After publishing an article about the $5,200 SCOOP PLO Main Event, the editors were intrigued by a comment we got from Andrey "Premove10" Skvortsov:
As expected of one of the weakest finals for $5,000 PLO buy-ins – the weakest level of play :)
To explore this topic, we invited high-stakes MTT reg Nikolai "NikolasDLP" Prokhorskiy to the stage.
First, the lineup. I haven't played on PokerStars since 2022. Compared to GGPoker, this final table, I think, doesn't quite measure up to the regular $500 tournaments on GG. It's closer to $100-$200 tournaments, in my opinion.
The only difference is that Prudently, the Dane, is clearly a top player. I remember him from Stars, a guy who played PLO 5k cash games. But when I was analyzing the final table, I noticed that he's surprisingly well-versed in ICM, re-pushing, and so on, as if he was specifically trained in MTTs. Online cash game players don't have those skills. He's clearly a strong PLO player who understands the intricacies of MTTs.
If we think abstractly, there are PLO cash game players, there are Hold'em MTT players, and there are PLO tournaments. Which has a greater influence? The specifics of Omaha or the tournaments? In my opinion, PLO is more important. Although Hold'em MTT players think the opposite.
Firstly, I can say with certainty that it's easier for a PLO player to learn to play these MTTs than for a Hold'em MTT player.
Secondly, I don't know how well I'm expressing this, but for me, most Hold'em MTT players in Omaha are semi-fish. At some point, I fell behind the current Hold'em MTT rankings and stopped understanding who was top and who wasn't, and when I started actively playing Hold'em tournaments, including high-stakes ones, I eventually realized that a decent pool of top players were marked as fish because I'd crossed paths with them in Omaha tournaments. And I don't really do this out of tilt, I think, but only when I see someone is clearly playing the wrong way. Then I see they're in the top 3 at GG Millions. Okay, I think I should re-mark them; they're probably a reg. However, I never actually mark a PLO reg as a fish. I can consider that a person plays with mistakes, a little in the wrong direction, but he is not a fish.
Omaha differs from Hold'em in its specifics, with a very similar preflop equity distribution. Equity fluctuates more between streets, and a major runout can occur, which can completely overturn the equity distribution and the nuts. Hold'em doesn't have this, and they build their strategy a little differently. Hold'em MTT players don't really understand this subtlety. Although there are a few who have really improved. Artur Martirosyan is quite good at this. Compared to the strict standards of those he plays against, like omaha4rollz and the like, he's weak at that level, but compared to average PLO-MTT players, he's quite good, and I certainly wouldn't label him a fish even if I didn't know it was him.
In my opinion, people's real skill really comes into its own in 3-5-max. When it's 6 or 7-max, everyone is locked into very tight ranges and usually doesn't make big mistakes. Take Talal Shakerchi, for example. He generally understands the game; he's been around for a long time. Sure, he might limp when he shouldn't, but you can't say he's free. People make mistakes on the level of PLO regs making even 100. I'm going to tell you right now that this guy made a lot of mistakes, and that guy made a lot of mistakes, but that doesn't mean they're idiots! You have to look at the context.
By name at the final table. WhySoS€rious busted pretty early, and I didn't have time to assess his skill level. He's neither bad nor great.
Rodrigo Selouan, as far as I could tell, is an NL MTT player. Selouan, Schemion, and Pads—they're all more or less the same level. They just had different roles at the table: Selouan had a big stack, while the other two were mid-table. Selouan played aggressively, but crumbled horribly when he lost his chips. He was especially bad at 3 and 4-max.
Alfred "Kzzon" Karlsson, is a well-known PLO player. He is considered careful, while I play a slightly different style. But careful and a bit nitty isn't always a bad thing, especially in MTTs. I can't say anything bad about him.
Talal "raidalot" Shakerchi—he made mistakes, he's a fish, but he's not a freebie at all. No disrespect intended.
