It has a collosal effect on PLO. Basically, on a table where preflop raising is common (as is the norm at Party) it means that the pot is relatively large on the flop, so very large bets (whole stacks or pot-committed) are common on the flop. Now, intuitively, you would think this might favour good players (the flop IS the most important street in PLO after all, and the place where you can really charge the gamblers). However, that's not the case at all. Take, for example, an occasion where you have top set, and your opponent has a flush draw: board is K[h] T[d] 3[h]. Now, normally, you'd bet pot here and charge your opponent through the nose to catch his (very obvious) draw. At party/empire, however, you can do the same, but it'll quite often be for a big chunk of your stack (if not all of it) not leaving you a significant amount to bet on the turn. So, you bet, he fishes in and calls along, and guess what, the turn is a blank and you STILL have to survive another card with no significant money to bet on the turn.

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
xxxxx

PS If you have already downloaded the empire software and made an account to look at the tables, you will not be eligible to be signed up by an affiliate as far as I know. Usually an affiliate has to send you their sign-up code to download the site from.

mmm that's what I feared, no money on the turn to make them pay !
I'd rather learn the proper way to play with decent stack size, I think it will be more useful when I'll go up in limits.;.
I dedicated a 3k bankroll for PLO so I think I could sustain such big moves at Emprire but learning a game is always costly and I don't want to blow my BR that way.

appart from stars, what sites propose good bonuses and have a decent buy-in structure ?

I'm not a bonus whore at all but hey it's free money so from time to time it's good to take it no ?

ps : i dowloaded partypoker software which is apparently the same as empire ...

My top 3 choices would be.... Gaming Club, UltimateBet and InterPoker.

That avatar is worrying!

Monk
xxxxx