I remember a few years ago when I used to avoid PLO like the plague. The game just seemed too complex to fathom above a very simple level. All this of course means that you don’t really understand poker. Simply put then “poker” is the generic name for playing cards where the hand rankings and action are as we know them to be. If you are a good “poker” player then you will play any game well. There really shouldn’t be any such thing as a good limit player or a good no limit player. Well actually there are people like this and I used to be one of them but in order to be a good “poker player” then you need to be in possession of knowledge that can easily be transferred from form to form.
Let me give you an example…….you have raised on the button and the small blind folds and the big blind calls. The flop comes whatever and they check and you c-bet and they call. The turn comes whatever and they check again and you bet again with a mediocre hand and they check-raise the pot. They have followed this betting line of calling pre-flop and calling on the flop only to then check-raise the turn four times in the past five orbits and are clearly showing a pattern.
Can you see here that I haven’t even mentioned what form of poker we are playing? This hand could be taken from PLO, NLHE, LH or even tournament poker. The key factor in this hand are the betting sequences exhibited by your opponent. Your optimal game strategies will be geared around what your opponents are doing and how they play. If you can feel them out then you can largely own them unless they are sophisticated enough to be balancing their ranges. So here it is your opponent’s line of call-check-call-check/raise which is illuminating.
It is when you start to view poker in this way that the lid really gets lifted off other poker forms. Then at the higher levels it boils down once again to a battle of strategies and a battle of adjusting and who can out adjust who. Who can identify and exploit their opponent’s ranges and maximise their equity against their range better than the other. So PLO or NLHE then it makes no difference……it is still poker.
Carl “The Dean” Sampson plays poker at www.pokerstars.co.uk