I selected a few hands and discussed them with a decent PLO MTT regular. We have different styles and approaches, so it's been very interesting. I didn't ask if I could mention him, so I'll leave it anonymous.
Let's start with this one:
While watching the final table, I noticed that limp. That should have been a preflop fold. And Schemion will have plenty of hands like that. To do something like that, you have to have no respect for the people sitting behind you. There's a top reg in the SB, and in the BB, there's a NL Hold'em reg just like you, probably playing just as well as you. I don't know, maybe if Shakerchi had been in the BB with a big stack—passive, careful—then maybe something could have been done. It turned out to be a pointless hand. Schemion essentially won it, making two pair into two pair. Selouan could have won if he'd check-raised with a pair, gutshot, and flush draw on the flop, but his call was correct. I don't see the point in check-raising; he simply realized the equity in his hand.
In this situation, against a chip player, we should limp very few hands. The main difference in tournaments is the presence of a bubble factor, now called a risk premium. It's easy to calculate: we need 38%, add another 12% on top, and now we need 50% against a range. And there's another factor – the ability to realize your hand's equity. And the latter is much more pronounced in Omaha than in Hold'em.
In Hold'em, you've either hit the nuts, or you've got nothing.
In Omaha, there are many more marginal situations.
And going toe-to-toe with someone who can play hands aggressively is very expensive. And Ole "wizowizo" Schemion has no reason to think the Brazilian will give up his aggressive play. Even in position, you might not fully realize your hand with such hands. Therefore, I consider his limping an act of disrespect – as if to say, "You're so bad that I'm going to realize my hand against you anyway!" Either he's suicidal and just losing his chips. One of the two.
I'm starting with such a small detail because when I turned on the final, I was looking for every mistake. I saw many such micro-moments during the tournament, and we won't dwell on them each time.
Wizowizo chickened out of three-betting here. What's typical of people who don't understand the intricacies of PLO?
Take wizowizo, for example, Ole Schemion, a famous MTT player who's been playing since he was a kid. As much as he understands the dynamics and steals and resteals in NL, he doesn't understand them in Omaha. Talal "raidalot" Shakerchi is definitely a player, albeit at low stakes, and you can't imagine him as a nit who, even with a short stack and from early position, only raises aces and won't raise-fold. Shakerchi—he's just a smart guy. He knows which hands regulars raise and how they raise-fold.
He's not necessarily supposed to open this particular hand, by the way. I didn't count; he's certainly the shortest at the table, and with a 16bb stack, he should be a little looser. But "looser" still means 15%, maybe 12%. And with such a narrow range, Schemion should three-bet with his hand, and raidalot should fold it to a three-bet.
We three-bet pretty tightly, of course. Even if we three-bet hands like these, the overall 3-bet will be around 3.5%, of which 2.5% are aces and a bit more... and a few more hands like that are added. These are good hands, semi-bluffs, bluff-3-bets. If you run into aces, you'll do more or less well, not super badly. Well, you'll have 38%. And you block aces, have good fold equity, and all that.
You could say he just played more carefully. More carefully here, more carefully there... But that's really a misunderstanding. Prudently, I noticed, he didn't miss a single resteal! In fact, all the ones he made were correct. That's why I was shocked by his play. I looked at some resteals and realized: I would have chickened out there. But he executed everything perfectly, did absolutely everything he needed to! Kzzon chickened out too—the article mentioned it when he did it for the second time in a row. and didn't three-bet. That is a mandatory resteal! But, even though they're in the same category, Schemion's hand in this hand makes me even more inclined to re-raise.
Let's move on to the Pads vs. Schemion hand.
Why do you think I returned to this screenshot? Preflop, Pads, the shortest, raised, Schemion in the big blind called. Then donk pot, all-in, and call.
What do you think Pads's raising range should be at the 7-max final table?
7%! Against 7%, Schemion should fold his hand. His bottom hand is the same hand with an ace-high suit. There's a difference between a regular flop and the nuts here.
