If you ever find yourself unsure of how to play strong hands (that aren’t the nuts) in Pot Limit Omaha, keep reading.
The following advanced hand analysis covers a very interesting hand played by PLO beast Chris Wehner. The preflop and flop analyses are very straightforward…
…but the hand really heats up on the turn.
By the end, you will be better equipped to play your strong hands in PLO and you will have gained insight into how top PLO professionals approach post-game analysis.
This is part 2 of Dylan Weisman and Chris Wehner’s new Pot Limit Omaha strategy series! Click here to go back to part 1. Parts 3 and 4 will be published on this blog next Friday and the Friday after that (February 21st and 28th).
Both Dylan and Chris are PLO professionals who crush games as high as $25/$50 and $50/$100.
If you want to become a true PLO crusher yourself, keep an eye out for their Advanced PLO Mastery course, which comes out in early March.
The game is $10/$20 PLO on a site that runs anonymous games.
The Villain in the hand raises to $70 on the button and Chris defends his big blind with 7♠ 7♣ 6♠ 5♦.
Both players started the hand with a $2,000 stack (100 blinds).
Preflop AnalysisEasy defend for Chris with the paired and connected hand, which is way too strong to fold and way too weak to 3-bet.
With $150 in the pot, the flop comes J♣ 5♠ 2♣.
The action checks through.
Flop AnalysisChris has flopped very poorly. His best play is clear: check and fold should Villain bet.
The turn is the (J♣ 5♠ 2♣) 7♦ and it’s time for some fireworks.
Chris checks and the Villain bets $100 into $150. Chris puts in a pot-sized check-raise, making it $450 to go. The Villain re-raises to $1,500 (pot) and Chris goes all-in for $1,970 total. The Villain calls.
Turn AnalysisThis is a spot where Chris needs to include plenty of strong hands in his checking range. He explains why in the video:
Since our opponent has [a largely] capped range [after checking back on the flop], we’re going to want to apply a lot of pressure to that range when he does bet.
So we want to make sure that pressure that we’re applying comes from made hands, such as [second set], as well as weaker hands that generate a lot of [expected value] when they accrue folds from our opponent.
This type of [hand] can mix between betting and checking on the turn. In this instance, I chose to check.
Facing the Villain’s delayed c-bet, Chris should check-raise with all of his strongest hands (top two pair or better). A full pot-sized raise is best in order to apply maximum pressure to the Villain’s largely capped range.
Once the Villain re-raises the full size of the pot (essentially all-in), Chris is in a bit of a nasty spot. He has the second nuts, but his opponent is representing the nuts (top set).
Chris explains that, when we have hands like 77 or J7 here, we are basically indifferent between continuing and folding. They could go either way — the spot is that close.
Keep reading this section for Chris’s full explanation of why that is. Warning: this analysis gets very advanced and PLO beginners may prefer to move on to the results.
Chris uses Monker Solver, specifically a powerful feature called Equity Graphs, to figure out the best course of action facing this big turn raise.
These graphs show how a specific hand class in Chris’s range fares versus the Villain’s entire range. The hand class on the left is naked middle set — “naked” indicating there’s no backup equity (draw) to go with the set. The hand class on the right is naked top two pair.
I’ll let Chris explain further:
We can see [on the left] that when we have pocket sevens, [we hover] around 40% equity [versus Villain’s range]. Our opponent, on the other hand, can have a variety of different equity — because, remember, we’re looking at pocket sevens for our Hero but we’re looking at our opponent’s entire range.
You’ll notice that a huge portion, [around 43%], of our opponent’s range has almost 100% equity. That’s when he has pocket jacks and we are basically [drawing] dead. And then you’ll see this huge drop off in equity [followed by] a more gradual [drop in equity] that the rest of our opponent’s hands have.
[The part of Villain’s range that drops in equity] represents all of his semi-bluffs. He should be shoving a lot of hands here like combo draws, a wrap with a flush draw, maybe the nut flush draw with an open-ender, maybe a pair with an open-ender and a flush draw. These hand classes are going to have various amounts of equity against us.
So this is what we’re facing here when we have pocket sevens. We’re facing pocket jacks close to half the time and a variety of semi-bluffs that we’re doing anywhere from okay against to quite well against.
That puts us in a really tough spot here because with the offered pot odds, Monker Solver is actually both calling and folding some of these naked pocket seven combos. This is the hand class that [Monker Solver] is exactly indifferent between continuing and folding with.
Chris then draws an interesting comparison between the Naked 77 graph and the Naked J7 graph. Let’s take a look at that J7 graph on its own (with some extra labeling):
Despite being a weaker hand, J7 has a very favorable blocker (the jack) that reduces the likelihood that the Villain has top set. That’s reflected in the equity graph. On this graph, the Villain’s sharp drop in equity occurs sooner, meaning Hero will be drawing (near) dead much less often when he holds J7.
In that sense, it looks like continuing with J7 is preferably to continuing with 77, but that’s not the end of this analysis.
The same range of semi-bluffs from before has a lot more equity versus J7 compared to 77. This is simply because 77 has more outs to a full house, and thus it will still win the pot when the Villain hits his draw on a card that pairs the board.
These are the two closest hand classes on the turn. Monker Solver is leaning towards:
From this extensive analysis, we can conclude that weaker value check-raises on the turn (55xx, 22xx) are going to be really easy folds versus the big re-raise. They’re going to have less equity and everything is going to be less favorable compared to the two hand classes we looked at here.
Chris went on to explain an important and valuable concept that relates to folding strong value hands after having raised for value. Expand the next section to see what he said or keep scrolling to see the results of the hand.
Concept SpotlightI want to zoom out from this specific hand to cover [a concept] more broadly.
Whenever we check-raise, on the [J♣ 5♠ 2♣ 7♦] turn in this instance, we have both check-raises for value and check-raises for bluffs. Our value combinations are hands like J7 or better, we have some very strong semi-bluffs, and then we also have some bluff hands.
I think people are making the mistake of thinking that every time they check-raise for value, they need to play for stacks. That’s not true at all.
There are plenty of hands that generate way more value as a check-raise in a spot like this — such as 55 or 22, or even some of these J7 combinations — that are not strong enough to play for stacks whenever you surprisingly face a 3-bet on the turn here.
So, don’t make the mistake of thinking just because a hand is strong enough to check-raise for value, its also strong enough to play for stacks with.
Those hands should still be check-raised for value, even if they have to fold to turn 3-bets because they’ll be generating so much value whenever they force a fold on the turn, or whenever our opponent bluff-catches us on the turn and river with a weaker hand.
The Villain shows T♣ 9♣ 8♥ 7♥ for a wrap with a flush draw (which has 42.5% equity versus Chris’s set).
Unfortunately for Chris, the river was the Q♣ and the Villain dragged the $4,007 pot.
This has been an example of how to use solvers to better understand how to play tough spots in PLO.
Keep in mind that getting solvers setup is quite an ordeal. You have to spend €499 on the solver itself, thousands of dollars to set up dedicated server space, and loads of time to actually run the simulations.
If you want to skip all those steps, you should check out the Advanced PLO Mastery course. You can see a review of the PLO course here.
The course includes a library of solver-based content for almost every possible situation. Anytime you run into a gross spot in your own games, you’ll have material to reference to solve that spot without any hassle.
Click here for part 3 of this series, in which Chris will break down how to crush a common inefficiently in opposing players’ games.
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