New PLO Book

I received an early draft of an upcoming PLO e-book written by Tri "Slow Habit" Nguyen.  He's already written an e-book on NLHE with cts which I heard great things about, but which is currently out of my price range.  So, even though I've never played PLO or even watched a video on it, I was pretty interested in reading through the book.

It struck me as I was reading it that I used to read an awful lot of poker books. I've got books that I've read scattered throughout the house and garage, and stopped counting my old poker books at 19, but there were probably a few more.  And actually, just about all of them were pretty good (never bought a poker book before discovering 2+2, so between their decent quality and book forum, I was able to do decent research before buying).  I've got several on theory/math, a bunch on limit hold'em, a few on NL, and a few on other games, but none on PLO.  I know there are some PLO books out there, but not many, and since using Cardrunners and other video sites, I stopped reading as much anyway.

So, I don't know how to compare this one to other PLO material, but I can pretty well compare it to other poker literature in general, IMO.  The most immediate thing is that there is very little preamble, which is great.  I don't need another book to review pot odds and other basic ideas.  That means that this is not a book someone who saw a few episodes of High Stakes Poker and wants to get a poker book should get.  But that's fine, since I doubt that's Tri's target audience anyway.

Anyway, he jumps right into preflop play.  Although there are some hand charts, he actually spends most of the preflop section talking about a couple things that are way more important than what hands to play:  why you should play (and avoid) certain types of hands; and how equity analysis in PLO works (somewhat differently than NL).  Although the preflop section deals with some postflop content, obviously the meat of the book comes after preflop.  Like any other game with decent stack sizes, postflop is where the money is made and lost in PLO.

I like the way Tri organized the postflop section.  He didn't just go from preflop to flop to turn to river in the book.  The postflop section actually starts out talking about some general concepts and common mistakes, that to me at least, framed the postflop street by street content.  One of the things that would have helped me personally going through it the first time is more of using both the similarities and contrasts to NL in order to explain PLO concepts.  However, upon reflection, I think that may be because I have a decent amount of NLHE experience and zero PLO experience.  After getting some PLO under my belt and coming back to the book, perhaps I won't really care about the contrasts.

That aside, what struck me about the postflop play is that there was a good balance between the theory/reasoning and the practical application of that theory with both practical lines and actual hands.  I think for me why I emphasized books less as I got into video training and coaching is that the latter was able to provide a lot more case studies, and I had already built some sort of theory foundation.  With PLO, although I've got some general poker foundation and a good amount of hold'em foundation specifically, I needed the foundation as well as the case studies.  So, the balance in the e-book was great.

Here's where my thoughts on the book will be least satisfying to anyone reading this:  I have no way to verify right now that this is a correct approach to PLO.  For that, we would have to trust Tri :).  In all the other books I've read, I either knew enough to work out what made sense and what did not in the books, or there was already enough positive opinion about the books that I took it on faith that the authors were correct (for instance, my first two books where "Small Stakes Hold'em" by Ed Miller and "Theory of Poker" by David Sklansky).

Assuming that Tri knows his stuff in PLO -- and I would think he does (and it wouldn't take long for PLO experts to contradict him if he's wrong) -- his e-book seems like it will give a nice blueprint to the game, at least for a while.  The timing for me reading the book is pretty good.  I've been thinking about giving PLO a try, Hold'em Manager has a public beta of an Omaha tracker coming out soon, and it seems like there is a fantastic PLO series combined between Deuces Cracked and Blue Fire Poker out as well.  The only thing that makes me nervous is that I hate running bad at NL, and it seems that with PLO, you're more subject to variance.  One of the ways that I keep myself level-headed while running bad at NL is being able to know pretty much when it was played well and unlucky, and I won't have that luxury in PLO.  However, with Tri's book, I'll at least have a concise reference guide to measure my play against, and that will help a ton.

OK, I'd intended to keep this post shorter, so I'll stop now.  By the way, Tri's site, where you can see a full table of contents and an excerpt, is http://www.dailyvariance.com/