Rolf's PLO strategy

[Aisthesis]

Having browsed through the book a little upon buying it, I decided to start getting serious about working through it now and thought I'd attempt a combination of summary (to check for misunderstanding) and question marks in order to get a better grasp.

I'll pretty much leave the deep-stack strategy alone for now. As I see it, the essence is, in addition to just good play, with some bluffing (very nicely illustrated in examples) is to have a very specific over-aggro target in mind who is also deep and on whom you have position. Basically, you isolate this guy (ideally) with smallish re-raises and then outplay him having position always. I'll leave it at that for the moment, as what really interests me right now is the short-stack approach.

First, you really do buy in for the bare minimum, which is just 20 BB in the Stars game, and you can multi-table pretty easily since it depends much less on detailed reads and also reduces risks (one of the benefits). Rolf was also, as I recall, averaging $250/day in the Vienna game, where the BB (no SB, if I understood correctly) was either $2 or $5. So, that's about 75 BB each day (125 BB at the $2 game or 50 at the $5) as goal for the strategy. Elsewhere he says that it's possible to win as much as 30-35 BB/100. So, that all sounds about right.

Second important concept: Sitting to the maniac's right. Ok, I can definitely sympathize with this, as I've had great experiences with that in NLHE. But I also check my Stars database for all the PLO hands I've played, and there are only a handful of regular players that can really be classified as maniacs. Moreover, as Rolf points out, it's often hard to get just exactly this seat online, since there's usually just one open seat, take it or leave it.

In any case, the idea here is to play very tight and never raise, but limp re-raise a lot. Basically, you let maniac raise, then see how the rest of the table responds (if there's a re-raise indicative of AA, you're plan is to fold without your own AA) and re-raise near all-in with a fair amount of dead money and a maniac who is likely to secure that dead money for you. What you're looking for here are hands that are favorites against maniac's raising range.

Now, Rolf is calling a maniac anyone who has more than 20% PFR at FR. Well, I think I have only one player in my database who's that high with a substantial number of hands. I do have several in the 15% vicinity, which is certainly getting close, and several of those are familiar regulars.

AA for the limp-re-raise is obvious, but also for loose raisers, above average KK. His example is KK97ss, so I'm assuming any KK with a connector and at least ss. He also places a lot of emphasis on ds without going into great detail, but it seems like he's looking for big cards here. He at least doesn't like 6789 even for a limp, although ds he'll consider it. He does like a hand like AJT8ds in this situation. What I'm assuming here is that you're looking to isolate when you have the opponent high-carded or with dominating wraps (bigger wraps) and AA doesn't figure too strongly in the raising range. It looks to me like about 6% or so of your hands should qualify for the limp re-raise against maniac.

Anyhow, the precise hand selection here isn't completely clear to me yet (maybe it will become so in the sampel hands). But I'm guessing KQJTss or KQJ9ss qualify, pretty much any ss A where all the cards are 8 or better, stuff like that. With 89TJ or 789T it's a little unclear to me. The lower wraps may be more in the limp-call category (?).

In any case, if you limp-re-raise with 20 BB, the rest of your stack is going in regardless of flop, if I'm understanding this correctly.

I'll leave it at that for now. The strategy gets rather more complicated when you don't have the luxury of having a maniac to your left--and that's just difficult to get at the Stars tables, at least in the $100 or $200 games. These tables are more on the kind of semi-loose, semi-passive side for the most part, I'd say.

But I need to re-read the pertinent sections on how to deal with that before trying to summarize it here (will try to do so as soon as I feel like I have a grasp of it). My impression up to now is that you're no longer really trying to get it all in normally PF but doing a lot of variable raising with strong positional components (some mini-raises, some max, some in between).

Common to both the maniac strategy and the more normal strategy, though, is playing quite tight in short-stack: somewhere in the 16% VPIP range with a lot of emphasis on ds and big cards.

[emmasdad]

[Felonius_Monk]

[Felonius_Monk]

To clarify - Aisthesis, you're a hella good player and have enough of an advantage over your opponents that you don't need a short stack strategy unless you're aiming very high. Rolf's PLO game is almost certainly pretty good (and much more aggro than the games you play, which I suspect is nigh on crucial - you NEED to be able to get your stack in in ANY situation you wish to make this strategy a good one).

[Aisthesis]