PL Omaha for beginners part 1

PL Omaha is the new game of the nosebleed online poker royalty. If you read poker news, I needn’t tell you how PLO has pretty much swept NL Holdem aside when it comes to nosebleed stakes poker. Nowadays, PLO holds a whole bunch of online poker records: the one for the largest pot ever played (as a matter of fact, most of the 10 largest online poker pots ever played, were PLO ones), the record for the largest ever single session swing and for who knows what else. The Durrrr challenge is played at the PLO tables: nowadays, pretty much everything that amounts to something unfolds at the PLO tables. Before the popularity explosion of 2003-2004, Omaha used to be more popular than Holdem, both in Europe and in the US. Moneymaker’s spectacular WSOP win triggered a process which led to Omaha being pushed into the back seat by Hold’em. As the game continuously evolves however, apparently it goes back to its roots.

Due to the nature of Omaha, the NL betting structure is quite unfit for it. If you’re keen on tossing your dough into the middle preflop, you’d better stick with NL Holdem. The fact that it’s only played in the FL and PL betting formats, doesn’t mean PLO won’t generate huge volumes of action. How exactly does Omaha stack up against Holdem though? As a Holdem player contemplating a move to PLO, what should you keep an eye on?

First of all, because Omaha is a game of “nuts”, a predominantly post “turn” game , while Texas Holdem is a “flop” one, more players will get to see the flop in Omaha than in Holdem. Pocket rockets lose a lot of value in PLO, while suited cards and connectors as well as one-gappers gain value.

With this many folks eager to see their 4 pocket cards connect with the board somehow, the preflop pot will be larger, which means that the betting can go much higher past the flop. This takes us to another point: because of the abundance of drawing hands and because each player has 4 pocket cards, you’ll need a much better hand to take to showdown to win. A 2 pair is a great hand in Holdem: not so much in PLO.

In Omaha, bluffing opportunities are reduced. The game of nuts doesn’t leave much room for deceit: if you have the goods, you have them, if you don’t, you don’t. What this means is that tight-passive players are no longer trounced. As a matter of fact, tightening up waiting for that good hand makes much more sense in Omaha than it does in Hold’em.

The texture of the board takes on an entirely different significance in Omaha. If there are 3 suited cards on the board, you can be pretty certain someone has a flush. A paired board almost certainly means a set or even a boat.
Position is important in Omaha too. While in Holdem, being the last to act gives players a chance to win more pots, in Omaha if offers them the opportunity to control the size of the pot better.

Phil Hellmuth on his hands and knees

Now here’s something I never thought I’d see. After having been out of the top tournament spotlight for a while, and only really making news through his various entrance gimmicks (dressed at Caesar at the WSOP Europe – give me a break…), and after throwing tantrums and bashing players left and right in various televised events, Phil Hellmuth has finally crumbled under the weight of his own expectations.

Day 3 of the WPT’s bay 101 Shooting Star event saw Hellmuth put in a more than solid performance. He came into the day 1st in chips, and he only got overtaken in the final stretch, but he’d still secured a more than comfortable cushion going into the final table action. As fellow Shooting Stars were relieved of their $5k bounties all around him, Phil stood like a rock, upon which no tide could inflict any kind of damage. He came into Day 4 second in chips, and viewed as probably the most likely to end up with the title.
Phil did well too. He had solid reads on his opponents, and got his money into the middle in the best possible spot. There was just one thing wrong though: Lady Luck decided to have some fun with him, to teach him a lesson on why poker was a mere game, subject to her caprices at every turn.

