PLO For POY: Dylan Weisman On Becoming A High Stakes Contender

Hold’em has been king of the poker world ever since it came to Las Vegas in the ‘60s, but it’s time to recognize pot-limit Omaha and its recent surge in the high-stakes tournament scene. If hold’em is ‘The Cadillac of Poker,’ perhaps PLO could be considered ‘The Porsche of Poker,’ which would be fitting given its popularity originated in Europe.

For many years, PLO players had trouble finding a tournament outside of the World Series of Poker, and certainly not for high stakes. But these days, a dedicated pro could easily rack up more than $1 million in PLO high roller buy-ins each year.

One of those high rollers leading the PLO charge is American pro Dylan Weisman, who has banked $4.8 million in the four-card game, which accounts for more than 70% of his $6.7 million in career earnings. Moreover, Weisman managed to contend for both the Card Player Player of the Year race and the PokerGO Tour leaderboard while consisting on a steady diet of big buy-in Omaha events.

The two-time WSOP bracelet and WSOP Circuit champ found the winner’s circle five times in 2024, making 15 final tables while finishing just outside of the POY top 10 with nearly $4 million in total cashes. “Dr. GTO” then took fourth in the PokerGO Tour Championship Invitational to close out his season.

Weisman joined the Poker Stories podcast to talk about finding the game early in life, misconceptions about solvers, and just how he got so good at PLO. You can listen to the full episode below or on CardPlayer.com, YouTube, Spotify, or any podcast app.

Dylan Weisman: You caught me on an in-between day, which means I get to rest.

Julio Rodriguez: You were playing online poker when I came in here!

DW: I was. I was playing mixed, which for me is mostly…

JR: A resting game?

DW: I am training for mixed right now. I already play big mixed but I want to be able to play the really big mixed. But it feels like a rest day relative to say, a work day where I have seven clients, or a PokerGO [studio] day where I’m playing for 12 hours.

JR: By clients do you mean students?

DW: Both. I do have poker students, but I also do executive performance coaching. I have clients that work in tech or I will work with company founders to help try and scale their businesses.

JR: You were young when you first started playing poker, right?

DW: I played cards with my grandmother when I was like five years old. She was a very talented bridge player. So, she was the one who brought cards and games into my life.
I was a Moneymaker kid. I got super sick when I was 12 with a stomach flu for three months, and I just watched Moneymaker on repeat. This was already after I had been playing with family.

There was an [online] freeroll at the time that you could play every hour. I would play those from the time I got home from school until I went to bed, winning $2 or $3 every couple of days and try to spin it up.

When I was younger I definitely had bankroll management issues, tilt control issues, and emotional regulation issues. I would win a freeroll, run it up to like $5,000, and then go bust. I probably did that five to 10 times before it eventually stuck.

JR: At 32, you might be the youngest poker player that the Moneymaker boom affected.

DW: It’s funny because Chris and I are friends now. It was a super cool, full circle moment for him to become a friend of mine at this point in my life.

JR: You also found PLO early on, already winning big at the game when you were in high school. What drew you to PLO?

DW: Galfond. Phil Galfond really resonated with me more than any other coach. He spoke in a way that made sense to my brain, which after meeting him and becoming friends with him, I can see where the similarities and differences are.

The game was just objectively softer, as well. People were just really, really bad at PLO.

And, I’m a degen at heart. I love stimulus, and PLO provides a lot of stimulus. You get to play a lot of hands.

And because it’s an action-driven game, you still to this day get people who perceive it to be gambling when in reality its incredibly mathematical. You get to print these huge win rates because of the way the game is perceived versus the way that it actually gets executed in real life.

PLO is actually less variance than hold’em as a tournament game. That’s another secret sauce thing. It’s just because the win rates are larger, and variance is lower when your win rates are larger.

People know how to fight back better in hold’em too. At the average PLO final table, the general population hasn’t learned what the re-steal spots are in ICM scenarios. In hold’em, we know that K-4 offsuit can sometimes be a re-steal in weird ICM scenarios. But those same people don’t know what that looks like from a solver perspective in PLO.

In order to be a good poker player you have to understand game theory. And once you understand game theory, you need to understand ranges. And once you understand ranges, you can start to do a bunch of shit. The main problem with PLO is that it’s very hard to learn the ranges because there are so many more combinations.

And then you have to be able to adapt when your opponents are not playing GTO.

JR: Right, and they are deviating a lot farther from GTO in PLO than in hold’em.

DW: For sure, but that just makes the win rates higher, right? Because whenever someone deviates from optimal, it means that there is a counter deviation to that with a high win rate associated with it.

If you could node lock someone’s exact frequencies, the solver would spit out the exact answer, which is easier to do in hold’em and harder to do in PLO. But some of us can do that…

The modern-day PLO player understands that limping ranges are real. The modern-day PLO player understands the different sizings and knows the stages of the tournament where you do need to take that coin flip and when you shouldn’t. They’ll know when to apply pressure, and understand the push and pull of the game.

There’s the misconception that you have a pair and a flush draw and you should just go with it, when actually you’re against a range that has an overpair, better pairs, plus wraps, plus flush draws. You think you’re getting it in as a flip, when it’s more like 82/18.

JR: You’re more creative than your nickname suggests, with a love for music, Acroyoga, and other art forms.

DW: Joe Ingram called me ‘Dr. GTO’ from the time I was 21. It’s a misnomer.

I think that I do have a very strong, mechanical background in math and science and all that jazz, but I’m also a flowy hippie at heart.

JR: But I imagine that solvers still came very easy to you.

