6 PLO, did he have str8 flush???

[chnren]

Wow, this is HU game I know with more players I would be more cautious but in HU I think he is bluffing here alot with hands like kt k7 qt q7 flushes narrowing him down to just 2 hands is a bit tight imho in 6 card plo its about nut hands but HU  its hard to fold what in effect is 2nd nut on this board if he has it he has it so wont be raising but hard for me nit to call

no-body raises the Q high flush for value on the river, and we have the key card he'd need to be bluffing, if he's buffing with a SF blocker then it has to be the (no good him bluffing with the or the ) so we have to assume he has the in his hand - if he has the K of diamonds with it he'd prolly just call this bet, so needs to be a hand, with the that can't call and DOESN'T have the or the with it. Also he need to have the naked , and decide to bluff with it, it's a lot less obvious a bluff than the NF blocker bluff.

There is, imo no other bluffs he can be making other than with the in his hand and given the criteria for holding that card and how it affects the other cards he's likely to have I just can't give him anywhere near enough bluffs to make this a call.

very nice analysis, Dave

[Ironside]

Wow, this is HU game I know with more players I would be more cautious but in HU I think he is bluffing here alot with hands like kt k7 qt q7 flushes narrowing him down to just 2 hands is a bit tight imho in 6 card plo its about nut hands but HU  its hard to fold what in effect is 2nd nut on this board if he has it he has it so wont be raising but hard for me nit to call

no-body raises the Q high flush for value on the river, and we have the key card he'd need to be bluffing, if he's buffing with a SF blocker then it has to be the (no good him bluffing with the or the ) so we have to assume he has the in his hand - if he has the K of diamonds with it he'd prolly just call this bet, so needs to be a hand, with the that can't call and DOESN'T have the or the with it. Also he need to have the naked , and decide to bluff with it, it's a lot less obvious a bluff than the NF blocker bluff.

There is, imo no other bluffs he can be making other than with the in his hand and given the criteria for holding that card and how it affects the other cards he's likely to have I just can't give him anywhere near enough bluffs to make this a call.

I obviously havent played as high as 5/10 but I have been called ans raised by alot worse in the 1/1 live games I used to play which is why I liked the games so much but I respect your points

[Ironside]

Let me rephrase that

when I say I resepect your points I mean they are probably more relevant at this level and online

[Honeybadger]

What do people (esp Lil'Dave) think about my suggestion that it would be better to call this river raise with the King high flush than with the nut flush? I expected some responses to it when I made the comment, and tbh I am not at all sure that it is correct. But it does seem to make sense to me (blocker to his bluffs when you have the NF obv)...

Also, what do you guys think to hero's half pot bet sizing on the river? It feels to me like we should be betting a bit bigger on the river with in our hand (whether we have the NF or are bare). But not full pot because we are unlikely to have enough bare Aces in our range to be balanced if we bet full pot - we will likely have more than a 2:1 nuts/air ratio due to not having enough bare Aces, and thus we should not bet the full pot.

The half-pot bet sizing instinctively feels like a good sizing to use with the King high flush AND a straight flush. This sizings makes it more likely that we are called by a smaller flush, and puts an opponent with the nut flush in a very awkward position. He may choose to raise the NF due to our half-pot sizing which would be suicidal for him since we will simply fold the King flush and jam the straight flush. And if he does not raise the NF then we have gained in a different way since we might very well have called a bigger bet if we had checked.

[tikay]

What do people (esp Lil'Dave) think about my suggestion that it would be better to call this river raise with the King high flush than with the nut flush? I expected some responses to it when I made the comment, and tbh I am not at all sure that it is correct. But it does seem to make sense to me (blocker to his bluffs when you have the NF obv)...

Also, what do you guys think to hero's half pot bet sizing on the river? It feels to me like we should be betting a bit bigger on the river with in our hand (whether we have the NF or are bare). But not full pot because we are unlikely to have enough bare Aces in our range to be balanced if we bet full pot - we will likely have more than a 2:1 nuts/air ratio due to not having enough bare Aces, and thus we should not bet the full pot.

