Stack Management in Pot-Limit Omaha Tournaments Part I – How PLO Tournaments Try to Ruin Your Sanity

Pot-limit Omaha (PLO) is the game most adversely affected when it is thrust into the tournament spotlight. I would go so far as to say that is broken, or at least was not designed to be played in tournaments because the correct play can diverge so radically from its cash game sister. Specifically, there are more situations where it is correct to take the more conservative action with your entire range.

For instance, in no-limit hold’em, it can be correct to fold pocket aces with a single big blind on the bubble of the tournament. In seven-card stud it can even be correct to fold a rolled up hand with one ante a spot away from the money. However, these scenarios are fairly corner case and involved having a microstack. In PLO tournaments, it is fairly common that you should fold or at least not reraise premium aces, even with a healthy 15-30 big blind stack.

Let’s examine why this is before I even delve into proper strategy.

Pot limit betting

PLO is a big-bet game. Like in no-limit hold’em, the table chipleaders can jeopardize a smaller stack’s tournament life with multiple streets of large bets. In limit games, as long as you have more than 3.5 or 4.5 big bets, you cannot be eliminated from the tournament in a heads-up pot against your will. Worst comes to worst, you can simply call down and lose that amount. This means that the majority of stacks are safe deep in a tournament. As we will see, this is not the case for most stacks on a PLO bubble.
There are two factors that mitigate this effect:

First, PLO tournaments have no antes. Unlike in no-limit hold’em, where players are incentivized to battle for the antes, they don’t exist in PLO, so even though players have some motivation to defend their blinds, it is not as extreme. Many correct strategies to deal with awkward tournament situations involve playing significantly tighter. No antes means that a middling stack is less punished for this repeated folding and also bleeding less per orbit.

Secondly, pot limit is not no-limit. This has severe implications, as one strategy at a big stacks disposal in no-limit hold’em is to use overbets— wagers bigger than the size of the pot to force a player to be put at risk when a normal-sized bet would not.

In Pot-limit Omaha, this is only possible if you do not possess the chips to call three pot-sized bets postflop, This means that as long as you hold 13 times the size of the pot on the flop, unless you make a bet, you cannot be forced all in. In a heads-up pot with a 2.5x big blind raise sizing, this comes out to be 71.5 big blinds, which is often way above the size of average stack on the bubble.

Functionally, this number is not that high, because players frequently do not always bet pot. In the same scenario, if a player only bets two-thirds pot on each street, a common bet sizing, both players are only putting in rough 6.5 times the flop pot size or 35 big blinds, a much more common stacksize for a healthy player on the bubble to have.

Hand equities run close together

I said that PLO is the game that changes the most drastically, but it happens despite these two moderating factors. The combination of starting hands having similar equities and being a big-bet game is what really makes tournament PLO such a cranial garbling. Even though big stacks can leverage their safety in the tournament to force out other players in no-limit holdem, a shortstack can go all in and prompt a fold. Even when called, the shortstack can be a heavy favorite with an overpair or dominating holding, the threat of which is the reason that the big stack has to fold in the first place.

In Pot-limit Omaha, this just doesn’t happen. It just doesn’t matter if you have double-suited A-A-J-T, you just aren’t that big of a favorite and, similarly, everything but the worst or dominated hands just aren’t that big of an underdog. Therefore, big stacks are enticed to really try and punish middling stacks as the bubble approaches.

This conundrum continues postflop, where hand equities are much closer than they are in any other game. The nature of being a big-bet game does double duty here, as it allows the table chipleader to make speculative calls preflop. When most of the chips go in on later streets, having increased bluffing value there makes loose preflop calls more viable.

Not only are hand values close, but they change drastically from street to street. In a game where it’s important to draw and make the nuts or other strong holdings, it matters much more significantly that the turn and river can complete straight and flush draws or pair the board.

This is a considerable playability issue, as one strategy to counter act a big-stack bully, is to smooth-call with strong hands to induce them to continue barreling. However, this strategy faces problems on many runouts, where draws can come in and the nuts change on every street except on all but the driest boards.

Well, we know the problems, where do we go from here?

PLO is the only game where the strategy is so warped such that I felt it was important to breakdown the fundamentals of the game. In doing so, I’ve highlighted some tricky situations but haven’t told you how to solve them. I’ll investigate that next time, though some situations are absurd enough that I don’t have a great answer if my opponents are playing properly.

Luckily, most players don’t take all the liberties they could possibly afford to in tense tournament situations. It reminds me a bit of no-limit hold’em tournaments just after the Moneymaker poker boom, when players were still figuring out optimal bubble strategies. There just aren’t enough PLO tournaments or literature written to critically analyze this topic for most people, so we’ll try to make a dent into that next time. ♠

Ben Yu discovered poker while at Stanford University where he developed his prowess for mixed games. He has lived for the WSOP ever since 2010 when he broke out with a 2nd place finish in the World Series of Poker $1500 limit holdem shootout. His poker-induced adventures have included living abroad in Rosarito, Mexico and Toronto, Canada to continue playing online and traveling the European Poker Tour circuit to in search of the most delicious schnitzels and pierogies.