Translating Schemion's mistake into cash game terms, it's a -0.1bb call. So, it's not a huge mistake, but it's there. But it's not necessarily the bottom of what he's calling with... For me, this is another example of a lack of understanding.
He can be commended for betting the pot right away on the flop. That's right... or rather, it's solver-like. The solver here checks very few strong hands, and plays value hands quickly, not wanting to give away free cards.
Here comes a point that's a bit specific – perhaps not all of the solver's lines are correct against people. Keep in mind that he donks 50% of the time here! The only hands he doesn't bet are sets of queens, sets of nines, and half of the sets of threes. He crams in all the other value and draw equity.
Pads went all-in here, and the solver folded the hand! But I'd argue with him here. The calculations suggest a close decision, so a few other factors could influence the final conclusion. First, I was calculating in Monker, where ICM is officially experimental. Second, such calculations in Omaha don't take FGS into account (Future Game Simulations), and FGS always biases ranges toward looser hands. In reality, the risk premium is always slightly smaller than solvers think. How much is an interesting question.
When I was playing hyper-turbo NL on Stars back in the day, we'd calculate FGS five hands in advance—two rotations. We couldn't look any deeper. But there were hyper-turbos, 10bb stacks, and the tournament would soon collapse. But here, the tournament is slow, and you can use a big stack for a long time... I'm still not sure how all this affects things. But when I ask MTT players, they throw up their hands and say no one calculates that.
Anyway, what I'm getting at is this. A solver wants to fold. I think folding is crazy. The decision was very close, and if Schemion's range is slightly adjusted, it'll all go through without FGS. So you can't blame Pads for going all-in. The mistake in this hand I want to point out is the preflop call.
Now, suddenly, we jump into 3-max.
Preflop: Prudently raises the pot, Selouan calls, Ole "wizowizo" Schemion calls.
Postflop: check, check, Prudently 3bb, Selouan raises the pot, fold, fold.
What are your thoughts on the hand?
There are three players, you can be in the place of any of them.
Obviously, it's easiest to play as the chip player. Your mistakes eat up less EV, just keep your foot on the gas. But you have to open the pot by sizing, which is what he does. Do you see why 2.5bb is worse? We shouldn't let the short-stack player see flops and build his stack. By reducing the preflop sizing, Prudently hurts both himself and Selouan, who also doesn't enjoy the short-stack player making money. And if you switch Selouan and wizowizo, then a 2.5bb raise only hurts the raiser. This is another peculiarity of Omaha tournaments.
By the way, Prudently's opening range in this situation is any two. A pot bet, without looking at the cards. He didn't play like that, but I didn't think it would be that wide either before the calculation. I thought, well, 75%, maybe 80%, or 85% if exploited, but still, it's a total bust. But the solver smashes everything. And that's despite wizowizo only folding about 50%.
When I watched the video, I immediately thought: "Looks like a bad call with kings! I should fold." Yes, kings are good against Prudently's opening range, but – realization! We can't realize its equity against a more or less strong player.
So, a 100% solver open is probably a bad idea in reality, since we see Selouan calling with a hand that should be folded. People tend to kill themselves with ICM. In the solver world, Selouan should be defending, like, 4% of hands in this situation! I didn't think it was that bad either.
What if we take FGS into account? Maybe calling with FGS is okay? I'll put it this way: who knows! Maybe it's not as bad as the solver thinks.
In wizowizo's place, of course, it would be a call, and even with the same suit on the ace it would be a call.
Well, on the flop, it's total crap on Selouan's part!
His pot-sized bet means he'll never convert kings properly in his life. And, furthermore, it highlights his preflop mistake. If someone like omaha4rollz were in Selouan's place, he wouldn't need to fold his kings because he's skilled enough to convert them well in this spot. And Selouan, specifically, if he plays kings like that, probably shouldn't have even brought them in at all. He should have waited. Sit back and not show off.