The half-pot bet sizing instinctively feels like a good sizing to use with the King high flush AND a straight flush. This sizings makes it more likely that we are called by a smaller flush, and puts an opponent with the nut flush in a very awkward position. He may choose to raise the NF due to our half-pot sizing which would be suicidal for him since we will simply fold the King flush and jam the straight flush. And if he does not raise the NF then we have gained in a different way since we might very well have called a bigger bet if we had checked.

If you don't mind some small fry input Stu, that comment really set me thinking, it was (to me) a very original line of thinking.

There must be a whole book waiting to be written about naked ace bluffs in Omaha. It is probably my mind playing tricks, but 10 years ago people would always fold to a hefty bet from the bare ace, they would never call with less than the K flush, Q at a push. This year, in Vegas, playing, say, $600 & $1,000 PLO Tourneys, I saw some breathtaking calls with really bad flushes, time & time again.  The game has changed so so much, but every time it changes, it gives us new opportunities, you swim this way, & I'll swim t'other way sorta thing. If they call light, fine, 'cos I'm not betting light.

I play VERY small-ball PLO online, & sometimes I see calls which make me think that flushes don't exist. It is common to see a player with what is obviously the nut flush getting raised on the end after tickle betting every street. Happy days.

[SuuPRlim]

Stu I agree that the K high flush would be a better hand to hero here than the A high flush, as for him to be bluffing a sufficient amount he really must have the naked A in his hand as you say, also as you said earlier naked A combo's in 6card PLO are quite rare as from a purely mathematical standpoint if you have the  in your hand and have chosen to play the pot you will very often have another diamond with it. So with this in mind I think, from a theoretical standpoint given that we allow our opponents credit for being ABLE to bluff, requiring us to have a calling range behind a SF here, but not being combinatronically in a suitable position to bluff alll that often we can prolly just call when we have specifically , and with 1 or very preferably no aces in our hand (increasing the liklihood he has AA**** which would increase the chances of him having a naked ACE significantly)

Like you say I think that would be a good spot to value-bet with those hands HU as well. OFC I think VS most weaker opponents at 6card PLO, in the games me and Stu have played lots of 6card PLO in for example, you could happily value-bet K and Q high flushes, and you would fold to raises 100%.

@Tikay - I think in general the overall standard in PLO tourneys (spesh in vegas where the game is still not as popular as in Europe) is very poor, people calling down 3 streets vs generic opponents with small flushes or even sets/straights on flush boards is pretty much always very bad. The easiest solution to this is not to try bluff people off flushes in PLO tourneys, and to value-bet very aggressively (maybe even as low as 4th nut flushes depending on the player/spot)

Online poker for 4card plo has gone the opposite, flushes are certainly one of the hardest hands to play - getting sufficient value from the nut flush is very difficult vs competent players because people just are not value-betting or bluffing enough, people are getting to the last street on flush boards with what is a pretty polarised and extremely value-heavy range (basically either the nut flush itself, or the blocker, and it's actually not much harder to have a blocker than the flush) so folding to river bets there is just a really easy and immediately profitable play. I've attempted to get ahead of this by value-betting wider but this is not easy to do and it's often been that a non-nut flush draw hasn't been played earlier like the NFD would have been, Ive also tried to bluff more but it's so hard to do it without the blocker, I've attempted to go off in a few big spots with no blocker, picking times where something in the hand has lead me to think they DONT have the NFD.

With the way the population is playing at mid-stakes ATM the best strategy here would be to keep a polarised range (nuts/air) but just go crazy aggro with your bluffing, like I say though this gets you into all sorts of messes

[Honeybadger]

Tikay, what's all this nonsense about 'small fry input'? We're all just learning together and you've been playing a lot longer than me! The 'esp Lil'Dave' comment was only to encourage Dave to give his thoughts, not to discourage anyone else.