He picked up pocket queens in the small blind and decided to trap someone with them. He limped along as Andy Seth decided to make a move from the BB. Seth had Ac,Jc and he fired out a 80,000 bet to mount a defense. Hellmuth would have none of that though. He raised to 280,000 and eventually got Seth all-in. The flop fell Kd,6s,5s and Phil was well on his way to reap the rewards of his sneaky preflop tactics. The 10h fell on the turn, giving Seth a straight draw, but Hellmuth was still well ahead. Then disaster struck. An A hit the board on the river, giving Seth a superior pair and sending Hellmuth to the payout booth, before everyone else from the final table. Phil just stood there dazed and battered, like someone living out a bad dream, but here’s a video worth more than a thousand words:

After he shook all the other player’s hands, Hellmuth walked to the sidelines and collapsed in a heap holding his head. He curled up in the fetal position and stayed there for several minutes, leaving the audience to ponder whether the presence of a paramedic crew was called for or not. Eventually he pulled himself together and came back to settle the issue of the bounty and even to sign a T-shirt for a fan. The way he handled the bad beat though, raised quite a few waves in the poker world.

Tony G, fresh Party Poker professional and owner of PokerNews.com (among several other online poker related operations) has written an open letter to Hellmuth in the wake of the incident in which he expressed his concern regarding Hellmuth’s mental health. Half jokingly, the Aussie pro made a few good points in the letter (which has been uploaded to his personal blog) and he even had a few words of encouragement for Phil asserting that the WPT final table was obviously a sign of an imminent comeback on the part of the Poker Brat.

What do I think about it all? Some people hate Hellmuth on account of the way he addresses other players, and on account of being conceited. Others pity him because he’s never managed to add a WPT title to his more than impressive trophy case, and attribute his meltdown to having come so tantalizingly close to breaking the WPT curse.
I just think he’s a guy who takes the game way too seriously. Sure, the best of the best play this game for millions of dollars, and they make more money in a single week (often in a single day) than I’ll ever make in my life, but there’s one thing these nosebleed stakes protagonists all have in common: they have a blatant disregard for the value of money, viewing it simply as chips to play poker with. They can weather huge swings without cracking, and I suppose if one can’t handle that, he shouldn’t be playing at that level. They see poker for what it is: a game, granted one that turns around millions of dollars, but still just a game. Maybe Sam Chauhan, his mindset coach, can hammer a bit of sense into him and get him back on the right track.

Bitching about your bad beats

Psychology has a great role in advanced poker strategy and these days I find myself more and more tied up in psychological intricacies for some reason. The mathematical part is ok too, and it too can be interesting, but past a certain point, you’ll find yourself more and more reliant on psychology, in addition to mathematics of course, and that’s a good thing I suppose.

Complaining about bad beats is one aspect of poker where psychology is quite obviously at its best (or worst, depending on how you look at it). First of all, why do we complain? Apparently it is in our nature as human beings to feel revolted when something unjust (or something that we perceive as such) happens to us. When we see those aces cracked by another player’s runner-runner straight, we feel slighted. It was not supposed to happen, yet it did – that means it must be unjust. It probably stems from our upbringing, but we have this way of categorizing things into right and wrong. Unfortunately, poker falls outside of these boundaries that we all have in our heads: there is no right and wrong in poker. There are mathematical probabilities which never lie. You may be a 90-10% favorite in a hand, but that doesn’t mean you won’t lose. Once out of 10 times you will lose and I bet you’ll feel short-changed by fate every time it happens. It’s just human nature. This is why most players are so prone to tilting in the wake of a bad beat. Some people can control this psychological process to a certain degree.
The top poker professionals you see battling at Full Tilt Poker’s nosebleed stakes tables are likely capable of taking quite a few bad beats before they tilt, but frankly, no one is a 100% immune to it. Just take a look at Phil Hellmuth. If anybody, he should know that bad beats belong in poker, yet he is capable of some pretty spectacular meltdowns every now and then. His latest one at the WPT’s Bay 101 Shooting Star event was really something to behold. He curled up in the fetal position and remained on his hands and knees for several minutes while the spectators wondered whether they should call an ambulance or not. The bad beat and the meltdown aspects of the game lead to complaining, whining and bitching, not to mention suspicion concerning the fairness of the software used by the poker room where the bad beats occur.

