Play More Hands, Win More Pots: 5 Tips for PLO MTT Success

Pot-Limit Omaha (PLO) tournaments are a completely different animal from No-Limit Hold’em.

If you try to carry over your standard NLHE strategy (tight opens, limited limping, range c-betting), you’re going to get run over and bleed chips in ways you’re not even aware of. The structure of PLO MTTs (no rake, big blind ante, multiway pots, higher equity realization) forces you to rethink how the game works, and how hands are selected and played.

In this video, Dylan Weisman lays out five core adjustments that matter most. If you internalize these, you’ll be ahead of the pack immediately.

[WATCH] How To Win Your First PLO Tournament

If you’re serious about improving your PLO tournament results, Dylan’s upcoming Crushing PLO Tournaments course goes much deeper into these concepts. You can pre-register now and be ready when it drops on Upswing on April 20th.

#1: You Get to Play More Hands

This is the biggest difference, and it’s the one most NLHE players struggle with. In PLO tournaments, you simply get to play a lot more hands.

There are two main reasons for this:

1. There’s no rake taken from each pot. In cash games, passive actions like limping and calling get punished because you’re paying rake postflop. In tournaments, that cost is already baked into the buy-in. This makes marginal hands more playable.
2. The big blind ante massively improves your pot odds. There’s already dead money out there, so entering the pot becomes more attractive.

Combine those two factors, and suddenly limping becomes viable with the right hands. When you mix limps with pot-sized raises, you can enter the pot roughly 30% more often compared to a strict raise-only strategy.

On the Button, that can push your VPIP north of 60%. That’s a massive difference from NLHE, where playing that many hands would be an expensive mistake.

From the Big Blind, the adjustment is even more extreme. You’ll often be defending 60–70% of hands depending on position and stack depth.

That doesn’t mean you go crazy with trash. It means you prioritize hands that perform well in multiway pots:

• Nut suits
• Double-suited hands
• Connected structures
• Pocket pairs with upside

And just as importantly, you avoid hands that get coolered too often. You get to play a lot of hands, but keep it to the ones that can generate powerful and nutted equity postflop.

#2: You Need to Build a Limping Range

If you’re not limping in PLO MTTs, you’re missing out on opportunities to boost your EV.

Here is the easiest way to think about your limping range:

Limp hands that don’t want to face a 3-bet, but are still strong enough to play.

These are hands that:

• Play well multiway
• Can call a single raise
• Don’t want to get blown off their equity preflop

A few common examples:

• Medium connected hands with suits
• A-high suited hands with decent side cards
• Hands that can flop nutted equity but aren’t robust vs aggression

Then you layer in a second category: limp-3-bets.

These are your strongest hands. Think:

• Premium double-suited Broadway hands
• Strong AAxx combos
• High connectivity with nut potential

This protects your limping range so it doesn’t get run over. When your weaker hands are coupled with your strongest hands, your opponents can’t simply isolate you with impunity, and your weak hands get to realize their equity postflop more often.

Finally, your raising range becomes more robust and resilient, because your raises are stronger in general.

If this shift toward limping and wider preflop play already feels uncomfortable, that’s normal—and it’s exactly where most players fall behind. Dylan breaks down these ranges in detail in his course, Crushing PLO Tournaments, so you’re not guessing in real time.

#3: The Shorter the Stack, the More High Card Power You Need

Stack depth changes everything in PLO.

At deeper stacks, you care about board coverage and strong postflop equity. You want hands that can connect with a wide variety of textures: low boards, middling boards, coordinated runouts.

However, these factors change as stacks get shorter.

Now you don’t have the luxury of navigating multiple streets. You’re not trying to realize equity across complex runouts. You’re often playing for stacks quickly.

That means high card strength becomes far more important.

This is because high cards:

• Make top pair more often
• Dominate weaker holdings
• Perform better in all-in scenarios

Meanwhile, hands that rely on implied odds, like small pairs or low connected structures, lose a lot of value. There just isn’t enough stack depth to realize their upside.

So hands that might be clear VPIPs at 50bb can become folds at 20bb, such as:

• Low rundowns
• Weak double pairs
• Marginal suited combos

In their place, you prioritize:

• High cards
• Nut suits
• Hands that can make strong, immediate holdings

As a rule of thumb: the shorter the stack, the less fancy you need to get.

#4: Don’t C-Bet Every Hand

If you’re coming from NLHE, this one is going to take some getting used to.

In Hold’em, you can get away with range c-betting on a lot of boards, especially at lower stakes. In PLO, that approach gets punished quickly. This is because players connect with the board far more often.

There are simply more combinations, more draws, and more ways to interact with any given texture. With four cards, your opponent almost always has something.

As a result, you need to understand what hands play best as check backs on the flop instead of c-bets.

In a standard Button vs Big Blind single-raised pot, you’ll often be checking back more often than you think, even on boards that look favorable at first glance.

Take an A-high board like A-7-5.

In NLHE, you’d expect to c-bet at a high frequency, especially against opponents who are not particularly studied. In PLO, not so fast.

The Big Blind still has:

• Ax at a reasonable frequency
• Two pair and sets
• Wraps and strong draws

Meanwhile, you’ll have plenty of hands that don’t want to face a check-raise:

• Medium-strength pairs
• Weak Ax
• Hands with limited backdoor potential

Those hands are better served by checking.

On the flip side, you bet hands that:

• Benefit from fold equity
• Have strong backdoor equity
• Don’t mind folding if raised

There’s also a second layer here: board texture.

On low, connected boards (like J-4-3), the Big Blind can actually have the range advantage and lead into you. They simply have more strong hands and draws available. And on those boards where the Big Blind has donk bets, you actually want to c-bet even less often.

#5: You Should Rarely Bet Full Pot

This is another major leak for transitioning players. In PLO, just because “pot” is in the name, pot-sized bets are not your default. They’re a tool, and a fairly specific one.

At higher stack depths, potting the flop is often a mistake. This is because it narrows your opponent’s range too much. You’re essentially forcing them to continue only with strong hands, which reduces your ability to maneuver on later streets.

Instead, smaller sizes are almost always selected:

• ~25% on static boards (paired, monotone)
• ~50% on many unpaired textures
• Even smaller in multiway pots

These sizes allow you to:

• Keep ranges wider
• Realize equity more efficiently
• Maintain flexibility across turns and rivers

The main exception is at lower stack depths (around 20bb), where pot-sized bets become more viable—especially on dynamic boards.

In those spots, you’re often looking to rush money into the pot to deny equity and realize your own equity. Potting allows you to do that.

But even then, it’s not an “always” button. You’re still mixing in smaller sizes depending on the situation. If your current strategy involves potting frequently just because “it’s POT Limit Omaha,” that’s a leak.

Final Thoughts

PLO MTTs reward aggression, creativity, and flexibility, but only if they’re applied correctly.

If you take nothing else from this:

• Play more hands, but play the right ones
• Build a real limping strategy
• Adjust your ranges based on stack depth
• Stop autopilot c-betting
• Use smaller bet sizes far more often

Most players won’t make these adjustments. They’ll stick to what feels familiar.

That’s where your edge comes from.

Once you get comfortable with these shifts, PLO tournaments become easier and start feeling like one of the softest formats in poker.

If you want a complete, structured approach to PLO tournaments (from preflop ranges to postflop execution) get Dylan Weisman’s Crushing PLO Tournaments course now released on Upswing. It’s designed to take these ideas and turn them into a system you can actually apply at the table.