DW: I hate using them, but yeah, they do make sense to my brain. When I came back to poker, it was after having worked with machine learning in tech. Coming back and seeing that solvers were not yet pervasive in PLO, I thought it was silly.

But doing sim work for PLO tournaments is incredibly, incredibly challenging. The technology was not as robust. There was one solver for it, and that solver has vast limitations and takes forever to run.

It’s an incredibly fertile field that exists, and PLO is just so far behind in terms of our understanding of game theory, ICM, and future game because we don’t have the tools to be able to do it.

I realized that this was a very good project for me because of my background in building large data projects. So, I hired [an analyst] and we went to work. It’s been nearly four years now that we’ve been working on the PLO MTT materials.

There’s a lot of good PLO cash game players, and a lot of good tournament players, but not that many good PLO tournament players. And that’s still true to this day. Even at the top level, you’ll see people making lots of mistakes.

And that’s why I was able to hit the scene running, if that makes sense. Just showing up with these tools that other people didn’t have was a big delta.

JR: For those that don’t know, what does running a solve entail?

DW: I have four servers that are running sims constantly. It just takes a long time to get this stuff done.

JR: How long?

DW: It depends. First you have to solve for that specific stack depth. You could buy some sim packs online, but I don’t trust a lot of them because I think people run their solves incorrectly. So [to do it ourselves] can take a while. Like, a month if you’re solving a big one.

But if you’re just wanting to run a flop spot, it can run overnight for like 10 hours. Turn and river are faster, like 30 minutes. The game tree is just way, way bigger for PLO than for hold’em.

JR: You spent the pandemic in the lab and came out swinging once the poker world opened back up.

DW: Once I transitioned out of playing online, I realized that tournaments were more lucrative because of what is unfortunately happening in the poker ecosystem for cash games. They are all going private.

I had a couple of experiences playing live where I wanted to go play in this $50-$100 game that was running. I would walk up to the table, [which had a seat open], and they would turn [the sign] to reserved, literally as I was walking up.

I knew then that this was not my path.

JR: They couldn’t shut you out of tournaments, though. You earned your biggest score ever in May, chopping the Triton Montenegro $100,000 PLO high roller for almost $2 million. Did the buy-in make the tournament feel any different to you?

DW: It was my second $100,000 event ever, having played the Super High Roller Bowl PLO event at PokerGO the year before. In terms of financials, it feels about the same. I use proper bankroll management and sell depending on what I’m playing. But in terms of the actual execution, that feels different for sure.

When you start playing the big stuff, it actually gets more casual, and some people are just truly comfortable in that environment. I’m starting to feel that way too, especially after Triton where I went and played every single day. That feeling of comfort and ease is a huge competitive advantage in an environment like that. For those that don’t, it gets in their head and they execute worse.

I think as the pressure goes up, I tend to execute better. Maybe that’s an ADHD thing because it’s about getting more stimulus. When you have more stimulus, you focus even harder. I’m grateful that my brain and body are designed in such a way that when the stakes are high, I actually focus in more.

JR: You’ve talked before about playing to support your family. There is this thing in poker where players will say they play better when their back is up against the wall.

DW: You don’t have to invoke your trauma in order to perform well. That’s something that I was doing for a long time, which you know, made a lot of money. But it also wasn’t sustainable as a human being. Not sustainable for me at least, it required a lot of emotional energy.

When you have money, you don’t focus as much because you don’t need to focus as much. Then the bankroll starts dwindling again.

I would much rather be a Stephen Chidwick-type, where I show up every single day and my focus is there and present. And then when I’m outside of poker, I have a sustainable life infrastructure. That to me is a much healthier interaction with the poker world and allows me to love the game more.

I still care a lot about poker. I will still get tilted if I make a big blunder. I have a process of feeling that and allowing myself to get over it. But over the long run, I think those that have less stable poker infrastructures just don’t last, especially at the $100,000 level where its so easy to run up a $3 million figure in make up and then get dropped. You must have the capacity to really sit down and grind effectively but allow yourself to be healthy and enjoy the process.

JR: Just a few years ago, there was probably 10 major PLO tournaments each year, at most.

DW: Maybe.

JR: And this year I think you won 10.

DW: (laughs) Not quite, but there was something like six $100,000 events this year, and that is insane.

JR: Someone could make a living nowadays playing exclusively PLO.

DW: During the summer in Vegas, you can play a PLO tournament every single day with an average buy-in of $1,500.

That’s probably the biggest bink that I’ve had in this entire experience. That I bet on a horse (PLO) that ended up just being a really, really good horse.

JR: Except not literally H.O.R.S.E….

DW: Well, now I’m betting on H.O.R.S.E. too, working on mixed. But yeah, I bet on the right game, in terms of the high-stakes environment.

Weisman’s Top Tournament Scores

Date	Event	Place	Prize
May 2024	$100,000 Triton Montenegro PLO	2nd	$1,666,090
March 2022	$25,000 US Poker Open PLO	1st	$416,500
December 2024	$50,000 WSOP Paradise PLO	5th	$410,970
June 2024	$1,500 World Series Of Poker PLO	1st	$294,311
March 2024	$25,000 PGT Mixed Games 10-Game	2nd	$290,535
January 2024	$10,000 PokerGO Cup PLO	1st	$240,300
March 2024	$10,000 PokerGO Tour PLO Series	1st	$229,500
October 2021	$1,000 World Series Of Poker PLO	1st	$166,461
October 2023	$10,000 PGT Mixed Games Dealers Choice	1st	$156,400
January 2024	$5,000 PGT Kickoff Series NLH	1st	$121,500
October 2024	$5,000 PokerGo Tour PLO Series	1st	$88,245