One needn’t look far for such monologues spawned by outrage at being slighted at the poker table. Online poker forums are crawling with them. The authors of these posts put their thoughts online in the hopes of wringing some sympathy out of their peers, for whatever reason. If one thinks about it, there’s not a whole lot of point in the whole thing, even if one manages the impossible and gets some of the guys on the forum to commiserate. How exactly will that help you? The truth is, such complaints are pretty much 100% certain not to get any kind a sympathy anywhere. As a matter of fact, you’re a lot more likely to get bashed and made fun of than anything else. The fact that poker forums are mostly frequented by conceited 12-year olds whose first reaction to everything is to call names and point fingers – put aside, there’s a serious psychological process at work here. It has been proven by psychologists that while humans beings are certainly capable to commiserate with stricken peers, with someone they cannot identify with or with someone they have a reason to dislike, that is certainly not the case.

As a matter of fact, people seem to have no problems further increasing the level of discomfort on a sufferer they do not like. The whole thing starts out with your complain: nobody gives a rat’s ass about your bad beats, and therefore you intrude on people by assaulting them with something they’re fed up with. The fact alone that you post or voice your complaints turns you into a bad guy. Then the dissing starts as people begin to pile on the pressure and to drop more abuse on your head. While in an online poker forum this has no consequences other than to make you feel ridiculous, if you voice your complaint at the poker table, you open yourself to more meaningful abuse. The fact that you paint yourself a victim will turn you into one in the eyes of your opponents, just not the way you’d like. They’ll begin taking shots at you in an attempt to cash in on your vulnerability and to further abuse you. Poker brings out the primordial beast in humans: if there’s a hurt individual among them, they’ll all turn on him to finish him off. As a result of that they’ll gang up on you, making it even harder for you to make any sort of headway.

In conclusion: whenever you feel the urge to complain coming on, stay away from that chat feature. Swear out loud if you feel it does you good, just don’t let the others smell your predicament. Tilting’s bad enough as it is. Advertising your tilt is the one thing you can do to make the situation even worse. You shouldn’t feel compelled to show any compassion at the poker table, but you shouldn’t expect any from your opponents either.

Online poker innovations part 2

This is part two of a two article series that I dedicated to the various innovations online poker has brought about over the years, constantly shaping and changing the game of poker. For some people, these innovations improved the game-experience, for others they’ve ruined it. One thing’s certain though: it was on account of these innovations that poker managed to reach the globally known status that it enjoys today.

The introduction of resizable tables (which have since become the norm) was one move that people generally agree was an overwhelmingly positive one. Multi tabling has reared its head quite a while ago, and resizable tables appeared as an answer to the multitude of problems early multi-tablers struggled with. Players can now display several tables on their computer screens and thanks to the resizable nature of these tables, they can arrange them in an optimal manner. The official multi-tabling world record holder is Betrand Grospellier. The ex-Starcraft player set his record in front of 4 computer screens, each of which had 10 tables displayed in certain moments. Before Grospellier’s deed, Hevad Chan had been the king of the multi-tablers. He once filmed himself playing at 26 SNG tables simultaneously, apparently to counter allegations that he was in fact using a poker bot.
The advantages offered by multi-tabling are obvious. With online poker becoming ever more competitive and with edges growing smaller all the time, productive players needed to find a way to increase their hourly rates. The only way to do that was to increase the number of hands they played per hour. Playing multiple tables was the obvious solution, though in the beginning, players could barely squeeze 2-4 tables onto their computer screens.