We just said Prudently has any two. He bets. He's probably not range-betting, but he's still betting pretty loose. I think even with two players, the continuation bet is 50-60%. Both wizowizo and Selouan are betting on sets of aces and , and we're not afraid to lose a few chips. And there's a short-stack in the pot—if his suffering ends, you, Selouan, will be playing heads-up on chipEV. How could anyone even think of giving a pot-raise here? It's fucking nuts, frankly! That's how I see it.
Here we move on to the stage where I'll f... them. Strong MTT player...? I just mark him as a fish. That's how I become a fish.
It's clear that when he's making a pot, he can't play the hand at a loss. But, overall, how are you supposed to play if you're shoving your nuts in like, "Oh, my God, I don't know what to do with them"? It screams that he doesn't know how to play most runouts. That can never be the best play.
Well, let's say he'd gone even further and raised to 8bb. Like, Schemion will go all-in, I'll play, and if he goes all-in, I might fold. That could be justified somehow. But I think he simply doesn't have a raising range. Yes, that happens. And it's a very serious mistake.
Another reason I liked Prudently is that the guy made very few mistakes. We'll see if one of them is catastrophic—maybe just a case of inattention. He had, however, perhaps the toughest spot. Right behind him is an aggressive chip stack. All the short stacks are sitting to the right—Prudently has position on them. That's bad. I think it's the same in NL, but definitely in PLO—if we take the chip EV stage and put a short stack against big stacks, the worst spot at the table is to have position on the short stack, the best is to be out of position on him. Prudently played hardcore the entire final table. He needed to find resteals against the chip stack, which he did, maneuver... It was tough for him. And he delivered. Even in 6 or 7-max, where there are fewer difficult decisions, he had a tougher time than the others.
Selouan, on the other hand, had it easy. And as soon as the difficult decisions began, we saw his true level of play.
Let's move on to another NL-MTT player.
First of all, I absolutely hate limping aces. According to the solver, you don't have to invent anything. Just play the hand. If they fold, good. If they don't fold, well, you'll have to play postflop somehow. The opponent is in the big blind. Everything is perfect.
Selouan's call from the small blind is correct. He's a chip player, it's realized normally, and there's no need to fold such a hand. Raising is also fine. A complete bet of 0.5 bb for the pot with an ante is fine.
Postflop: Selouan's 2/3 lead on the flop with trips is nonsense. When we were reviewing the hand with another reg, we forgot about the preflop action and thought that since Selouan found a 2bb bet, there were probably 8bb in the pot, and he continuation-bet a quarter. And in our world, it all came together. Then I noticed that no, I clearly remember Pads raising the pot. And then we noticed there were three blinds in the pot.
I don't want to dwell on Selouan right now, though; we've already covered him. He's a chip player, he won't play badly, although in his place I'd play range check. This board suited Pads's range better. , , ... And Pads will sometimes have , sometimes we will, sometimes Schemion. This board just didn't suit Selouan's range enough to bet two-handed without a pose. Overall, he plays Omaha with heart; they probably played like that in MTT Hold'em back in 2010. Hold'em has improved, but now they play like that in Omaha.
And – Pads's sizing is simply terrible. First, we should discuss whether we should even raise. Yes, the flop hit, yes, the chipped guy is fucking nuts, but why the hell raise that much? He played it so well that even this Brazilian is wondering if he should get it all in! Just raise 6.5bb-7bb, he's not going anywhere.
And what range would you put on a pot bet against Pads, in a pot that's empty? Am I bluffing, or something?
Like, a top MTT reg, a B2B coach, a $5,000 tournament... When people ask me, "Why are you so critical of NL MTT players?" Well, for example, because... My eyes just bleed when I see that.
I'm not even talking about whether we even need a raising range against a chip player who's going nuts. What if he just bet random crap? And is about to fire a second barrel?
It doesn't make sense. You can't be afraid of anything here. You're admitting your incompetence, but you're still sitting down to play a $5,000 tournament.
