A long time ago there was a book called “Seven Card Stud - The Waiting Game.” I forget who the author is and I never read it. But I think the book has a bad title. 7-Stud is an action game. Sure you have to wait for good starting hands at a full table, but that is true at every form of poker. So I stole the title for this post about Pot Limit Omaha, a real waiting game. Only it’s not about waiting for good starting hands. It’s about waiting for ATM machines to sit down at your table. That’s what playing PLO cash games is all about, especially online.

Most of the time you push chips back and forth with other decent players and when there is a pot-sized bet on the turn or river it doesn’t get called. You can grind out a small profit by playing slightly tighter than your opponents before the flop and becoming skilled at stealing small pots on the flop. But to expect all your profits from this game to come that way would be way too boring; too much work for the results. You need more big confrontations than would come normally in order to keep things interesting and avoid heading back over to the Hold’em tables.

Enter the ATM machine. These are the guys everybody is waiting for. If you are lucky you can find yourself playing one of them heads up. If not, you’ll just have to settle for your share of their stack (assuming all goes according to plan). These guys come in various shapes and sizes, but it’s obvious when they enter a game. The feel of it changes instantly, and there is no doubt that this player will be dropping off all his chips before leaving.

Most of them are overly-aggressive. By itself being very aggressive isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but PLO ATM machines over-play their hands. Either they don’t understand hand values correctly, or they have an irrepressible urge to bully the table. Consequently the best way to beat them is often just checking and calling with strong hands all the way through the river.

Another common mistake ATM’s make is to overplay aces. They will decide before the flop that they are going to play them as strong as they can and keep making pot-sized bets on the flop and turn. They will tend to call large raises with them as well. So what you want to do is be able to safely put them on aces preflop and then catch any two pair, a set, or a wrap and play it fast. The best way to do this is make a mini-raise with any hand you are going to play and when they re-raise the max you know they have aces in the hole. (Note that flush draws are not good in this situation because it’s just too easy for them to have the nut flush draw.)

Sometimes you run into an ATM in a PLO cash game who also is in the habit of making bad calls. In that case you just play your straight A-game and hope you get some hands. They will be broke pretty fast and you may or may not get any of it.

To make money playing Pot Limit Omaha, you just need to play a decent game and wait for the ATM’s to show up. If you sit and play, they will come. Especially at night. This is one of the most profitable ways to spend time at an online poker room. It’s usually a lot of fun as well.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, January 12th, 2008 at 6:12 am and is filed under strategy. You can follow any comments to this post through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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