So i have been a big fan of limit Hi/lo tournies and have had good success, but now i am thinking of making the move to the pot limit cash tables. I have had some success starting but nothing big.

I know in limit, solid play would tell you that you want to take high only hands when alot of people are in because this generally tells us alot of low cards are out and the deck is rich with high cards, so this makes sense. If we now look at Pot limit cash tables and or tournies, how are we looking to play high hands and are we adding or subtracting any starting hands from our general catalog in pot limit games?

An example would be, are we happy to call a big pot re-raise before with flop with a hand like 9 10 J Q or K K 10 Q assuming our opponent most likely has an A 2 or something of that sort? I ask this because i was playing a cash table earlier and called a players all in pre-flop with A 2 5 J with the ace suited and he showed A 2 4 9 no suits and i ended up winning with A J high and was called a donkey by the whole table.

Would like to start this discussion and get alot of the pot limit players inputs and what limit players have thought when or if they made the switch.

i think people usually switch the other way.



preflop in this game i usually take five things into consideration.

1) my hand
2) stack sizes
3) what would it take for each of us to get this person to pay me off
4) position is nice
5) his raising range

the order of importance here depends on the situation.

consider things like this

lets say a bad player limps with a full buy in. i have him covered. a tight player with 1/5 of a buyin makes a pot sized raise. im on the button. my calling range here is huge, even though im often behind the tight player. here im thinking about #3 and #2 mostly.

the answer to the example you gave is you didn't give enough details. high only hands generally require high implied odds because you are behind pretty bad preflop sometimes (#2 and #3 again). yea its nice if you hit, but you usually wont and if he aint gonna pay you when you do then he got the best of it with his a2xxish hand.

there are a lot of variables here, but i'll give it a go.

at most low limit tables, you're playing pretty tight preflop in both LO8 and PLO8 in order to ensure that your draws are to the nuts while the other idiots draw to 2nd and 3rd best hands while forgetting where the fold button is. akishore's guide (pinned in this forum) is good at explaining this.

at some mid limit tables, the play will be insanely nitty. in PLO8, i will start potting literally every hand that's not utter trash (up through single suited low-middle connectors in some sorts of tables) and force my opponents to define their hands against me so i can read their strength postflop. this raises both variance and winrate as long as you have enough control of the table to feel out the strength of your opponents' hands fairly easily postflop. my vpip, or whatever the pokertracker term is for flops seen, lol, is somewhere in the range of 70% for some mid limit tables. thinking players will annihilate this sort of aggression if you're not careful, though--pay attention to the difference between a table that lets you take down pots in position and a table which is waiting to checkraise your ***.

in nitty LO8 games, that type of thing is harder to do--it's difficult to just run over nitty LO8 tables since the hands everyone plays aren't going to be folded very often unless they get counterfeited or the flop comes from the wrong side of the deck. it's tough to explain how i alter my gameplan for nitty LO8 tables in precise terms, but my strategy in these sorts of spots involves isolation moves with some odd looking draws postflop--sometimes bottom pair, 2nd low draw, etc.--in order to knock out people that are drawing better than me but will have a tough time calling 2 cold to do so. but that's so situational that if you tried doing it without understanding the precise reasoning (which is a feel thing, mostly), you will just spew money. one thing you can manipulate fairly easily, however, is that if people are playing hands that are too predictable, you will know which flops whiffed everyone and you can take them down with a bet (things like 10 10 9, etc.). you can also pound on the blinds in position if they play too tight.

as for the lots of callers meaning most of the low cards are gone, well, that's a dangerous line of thought at a lot of tables (if there are lots of callers, it usually just means people are bad which is entirely more likely than everyone being good and just having a playable hand), but it would apply just as much to pot limit as it would to limit if it does indeed hold for a given table.

if you're looking for something more specific, sorry--my style of play, including preflop hand selection, varies so much from table to table that i couldn't really give you any hard and fast rules. good luck.

checky....


assuming we arent playing to run the table over but rather to put ourselves into situations where we win mostly by value betting, do you think my list of considerations good or bad?

good, but i'd say position is more important than anything else, even at low limits. it's very, very difficult to play a drawing hand out of position in PLO8 since you have to bet for value, but doing so can inflate the pot to the point that if a set repops you in position you might be looking at a very very tough call. if you don't bet your strong draws oop, you miss value, which sucks too.

i'd rather just keep the pressure on and get as much info as possible preflop while the pots are still small. also, i REALLY REALLY like isolating in PLO8 (achieved through preflop aggression) so that you get yourself into more 4 card hand situations that play much easier. 2nd-2nd is a monster HU, but can be a real moneysuck multiway.

edit: i also like high only hands more than you do, generally, i think. they're much easier to play postflop and tend to scoop when they hit. i'm probably not the best guy to offer PLO8 advice, though... i play a super weird style that has 5-6 buyin swings over the course of a session, and i don't think it would translate well to low limits at all. i also hate PLO8, lol.

I see what you two mean. It has become a more complicated game for me with the large raises because i was generally a pos flop player in limit, now with so much raising going on it requires my thinking to go up.

Generally i have noticed your position theory because if a low hand misses, it is generally checked to the next person who bets and it is folded to him. I will have to play some more and see if i can get a better grip on it because i started off with sit n gos and that was just basically playing tight and letting the others go crazy.