Edit: I awarded John a bracelet in the wrong event.
John “KasinoKrime” Beauprez, winner of the 2013 $5000 pot-limit omaha $1500 no-limt hold ’em 6-max WSOP event, will be our guest on Episode 43 of the podcast. In addition to talking to him about his poker career and the excitement of winning his first bracelet, we’ll also talk PLO strategy.
John is the author of PLO QuickPro, a hefty soup-to-nuts strategy book. We considered featuring PLO QuickPro on a month-long bookclub, but ultimately decided against it on the assumption that the $300 price tag would be a barrier to participation for a large percentage of listeners. Instead, John has made one chapter of the book free for readers of this blog to download, and we encourage you to read it before you listen to our interview.
It’s worth noting that although featuring a book or author on the show doesn’t necessarily constitute a recommendation thereof, speaking for myself, I’m nearly finished my first read-through of the book and have found it quite good so far. I’ll be publishing a review in the next week or so.
If you have suggestions for questions either about John or about PLO strategy, please leave them as comments here and we’ll consider them for the show.
I’m so happy you’re going to be talking about PLO! It’s my main game, so I’m always looking for intelligent discussion of it.
I’ve not yet finished the sample chapter from John’s book, but am enjoying what I’ve read so far. However, I’d like to ask a question about the following paragraph:
“Check-raising with a set on monotone boards is also a good option, because these are one of the few opportunities to semi-bluff on monotone boards. Accompanied by the fold equity from a check-raise, this can be a very profitable line to take.”
Suggesting that we are “semi-bluffing” implies that we are (at least partially) trying to fold out a better hand in this spot. If that’s the case, what better hands are we trying to make fold? The large majority of better hands, surely, are going to be flushes, and are we really going to fold them out that often? Are most villain’s ranges not likely to be weighted towards the bigger flushes, which are significantly less likely to fold? I can see the benefits of not letting someone hit a cheap straight, and possibly also getting calls from lower sets, and thus raising for value and hand protection (but I’m not convinced that these factors in themselves give us enough reason to raise). It seems to me that you want to keep the pot small if you think you might be against a flush, and hope to fill up, rather than attempt a bluff against hands that are unlikely to fold – particularly as we are out of position. Raising seems most likely to either build a pot against a hand that is beating us, or fold hands that we are well ahead of. Is this line of thinking flawed?
Thanks for the very good question, Chris. We put it to John, and you can hear his answer on Monday 🙂
Hey Chris,
Here is my own answer to your question. The question on whether to raise, flat or fold sets on a monotone board is very dependent on position, texture, width or ranges, and player tendencies, but I do think that raising is more often than not better than calling.
The reason is that indeed villain will sometimes have the nut flush. However, we need to be raising with some hands in order to put pressure on second nut flushes, third nut flushes, and worse flushes; typically even if we play the nut flush and the nut blocker aggressively, we still don’t have enough hands to put in our raising range, especially when the flop is seen heads-up. So rather than bluff-raising with air, or raising with non-nut flushes (which we usually like playing more conservatively), we prefer using sets as semibluffs. Using sets as drawing hands is sometimes fine, but in many aggressive games we just don’t have enough implied odds to make this particularly profitable, especially if we’re out of position.
It’s a bit similar to how in no-limit holdem we often like playing 9s8s aggressively on a Ks8c4s flop, especially when we’re out of position and see the flop heads-up: villain certainly will have a strong hand some of the time, but we like using our hand as a semibluff even if it has some showdown value, since we often won’t get to realize this showdown value anyway.
hmm, so I guess the interview is concluded?
Would you be able to put a “comments / questions for future podcast” request with a ‘due date’ so we know when it is too late, please?
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Yes, sorry about that. We don’t often know far enough in advance who our next guest is going to be, but we’re hoping to change the way we do things. Hopefully that will make it possible for us to solicit questions in advance more often, and you’re right that we ought to give you a cut-off when we do that. Thanks for the suggestion!