Guaranteed prize-pools also represent an innovation you won’t hear anyone complain about. Poker tournaments used to be fairly straightforward operations back in the day. They created a prize-pool out of the buy-ins players provided (took their rake off the top in the shape of tournament fees), and paid the winners out from that prize-pool. There are plenty of such MTTs running online to this day. The truly massive MTTs feature guaranteed prize-pools though. When a poker room guarantees a prize-pool, it makes 100% certain players are paid out of a set-size prize-pool even if it means it needs to round the sum up from its own pockets. Experience shows though that such a predicament is extremely rare for the poker room. The promise of a guaranteed prize-pool is generally enough to draw in more players than needed to cover the guarantee. Take a look at Full Tilt’s and PokerStars’ massive weekend GTDs. They always exceed their guarantees by a more than comfortable margin. PokerStars’ $1.5 GTD (the Sunday Million) is an excellent example in this sense. The tournament has recently broken all records concerning registrant numbers and prize-pools. A special anniversary edition of the poker tournament, featuring a $4 million guarantee eventually built a $7.2 million prize-pool, almost doubling the guarantee.

Poker tracking software: this is where things get a little messier. In the wake of the scandal raised by Isildur1’s 2009 felting by Brian Hastings, a move which many attributed to a combination of abusive poker tracking software use and obvious collusion, a lot of attention has been drawn to this aspect of the industry. Poker tracking software, like Holdem Manager, Poker Tracker and PokerAce HUD, are often credited by experts with the ruining of the game of poker. The advantages offered to players by these table-side assistants are obvious: they get to track their opponents’ playing style as a result of which they’ll be able to spot trends and to predict tendencies easier. The same statistics can be used to analyze one’s own play too and thus to improve by plugging up the leaks. The only question is: if everyone starts to use tracking software, won’t the already tiny edges completely disappear from the game, tuning it all into one giant crapshoot? I guess only time will tell.

Rakeback is another highly controversial online poker innovation. From the players’ perspective though, things are as clear as can be when it comes to rakeback: it’s great. It can turn a break-even or a marginally losing player into a winner at the end of the month. It will give players a more than welcome rebate on the poker rake they generate and contrary to common belief, even losing players contribute a lot of poke rake, depending on their style of play, which means they earn rakeback too.
The only ones who hate rakeback are some poker rooms, which feel slighted by the addition of this great player-recruiting/loyalty rewarding scheme. Rakeback does cause some unnecessary complications for large poker networks which host several poker sites, but for standalone operations (like Full Tilt Poker) there are no drawbacks to rakeback whatsoever. Rakeback has been invented as a marketing tool that affiliate sites cold use to recruit players in a more efficient manner. Nowadays, no truly skilled player plays without rakeback, although once a player signs up to a site without rakeback, he will most probably not be allowed to switch to rakeback on that site anymore.

Live tourney satellites are arguably the best and most significant innovations ever produced by online poker. Such satellites were directly responsible for the online poker boom of 2003-2004, when players – who would otherwise have never been able to rustle up the money needed for a WSOP Main Event buy-in – went on to win the Big Dance, setting the world on fire. Players everywhere saw that the everyday Joe finally had a shot at big-time money. Online Poker satellites are extremely popular these days too, and online poker sites send more and more players to various WSOP events each year. The concept on which satellites are based is simple: give a $100 seat to the winner of a 10-man, $10 buy-in satellite. All the costs are covered and small-bankroll average guys get the chance to play in the big one.

Online poker rooms pepper their direct access satellites with all sorts of perks these days. They offer their qualifiers extra rewards for making it to a certain point in the live event. Live event packages won through online satellites routinely cover travel and accommodation expenses too for the winners.

Online poker innovations part 1

Online poker’s impact on the game is undeniable. The fact that it made poker available for millions of players worldwide at the touch of a button was certainly a huge achievement, which obviously contributed to making poker what it is today: a globally known and enjoyed game, but it was by far not the only thing online poker has brought to the table. In this day and age, we’re used to taking pretty much everything for granted and we devour novelty with ease. That’s why it probably escapes us that many of very features we appreciate so much today did not even exist a few years ago. Here’s a countdown of some of the online poker innovations I deemed truly significant.

