Lethal Expectations

Pot Limit Omaha / Marcus Bateman / 09 March 2011 / Leave a Comment

To put it bluntly, never expect to win a hand of PLO until the river is dealt and you hold the absolute stone cold nuts.

This is a concept that drives most people to distraction in all forms of poker, but perhaps nowhere more so than in Pot Limit Omaha. You raise a nice looking hand, you flop a monster like top set, you suddenly get action off of a big fish.

You expect to win. You expect the chips to slide over to you and for your skill, guile and cunning to be rewarded.

Except they don't. They slide to your opponent after a few subtle twists of fate.

Poker is a game that truly tests your limits of expectation if you let it, and falling in love with a hand before all is said and done is a very painful process. This is a bad enough thought process in games like Hold'em, where you generally have very large edges when you start thinking about your victory dance; but in PLO it is a lethal thought process to have, as not only are no hands large favourites on the whole, but the large number of hand combinations make back door draws and astonishing beats much more likely.

To put it bluntly, never expect to win a hand of PLO until the river is dealt and you hold the absolute stone cold nuts. In a game where hands like under-quads are actually quite standard, the only way to avoid endless tilt is to simply never get too excited about any one hand. This in itself gives you a huge edge over the field pretty much by definition, as your lack of tilt in situations where they quickly go mad adds up to fortunes both saved and won in even the short to medium term, let alone the very long run that defines all great players.

Poker is a hard game. If it wasn't hard no one would not play it, and part of it's difficulty comes in the form of becoming attached to hands, expectant of outcomes, and disappointed when things go wrong. Learning to try and remove yourself from an attachment to expectation is one of the core skills of any poker player, but nowhere more so than when sitting down at the PLO tables - something you forget at your - and your bankrolls - peril.

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