Patri's Peripatetic Peregrinations

Makes me realize how much I have to learn about PLO, and how badly I play now compared to how I could play. (Fortunately I generally play in amazing PLO games with crazy action). But I feel like with the strategies in this book, I would still beat the bad players, while also beating people who play like me.

Specifically, the book is based on the idea that people tend to just whack their chips in with any "big" draw (which is how I play). Yet some "big" draws are much bigger than others, and by restricting yourself to hands and situations where you can be freerolling/dominating your opponents, you can seriously punish the people who are less discriminating. Put another way, big bet poker is a game of maneuvering to play the occasional big pot. When the occasional big pot comes along, you want a big hand. More than that, you want a hand which *plays well against other big hands*. After all, a big pot happens when multiple people are willing to put a lot of money into the pot. So you want a hand that is still big when conditioned on the fact that it is facing another big hand. It's the equivalent of playing for sets rather than overpairs in NLH (in some sense - although the games are different enough that this is a very rough comparison).

A simple example is that I hadn't really thought about the difference between Ad2d9c9s and Ad9d9c2s. Perhaps it is clearer as (A2)99 vs (A9)92. The former hand, half the time that it flops a set, flops it with the key 9d. Which means that roughly 1/4 of the time it flops a set, it also flops the nut flush draw, which makes for a monster hand that often dominates other hands. (A2)99 is pretty speculative, but this makes it much better than (A9)92 - it has the potential to flop a monster.

Another example is that he makes a detailed study of the structure of wraps. I knew that less gaps were better, but it turns out that it really, really matters where the gaps are. QJT7 can flop a monster nut wrap, while Q987 cannot. Gaps at the bottom are OK, gaps at the top are not, because you want to flop the overwrap against the underwrap - that's one of the classic dominating draw situations. And top gaps lead to underwraps while bottom gaps lead to overwraps (nut wraps). (Also note that part of the power of a dominating draw comes not just from the all-in numerical superiority, but from the power with which you can play nut draws and nut hands, which adds some leverage beyond the numerical EV).