Trying to find success at PLO
Hey all, this thread will be documenting my PLO journey. My goal is to become a winning PLO player and hopefully use it as a side income. A little about me: I'm a US based software engineer that recently turned 30. I began playing Poker in 2015 toward the end of college. I started at 2NL with about $40 and through the help of this forum + various poker content, I grinded up from 2NL to 100NL over the course of several months and a few 100k hands. Back then I loved grinding and studying - I listened to Joe Ingram's podcasts and had the dream to reach the success of some of the players on his podcast. However, I decided it was a foolish dream and focused on my career in SWE.
Recently I had the poker itch again and missed the old days of grinding. I'm also looking for more ways to achieve financial success. Ideally I would like to start my own business, but it would be great to use Poker to boost my income when I feel like it. I've always found PLO more interesting than NLHE, but during my old Poker journey, the games online weren't very available. Now I've found a site with ok action and the play feels soft.
So far I have a "lol sample size" of 11k hands of which I am losing. Although I had some ideas of what PLO hands you want to play, I think over the first few thousand hands my preflop selection was quite poor. I also found many opportunities to dust of stacks by trying to bluff way too much with blockers and bluff-catch way too much with blockers. I'm following Jnandez's course in attempt to improve my play.
So here's my first graph which is pretty lol. Basically began my journey losing 60BIs in nearly 8k hands lul. I'm also running pretty consistently 30BIs under EV which is...fun. However, over the next half of my sample (after putting time into studying) things are beginning to turn around.
I'm currently playing PLO100 and the games feel soft: a lot of limping, passive play, and occasionally maniacs show up and run up stacks. The variance can feel wild when maniacs show up and you start playing deep with them. Because of this, I do think I have an edge. A big part of my edge, I think, is that I don't tilt - which has been helpful since I've been running under EV so much.
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Small update. I've played a bit at the beginning of the new year and won a few buy-ins. Bankroll is at $5200. Since then I've taken a break to focus more on work and some personal projects. Sad to say that I haven't been all that motivated to play again. I think if I do fire up a session, I'll find some motivation. However, I'm not sure that Poker is the best use of my time. The goal was to learn PLO and make money on the side of my programming job. I've done well to achieve a winning winrate, but I'm not sure how much more I'm going to add to my income by playing 100PLO. And I don't want to move up stakes without first getting to there with my current BR. While I like Poker and PLO a lot, I'm not sure if it's something I really want to be investing my time in outside of work. It's hard to achieve volume when playing part time. The best use of my time is probably to keep getting better at my current job, saving more money to invest, and then taking shots at things I would find more fulfillment in that can make money (e.g. creating a business, content creation, etc). It feels kind of lame to quit only 30k hands in and while I'm making progress -- I would have liked to reach at least 100k hands -- so we'll see what happens.
