FULL TILT POKER BLOG

#281 – Chris Ferguson Thinks About Pot Limit Omaha Eight or Better (PLOEOB), Part I

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PART I – APPROACHING A NEW GAME

Chris made it clear to me at the outset that he liked the exercise of explaining how he prepared to play an event at which he had little experience and about which little has been written or even passed around as general strategy. He wanted me to make it clear that he was NOT claiming any expertise in PLOEOB. [For the purposes of this article, I used the abbreviation PLOEOB for Pot Limit Omaha Eight-or-Better, PLO for Pot Limit Omaha, and OEOB for Omaha Eight-or-Better.]

Mike: Did you play the PLOEOB event at the World Series last summer?

Chris Ferguson: I played many events at the World Series this year and that is one of the very few tournaments I missed. I did play live PLOEOB once, in a tournament in England about six years ago. Does that make me a “U.S. expert” on this event? (laughing) I’ve put in a small number of hours, maybe 10-20 hours, playing it online.

Mike: You probably have as much experience as most of the field. When you sit down to play a new form of poker – any form of poker, not just this one – how do you approach it?

Chris Ferguson: Generally one thing you want to do, if you have less experience than your opponents (though that might not be the case here) is you want to play more conservative. You really want to tighten up your starting requirements. Don’t play that many hands.

Second, when you actually do find a hand to play, you want to play it aggressively. Start with the best hand and then make your opponents pay to chase you. That is the kind of approach that I would recommend most people to take in this tournament. A lot of people, in an unfamiliar situation, don’t know whether to raise or fold. So they just call. If you don’t know whether to raise or fold … raise or fold! Do either of those two but don’t call.

Here is one thing I see people do a lot: they play a game they have never played before and they actually play a lot more hands then they would normally and certainly a lot more hands than the better players. Starting out, when I am the first one to enter a pot, I basically want a hand that I think is better than all the people who have to act behind me. If you are first to play with 9 players behind you, you want to play only your top ten percentile hands and that should be true for just about any game. In games with antes, it might be slightly less true but still generally a good guideline.

It’s true in this game. In all games played with blinds, you really want to have a hand that is better than what your opponent is going to have at any given time, especially for your starting hands. Be patient and be careful and be aggressive.

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