Rush Poker. A relatively recent phenomenon, Rush Poker is beyond doubt the biggest innovation brought to the very structure of the game in recent years. Rush Poker is a carefully thought-out setup, which offers advantages to both the player and the poker room, and therefore it stands a pretty good chance to become viable and mainstream. The player has all the downtimes (that make regular poker games boring for many) done away with. He will never have to wait for a hand to conclude and for a new pair of pocket cards to be dealt again, at least as long as he stays at the Rush Poker tables. The engine that powers Rush Poker whizzes players to another table as soon as they hit the fold button. Players don’t even have to wait for their turn to act: by using the quick-fold option, they can move on to another table, leaving their avatar behind to do the folding for them when the action comes around. The poker room (Full Tilt Poker) has obviously a lot to gain from the new game structure too. Because players will play far more hands per hour than at regular poker tables, they’ll generate much more rake too. In the beginning, only NL Texas Holdem could be played Rush Poker style. Omaha and FL Holdem have been added recently too. While its structure seems destined to success at first glance, at a closer look Rush Poker will reveal its short-falls too: because players will be going up against a different tableful of opponents in every hand, the skill element is pretty much excluded from the game. Players won’t be able to make reads on their opponents and they will be denied the use of the very skills that make the difference between good and weak players in regular games.

Mac Clients. For Windows users, this may seem like an unimportant innovation, but I guarantee you that Mac and Linux users won’t share that opinion. Most online poker rooms have made their software available in flash-based no download formats over the last few years, in order to reach out to potential players who do not use Microsoft’s popular operating system.

In 2003, only Pokerroom.com (has gone under/switched hands since), had a no-download client. Nowadays, every serious online poker operation has such an option available. Whether or not the actual impact of the move was a significant one as far as player volumes were concerned is debatable, but it certainly had a huge psychological impact, taking online poker to where it had never been before.

Online training sites are supposed to have revolutionized the way poker is played these days, although I have to admit I have a few problems with the concept. The theory goes that back in the days, poker players had “only” Doyle Brunson’s, Sklansky’s and Mike Caro’s books to turn to if they wanted to improve and to evolve to the stage of being able to make money at the online poker tables. Nowadays, these players can sign up to an online training site (for a fee of course) and be “trained” by some of the most successful players in the game, through videos and other such cutting edge means. Unlike books, these training sites are supposed to feature constantly updated content, meant to keep up with the ever changing game. While I can certainly see the potential benefits, I’m not entirely certain signing up to an online poker training site is indeed the optimal way to go about improving your game. Sure, the above named books may be outdated in certain ways, the core of the game will never change and these books offer everyone a thorough understanding of the game mechanics. Keeping up with more subtle trends is something a good poker player should be able to achieve without much effort once the solid foundations to build on are secured. I am yet to learn about a highly successful player who can credit online training sites for his success. On the other hand, I’ve heard/read about several players who joined training sites, and never really managed to get anything going. In my humble opinion, players who are meant to succeed will do so with or without enjoying the benefits offered by an online training site. Likewise, those meant to fail will fail anyway, regardless of what type of poker education they gain access to.

Heads-up play. This one here is a truly important innovation. Before the advent of online poker, heads-up play was something of a freak occurrence on the live poker circuit. With online poker game mechanics so wonderfully suited to accommodate this sort of action, a whole generation of highly skilled heads-up players has appeared. As a matter of fact, most of the nosebleed stakes online poker action that makes it to the columns of news-sites and poker magazines, occurs at heads-up tables. Just think about Tom Dwan, Patrik Antonius, Isaac Haxton, Phil Ivey and Isildur1 – it’s quite self–explanatory.

Live heads-up events have also gained in popularity lately. The National heads-up Poker Championship is considered a true test of skill among the best of the best. Even the WSOP features a $10,000 World Championship Heads-up NL Holdem event.

To be continued…