OP: Make Penneywize Not Suck At Omaha

Operation resurrected!

Cliffs for the last year: I've completed my Master's degree and have taken a position as an Econ researcher for a Defence Economics consultancy here in Kingston. For the time being however I have a great deal of free time, until I have my office and am expected to show up every day (should be a few weeks) I can pretty much make my own hours, which is pretty sweet in terms of flexibility obv.

All this is to say that I've got time to play poker again a few hours a day at least. And, of course, being away for over a year has made me miss it somewhat. I figure I'll continue treading down the path of pot limit omaha, since I am still fascinated with the game -- if not sometimes infuriated with the large amount of variance -- and still have the motivation to keep going.

Being excited as I was to resume my PLO journey, I studied for a few hours - mainly went over my old notes and analyzed hands from last year's sessions - and hopped right back on the saddle.

The results were nothing short of disastrous.



So I essentially burned through my ~10 BI shot at 10 PLO and now feel that moving back down to 5s is the best plan to iron out the kinks in my game.

Yes, I ran rather badly over that stretch; 6 or 7 BIs under AIEV in 3k hands is pretty horrendous even by PLO standards. But I still feel that there was a general downward trend in my winnings, and I'd have needed to run above AIEV to break even.

Also, it bears mentioning that RAKE has been a significant factor at 10 PLO: over those 3kish hands, PT3 shows roughly 30$ paid in rake. Not sure how this is calculated, but it seems that I'll not only need to beat the variance but beat the 5ptbb drain on my BR to successfully get past 10 PLO. Once I get back there, that is.

At any rate, I'm heading back down to 5 PLO and will play a session later tonight after I spend more time studying. Will be playing deep as much as possible, 4 tabling, putting in ~2 hrs if all goes well.

I'll be posting up hands I have difficulty with in this space, so if you're a PLO aficionado I'd appreciate your input.

Here's a hand from one of my sessions this week.

Villain is 30/3 over a small sample, with low aggr freq (~1.3).


$0.05/$0.10 Pot Limit Omaha Hi
PokerStars
6 Players
Hand Conversion Powered by weaktight.com

Stacks:
UTG ($16.39) 164bb
UTG+1 ($5.18) 52bb
CO ($6.99) 70bb
BTN ($9.60) 96bb
SB ($6.63) 66bb
Hero (BB) ($10.25) 103bb

Pre-Flop: ($0.15, 6 players) Hero is BB
1 fold, UTG+1 calls $0.10, 1 fold, BTN calls $0.10, 1 fold, Hero checks

Flop: ($0.35, 3 players)
Hero bets $0.30, UTG+1 raises to $1.23, BTN folds, $0.93 to Hero ($9.85)?


Post-flop thought process:

I'm pretty sure I can get value here from a great deal of potential holdings like flush and straight draws, pair + wraps and so on, so the flop donk bet is fairly standard I think. I chose the size that way because I want to balance out my cbet range a bit, where I normally select a size of 2/3rds or so, though in retrospect I probably should have gone bigger (80% pot?) here due to the obvious wetness of the board.

Once I get repopped by UTG+1, his range is looking a lot more like strong draws like gutshot + FD, wrap + FD and so on. I can't really discount strong hands like QJTXds based on his preflop limp, since the guy is obviously so loose/passive in the first place he's probably just limping gigantic portions of his pf range. In addition to draws, he'll occasionally show up with sets like KKxx and 55xx, sometimes with draws to accompany them. I'm blocking these somewhat, so I should discount these possibilities accordingly.

Thoughts on what I should do here? I could just call it off and hope to "bink" a non-scare card on the turn. If a flush completes, even holding the Kc here, I'm not sure I can fold off a lower flush by betting since villain is not going to be very deep after another street. Another problem with this action is that I'll just be oop on the turn without a real good plan, and I usually won't be too certain what cards help me.

There might be an argument here for a raise, given that villain's most likely holdings are strong draws and I hold blockers ofc.

Thing that gets me here is that the villain is incredibly passive and just pots out facing a cbet in a multiway pot. If I weren't blocking so much I'd just assume this to be a set most of the time.

Anyhow, what's my play here?