I'm all for it, actually. I'm only too happy to have guests from NL. Their egos are through the roof, they have a huge belief in themselves, but they usually don't have the energy to study PLO. There are NL MTT players who are pretty good at PLO, but there aren't many of them. Some of them play Tritons. Not so bad, but they still lose to, say, Laszlo Bujtas or Eelis Pärssinen. Say, Foxen plays PLO-MTT better than Pads. He won't do anything that crazy. But he still does a lot of crap.
When Foxen and Jason Koon play in a lineup with Bujtas, Pärssinen, Richard Grieco, even Guerrero, oh... We were recently discussing a hand where Guerrero had double-suited kings in the cutoff, there was a raise in front of him, he sat there, thought for two time banks, and folded. And you checked the solver—and it really was borderline!
You immediately realized the guy knows his stuff. And then you watch Pads play in a $5,000 tournament. The guy manages to make a mistake preflop, an even bigger one on the flop, and then he simply doesn't have enough stack to make another mistake on the turn and river. And I just wonder why I can't play on Stars... And GG could host more good Omaha tournaments.
And, for comparison, the Prudently bug I found.
wizowizo, 8bb, folds. Prudently has 100bb. He folds. That's the whole hand. The correct way to raise from the small blind to the big blind is to raise anyone. And this is despite Seluan having to defend 70% of his hands. And 0% of his 3-bets, he can't three-bet. And then it's off to the postflop.
I think we can limp this hand, because Selouan will probably three-bet something. But I know for sure it's not a fold. And Prudently folded pretty quickly. Maybe he won a hand before that and, in the heat of the moment, decided to slip away.
I found something to dig into. The difference between raising and folding is quite significant in itself. Conceptually, it's also worth noting: a solver wants to raise everything, and this hand, while obviously weak, isn't rock bottom; it's in the top 90%. I was so impressed with his play that I thought: you, man, should be able to finish off hands like this too! Maybe it's easier for me to spot hands like this because I've outplayed hyper-turbo SNGs, where we're constantly pushing each other with a short-handed player. He's obviously less experienced in that department.
And he restole with . I specifically recalculated it. It was crucial for me. And everything is clear there, as with all the other resteals.
Unfortunately, I wouldn't 3-bet that. Yes, it's loose. But... I don't know. The problem with this hand is that it's awkward to play with a 27-blind stack and a call. It's hard to convert. It's easy for the solver, that's a soulless machine, but we can't do that, especially out of position.
By the way, this is a reason to praise Ole Schemion (wizowizo).
That limp from him was a complete solver. He probably played better than Pads in that final table. I didn't see any crap from him. The sizings were fine. This hand was also well played, and I figured it out. Everyone played okay in it. Kzzon did a great job, finding a fold here. I don't know how much everyone would have folded in his place in reality; some players would have gone cold turkey. But anyone who's played Omaha knows that three-handed low flops and low two-pairs don't end well.
So, those are my impressions. We can discuss Tritons sometime; I watch them regularly too. Admittedly, the players there are usually better. But there was one tournament that, compared to what we discussed today, simply looks like grandmaster-level play. Admittedly, there's not much to discuss there; people there apparently haven't played Omaha before. It's better to analyze Koon. Or, conversely, high-level final tables, like the last Triton for $100k, which Matthias Eibinger won. He also wasn't hitting the buttons at one point, but he actually played better in 4-max, and I liked it. Selouan, Pads, and wizowizo were noticeably weaker. The rest of the players at that final table were simply top-tier.
By the way, I do crazy things at the tables too. First, your time bank is small. You misread something in the solver, and you start to lose your cool. Plus nerves, tilt, whatever. I've played so many stupid hands on tilt... Just because I criticize people doesn't mean I'm a fucking genius and they're all... But I would never in my life give a pot-size like Pads or a pot-raise with kings like Selouan. That's for sure.
