Friendly Advice For Micro PLO Cash Games

I’ll admit I haven’t studied much PLO in my life, but enough to hold my own in the softer side of games. That’s exactly where I found myself over the past couple of weeks, playing some microstake PLO cash games. A friend had asked me for strategy advice for them and, having been away from PLO for a few years, I felt like I needed to put in a bit of time at the table to figure out what state the micros were at in 2024.

After a couple weeks of investigative punting, here are the tips I sent him, hopefully they can be of help to you too.

I. Most importantly, practice good preflop hand selection. From what I’ve seen, players at these limits are making such enormous hand selection mistakes that you could do nothing but play solid ABC poker and have an edge against a significant portion of the population. You can then open up your game much more from the button since I saw pretty much no active 3-bettors from the blinds. But from all other positions, mostly tight is mostly right.

II. Call more on the flop, especially against smaller continuation-bets which I rarely saw happening with strong value hands (in fact, I can only remember seeing it once). Players at these limits appear to c-bet far too often, size their bets to the strength of their hand, and give up far too quickly when called (aka NLHE circa 2018). I found a lot of success floating against continuation bets on low and mid flops and then attacking checks and smaller turn bets. Remember, there are far more unfavourable runouts for aces and kings than favourable ones, so don’t be afraid to put some pressure on your opponents when the runout allows it.

III. On a related note, bluff-raise more yourself in pretty much any situation where your opponent isn’t mashing the pot button. Generally speaking, the players I saw all seem to think that 1. PLO is a nuts-only game and 2. That nobody ever raises on a bluff. Surprise them.

IV. Speaking to that second point, maybe they believe nobody raises as a bluff because…no one ever does!?! Having calling-stationed my way through these sessions (in the name of science, of course), I only ever saw two occurrences of river bluffs – and both of those were with the ace blocker on an unpaired flush board.

So, to recap, play good fundamentals, bluff more, and hero-call less.

Of course, you’ll have to practice moderation (aka ‘balance’) in all things if you’re playing with the same players regularly. You can’t go mashing buttons on every river and expect to get many hero folds. But if you play a solid preflop game and tactically ramp up your aggression in logical spots for it, you should be able to cruise past the micros, at which point, when it comes to PLO, I’ll sadly be of no further use to you.

Run good, my friend.