Boards on which a flush is the nuts create some really unique range vs range theory spots. The reason for this is because the presence of just one card in your hand (i.e. the Ace of the suit) massively changes the composition of your opponent's range. This effect is present on any type of board of course, but usually it only has a fairly small effect on an opponent's range. But on flush boards the effect is huge.

This sort of blocker effect can lead to weird situations in which, due to the presence of a key card (or cards) in your hand, you can actually know an opponent's range better than he does himself. In the hand in question a villain with a straight flush might raise big thinking to himself "I can get called here because I DO have bluffs in my range. I might play the bare Ace this way". Yet if YOU have the in your hand then you know he cannot have it! And so his range must be unbalanced - far too value heavy - and you exploit this by folding. In this case you know more about villain's range than he does... because you know where the is!

This is the rationale behind my theory of preferring to call with the King high flush rather than the nut flush. When you have the nut flush you block all your opponent's bluffs since YOU know he cannot have the bare Ace. So you know his actual range (in this specific instance) has far too few bluffs in it, perhaps even no bluffs at all, and thus you have a super easy fold with the nut flush. Whereas when you have the King flush calling becomes at least a bit more 'interesting' because villain now has some bare Ace bluffs in his range.

This whole logic is based on the very reasonable assumption that villain is never raising a non-nut flush for value on the river. What this means is that ALL flushes that hero has are basically of equal value - the nut flush is no better than a King flush, they are both bluff catchers. Which, of course, means that a King flush is no better than an even lower flush. And the corollary of this is that we should actually prefer to call the river raise with, say, a Jack flush with three of the suit in our hand (esp if one of them is a straight flush blocker) rather than the King flush. Once you realise that there is no difference in relative hand strength between any of your bluff catchers, you should look for blocker effects rather than thinking "hand x is stronger than hand y".

[SuuPRlim]

very good points at the end there Stu.

As an interesting add-on we have to remember that we can't go too low in our flushes, or start calling with straights etc, where Stu says thr K flush = the J flush here the J flush does NOT equal a 5 high flush or a straight because it's very possible that the villain is bluffing with a better hand than those, as we've already established that he would need the in his hand to bluff he could very easy have another bad diamond with it, the fact he himself has a flush with his blocker is near on irrelevant (I guess it makes it very VERY SLIGHTLY more likely you're bet is a bare ACE bluff and therefore gives his "bluff" a very small % more chance of working (as you'll ALWAYS fold the naked ACE to a shove, even though he would technically have the best hand) but his hand has no value whatsoever (he cannot call with it) except for the blocker value of the .

[tikay]

Tikay, what's all this nonsense about 'small fry input'? We're all just learning together and you've been playing a lot longer than me!

Yes, I've been playing PLO Tourneys for 12 years or more, but these days I mostly play at the micro limits next door. It plays VERY differently at those levels!

And truly, when I read the Level 5 stuff that you, LilD, Greek Boy, Patonius (?) & others Post here, it is honestly way above my head, I think at a MUCH more basic level. Big cards, potential nut hands, cards that work together, pot control, & identifying at it merchants to isolate & gamble against. Remember, in Tourneys we don't play anything like as deep as you boys do in cash.

 

[Honeybadger]

Hmmm... don't get too carried away with all this 'level 5 stuff' Tikay. We're all playing the same game, and to a great extent it's just about trying to make the best hand and get paid. Big cards, nutted draws, connected cards ... it's not like these things are suddenly obsolete because there's oh so many amazing players thinking at oh so much higher levels than everyone else.

To some extent it's a linguistic difference rather than a conceptual one. I remember many years ago I saw a (very) old school player call a bet after the last change with a 9 flush at padooki. He explained to me afterwards, "9 flush the same as a King padooki. I might lose, but it won't be to a 6 flush". Nowadays we call this concept polarisation. The old schooler would never have heard that term. But he understood the concept just fine.