Brags. Beats. Battlestar Galactica.

I've been playing a ton of 200PLO 6max, varying between deep 250bb with antes and regular 100bb and it's coming a lot more naturally to me than it did previously. With my new approach to the game, and confidence in that approach, it's a lot smoother ride in terms of easier spots and less tilting. Before, I would often make calls which I sorta knew was wrong but wasn't that confident that it was wrong so I did it anyway (which hurt my winrate, leading to bigger losing sessions, which lead to even more tilty calls), but now I'm much stricter into saying "this is a clear fold, and I know why" - I guess my mathematical understanding of the game has improved lots.

It is also becoming much clearer to me where opponents are making mistakes, and precisely how big those mistakes are. The most common being bad pre-flop hand selection/aggression compounding, leading to bad situations postflop, mostly people being overaggressive preflop with 3-betting then choosing to call off 4-bets when their hand is in really bad shape.

I'm thinking about the game a lot, especially in terms of where the money usually comes from and it breaks down into two main postflop situations where:

a) an opponent ends up putting in a lot of large bets behind.

b) an opponent ends up folding his equity on some street when the pot is sizeable.

These may be obvious, but what is special about these situations is that opponent's plays could technically be FTOP correct calls or folds. The problem is they set themselves up on an earlier street, be it playing a bad hand preflop or making a loose call on the flop and it ends up hurting them when the pot is big and the bets are big. Because equities run close in this game, a bad preflop call can often be enough to "pot-commit" you for the rest of your stack.

a) happens a lot due to playing hands preflop that are frequently dominated when they do flop something - I'm talking small suits*, small wraps, gaps at the top, bad Axxx hands, 3 card connectors, 2 card connectors, and just random disconnected hands.

* Small suits sometimes means anything that isn't the nut suit. I used to get too peel happy with weak hands that had K high suits before (using position and ability to outplay opponents as an excuse), but they lead to a huge amount of trouble multi-way, most particularly in spots where you flop a king high flush draw + something; those are terrible reverse implied odds situations where all options aren't really that great, while with the nut suit you are almost certainly comfortable in continuing. Given how visible flushes are, you just don't get paid that much on K high flushes and you also end up in situations where your flush draw is dominated in an all-in situation. Q high suits suffer the same problem but are significantly more dominated, and J high and below are almost worthless other than as backup.

Sidenote: Even hands like JT97 (suited or otherwise) carry a lot of flopping problems that people don't realise because they instantly see a monster; the power of JT97 is actually in quite an infrequent number of really strong lockdown boards, but there are still a ton of a trouble boards/bad postflop situations, just because whenever the board is twotone, a nut flush draw can have so much equity with decent side cards. In fact, JT97 actually suffers a lot from not seeing all 5 cards straight away, because only seeing 3 cards doesn't give it enough chance to flop the big things that build up a lot of its equity. I'm not saying you should suddenly start folding JT97s all the time, but realise that it's weaker than it looks or people seem to suggest, especially OOP and multiway.

b) ends up happening a lot because people are really loose on the flop in terms of what they peel with. For example, peeling bare overpairs on most non-paired boards OOP is rarely a good idea because you have to fold or get valuetowned on the turn so often, but a lot of people do it. They are afraid of folding the 'best hand' with kings, but that's a terrible way to think about poker because your hand never really improves. Even if it does have equity, your equity is built up on hoping your opponent misses but it's still very easy for him to leverage his equity on future streets, and you can't exactly call down unimproved overpair for several streets, so they usually end up folding on the turn or river after turning their range face up as weak. Well, either that or they don't fold and a) ends up happening really often. Unless you're against a passive opponent, save yourself the money by folding the flop. 

The way to make money is simple: play better hands than your opponents then the situations come naturally, but also be very aggressive with your entire range when you know their range is wide and weak - put them to the toughest spots possible and back this up with those strong range of yours. The thing is, if this were NLHE and you were playing strong ranges pre people would just avoid you, but the nature of PLO and people's bad understanding of mathematics means they don't really care your ranges are strong and still end up making big mistakes against you regardless, when really they should just have folded preflop.