Art of Conversation

Poker has always been a survival of the fittest type of equation. Evolution in a raw form, yesterday’s heroes are often not even considered today’s make-weights. I can think of many players from when I started who were then considered expert winners and would now just be grist in someone else’s mill; low down in the evolutionary ladder; basically fodder.

However, one of the principles of the game that has seemingly stood the test of time, a constant in evolutionary change, is that tight aggressive is a good, low variance style. Play few hands, but play them strong. This approach really hit its high point in the shorthanded no-limit games, probably evolving out of simple set-mining, where you play uber-tight and wait for the donks to donate.

Clever players realised that style was exploitable and therefore started to play more hands very strong, the set-without-the-set, as it were. These players naturally played lots of tables and lots of hands ­— if you are passing a lot, you might as well play more games — and the style refined. Three-betting, and even four-betting, thin, fighting for every pot, it was a style that very naturally suited no-limit hold’em, as it is a game where fundamentally, each side is likely to have a comparatively poor hand. The betting conversation goes, “I have a hand”, “I have a better hand”, “Well, I have an even better hand”, until someone blinks. This is an oversimplification, but often mirrors how hands proceed.

The problem was when they moved this style to pot-limit Omaha.

I have seen lots of players, taking this style, and instead of having a profitable, low variance, straightforward route to profit, they find themselves having lower profitability, coupled with much higher variance.

Here is where it starts to go wrong. First off, they completely transfer their tight, raise, reraise style from no-limit hold’em without realising quite what it means in pot-limit Omaha. They get called much, much more, especially when three-betting out of position. This is a nightmare scenario in Omaha, being called by a good player, in a larger pot, out of position. The power of the three-bet in no-limit hold’em is that people pass to it; in pot-limit Omaha that just does not happen anywhere near as frequently.

The next way they start to haemorrhage money is that the better players start four-betting their out of position three-bets. The beauty of this, if you can keep large effective stack sizes, is that you do not have to even fear a five-bet, as long as you are not raising with poor ace-type hands. The tight-aggro player then finds himself on the horns of a dilemma: he can’t keep on passing to these four-bets, or the style becomes ridiculously easy to exploit; he has to be careful about what he five-bets with, in case he runs into a genuine A-A; and because he is normally massively multi-tabling, he also does not have much time to think. He does not adjust and so ends up just calling.

So having started with what he assumed would be a tight, low variance style, he still ends up playing few hands, but a significant number of those he plays has him out of position in a big pot, with maybe just two bets left; or in an enormous pot, still out of position, with even less room to manoeuvre.

The heart of the problem is that the dialogue of betting in pot-limit Omaha is very different. It starts off with “I have a hand”, “I have a better hand”, “Well, I have an even better hand” just like no-limit and sometimes it proceeds the same. But often, because of the powerful drawing element in pot-limit Omaha, the conversation reaches a point where one participant simply says, “I don’t care what you have, I have enough equity to continue regardless.” Until you recognise this, you are not conversing, just talking.

David has played poker all over the UK for the better part of a decade. Originally a tournament player, now focused on cash play and almost entirely on the Internet for the last three years, he makes a healthy second income playing a wide range of games. David is also an Omaha instructor for CardRunners.com, a leading source of online poker instructional videos.