Poker Video: Pot-Limit Omaha by DJ Sensei (Micro/Small Stakes)

Congrats on your first and premier episode, Kevin!

Congrats. I get off work in an hour and can't wait to give this a watch.

Good stuff, I've been looking forward to material from you Kevin; I'm always happy to see vids from Dan.

Really looking forward to this series!

Really looking forward to this series!

+++1

very nice breakdown

the same as PLO fundamentals by LFTV yet more simple/elegant in your expression of the concepts

5 stars

I guess I have to watch this episode about 5times to get all the information out of it!

thanks a lot for this fantastic video!

I'm kind of curious as to what your thoughts are on how the presence of antes should impact your ranges in the small blind in overlimping or stealing. Your argument seemed to be that we shouldn't be too concerned with the pot odds we're getting but are antes widening your small blind ranges in any real significant way?

I'm kind of curious as to what your thoughts are on how the presence of antes should impact your ranges in the small blind in overlimping or stealing. Your argument seemed to be that we shouldn't be too concerned with the pot odds we're getting but are antes widening your small blind ranges in any real significant way?

I am considering devoting some discussion to dealing with antes in a future episode since playing with antes almost certainly also means playing deep. In general though the presence of antes should make you more incentivized to steal the blinds but not necessarily change your OOP ranges until you notice your opponents are adjusting to the antes.

Honestly though I think people mostly over adjust, rather than under adjust, to the presence of antes.

Time Link to 00:00:37

Congrats on the new series! The only thing bad about it is the lack of "long and thought out responses" to posts in the forum -- you went dark while making this vid. Don't be a stranger.

I'm kind of curious as to what your thoughts are on how the presence of antes should impact your ranges in the small blind in overlimping or stealing. Your argument seemed to be that we shouldn't be too concerned with the pot odds we're getting but are antes widening your small blind ranges in any real significant way?

Agree with Kevin that we should be stealing more when it folds to our SB (one nice thing is that we can raise bigger to drive out the BB more often), but that otherwise our VPIP should remain low. Remember, implied odds are much more important than pot odds when we're oop in a small PLO pot, so we definitely need to have some nuttiness to get involved.

Great start to the series guys! I agree with the interest in more coverage of PLO with antes, I think I'm one of the ones who over adjust .

I will make an effort to address antes in a future video. Something else that I will try to address that should be relatively quick is calling 4bets preflop, as a lot of the hand histories I received were about whether or not a 4bet can be profitably called (assuming villain has AAxx). Feel free to make any further suggestions.

Agree with Kevin that we should be stealing more when it folds to our SB (one nice thing is that we can raise bigger to drive out the BB more often)

Are we assuming that opponents are somewhat stupid and think that a 4.5x pot raise with antes is somehow bigger than a 3x pot raise without antes even though he's receiving the same pot odds in both situations and we aren't technically raising bigger?

I'm kind of curious as to what your thoughts are on how the presence of antes should impact your ranges in the small blind in overlimping or stealing. Your argument seemed to be that we shouldn't be too concerned with the pot odds we're getting but are antes widening your small blind ranges in any real significant way?

The thing about ante games is that people adjust to the fact there are antes but don't adjust to the fact that effective stacks are deeper, the latter being the far more important factor in how you should play because it vastly changes how post-flop play runs out.

Here's an interesting thing to note about ante games and depth. Some say the inclusion of antes don't really differ in depth from a regular 100BB game despite being deeper in BBs because of the larger size of the pot to start. To counter that, let's take a 50c/$1 200BB effective stack game with antes vs a 1/2 100BB game (note I am only taking two different stakes to use similar stack sizes, but there is no reason why we can't compare antes vs non antes at the same stake and only talk about SPRs). In the first, assuming 6-max, pot to start is $2.70, while in the latter pot to start is $3, both with $200 starting stacks. At first glance, you might think this is only a 30c difference so the games must be fairly similar right? After all, they have the same buyin and one is 74 SPR and the other is 67 SPR.

Wrong. Here's why. The way a pot sized raise is calculated makes a massive difference on future street SPRs. Because pot is calculated by calling first, the pot raise will be much larger when you are calling a $2 bb instead of a $1 bb before you raise. In the first, it's an open raise to $4.70, while in the second it's an open raise to $7. Assuming one caller from the BB, the pot is $11.10 in the first, but it's $15 in the second. Now suddenly we're dealing with ~17SPR vs ~13SPR and this gap only widens the more callers there are. Assuming an extreme example of all 6 players in the pot pre to one raise it's $29.40 vs $42, which is something like a 6.7 SPR vs a 4.8 SPR. To illustrate this even better, we could devise a game with no blinds and only a 50c ante and compare it to a $1/$2 game; both have the exact same $3 pot to start but you can see how the first has a limiting raise of $3 pre-flop that it changes true stack depth completely.

Now back to the idea of open stealing in SB in ante games vs non-ante games. Assuming our opponent in BB is slightly competent and realises that he is getting 2-1 in both scenarios against a pot raise when we steal from the SB, he should really be thinking about his SPR in this spot. In typical ante games, I believe SB can only pot to 4.2bbs, while in a non ante game SB can pot to 3bbs. If you are 200bb deep as you typically are in an ante game (on PS you can typically be 250bb deep so this is even more pronounced), this raise is a smaller % of your stack than the 3bb in the 100bb deep non-ante game. SPRs are higher in the ante games therefore position has more power postflop. This means in SB we should be stealing less in general (again assuming our opponent is competent.)

Apologies for the long post, but my point is stack depth should be the main concern in adjusting our ranges, not whether there are antes (unless our opponents are stupid and get confused by this easily and only think in terms of BBs.) I hope I also illustrated how the existence of antes messes with pot size raises that you should take this into account when thinking about stack depth.