from my own experiences, it feels like the phases where you're running cold or hot are more extreme, and I find it significantly more difficult to stay objective during each of these as a result.
A bit off topic, but one thing I noticed as being VERY important in Ciaffone is making sure you're on the correct end of overlays (such as set over set, big flush over little flush, overfull vs. underfull). I think being on the wrong end of a 60-40 isn't a big problem (but does lead to major variance), but you should simply never be drawing to a 1- or 2-outer in a big pot.