Rebuilding an online roll at 1/2 Online Vegas PLO

“The main argument I hear from people is that the dealer cut is enough, but it really isn't. Decks can be sequenced in a manner to always make a single player or position win. Decks can be sequenced in a manner to make "bad" hands win more often vs good hands. Deck sequence data can also be accessed and relayed to a player if they somehow hack the shuffler. Literally 1 riffle, protects against all these cases.“

You seem like a sharp guy but how can you have concerns about this in live poker but blindly trust the RNG online?

On the WSOP online poker forum thread, a couple people have stated they got 7 stars through playing online poker only but if I don't get "invited" then its not too big of a deal. I'm mainly using it as a source of motivation to put in hours. 7 stars is just something I've never gotten and I thought it might be cool to get but the benefits of 7 star vs diamond elite is not super amazing or anything relative to the effort it takes.

The PLO volume is doable b/c 6 card is new and interesting to me for now. I expect to get burnt out by mid to end of november and I'll most likely just take the entire month of december off from poker.

Well there have been different instances of the Deckmate 2 being hacked and also being used to cheat in home games. I've looked under the table (usually seat 1 next to the dealer at a casino) and the deckmate has its USB port right there in the open for someone to potentially stick in a drive and do who knows what. But the extent of my concern is not actually as high as you probably think from my post. I'd say I'm more than 99% sure live poker is safe in terms of shuffler shenanigans but I think one dealer riffle at the end of the shuffle is such a tiny and effortless addition, I just see no reason why it's not procedure. Its not even necessarily to stop deck sorted cheating, but to kind of give players who are a bit paranoid about the shuffler better peace of mind seeing a riffle at the end of the sequence. Currently, the deck that is being played with at a casino is entirely sorted by the shuffle machine, and then the dealer adds a single cut at the end before pitching, which has been proven to accomplish absolutely nothing if the deck is actually sorted in certain ways. So casino deck randomness = 99% programmable machine sorting input and 1% human input... and I prefer a bit more human rng input in this scenario.

As for online poker, I don't trust all aspects of online poker like potential collusion/infected malware and I've had my fair share of rage venting about WSOP RNG when I'm going on really bad down streaks. Pokerstars a long time ago used to have an annual RNG audit by an outside party and I remember watching some videos on how they generate their randomness using random inputs like sound vibrations and **** but nowadays, none of the sites do stuff like that to put people's minds at ease so we do kind of have to blindly trust the sites to have fair and secure deck RNG inputs.

That being said, the majority of online poker is rigged posts have come from pretty bad losing players, and in the history of regulated online poker software, there has never been a case of the RNG or deck being manipulated and after 20 years, you'd think there would at least be a leak if it existed (the UB hole card scandal was a non RNG related matter). The incentive to risk just does not exist for online poker software to rig their RNG while the incentive to tamper with live deck shuffler software does exist and has proven to happened multiple times in home games. Also, I've just always won on every poker site I've played on, Global Poker, Stars/Tilt back in the day, Ignition, Carbon poker...and I even made enough to purchase my first home on what is arguably the sketchiest site available which is ACR while I was doing their rake races. Nowadays I only play on WSOP and I'm up quite a bit the past several years playing PLO so I just don't have legitimate reason to believe the RNG could be compromised although that won't stop me from whining to my friends how rigged WSOP software is when I'm experiencing a downswing.

Weekend PLO promo wrap up
The PLO super rakeback promo is over and I way overestimated the volume I thought I'd be able to get. I was shooting for level 250 but only got to level 193 in 27 hours of grinding. This puts me at close to $2k rake contributed and with the 50% rakeback promo allegedly coming to load up my account in the next 72 hours, I should make close to $1k from the promo rakeback.

Also made like close to $4k at the tables so a pretty good weekend. My hourly in these games are going to take a noticeable big hit since the traffic has dropped to the point where I'm throwing a bunch of .25/.5 and .5/1 PLO6 tables in the mix just for volume. Here's weekend results where I break through my 100 hour breakeven stretch.

All in EV
I've finally separated my recording of all ins with heads up pots and multiway pots for plo6 200. I also decided to track my heads up all in EV for the month of november out of curiosity. So far my all in record for heads up pots is

(HU All in counts only)
Nov 1: 19-11
Nov 2: 11-14
Nov 3: 13-7

Multiway pots
7-13

Running close to 2k above EV currently in heads up pots but not doing that hot in multiways. I don't calculate All in EV for multiway as its a bit complicated and tedious to record. Here's what my spreadsheet looks like so far. WSOP not allowing stuff like Pokertracker is a real pain.

Random 50 PLO6 musings
I had a .25/.5 PLO6 table yesterday where the average pot was $75 a hand lol. 2 absolute whales were just going at it every hand and eventually one guy ended up with 2600 BBs which is the most I've seen for a plo6 table. He stacked me 4 times shoving basically any 6 cards pre but it was a pretty amusing session.

Highlight hand of the table. Notice the SPR and might I remind you again that this is .25/.5 stakes.

Anyways, I wanna get 1000 hours recorded of PLO6 at 1/2 and then I might start firing the 2/5 PLO6 line ups as its the same whales and some of the games look even softer than the 1/2 line ups. Or I might just cash out the bulk of the bankroll and not move up. Don't care too much above moving up stakes at this point in my life.

I also suspect that rigging the deck has a far bigger impact in a private game setting where its much easier to control the lineup of who is playing. Again, pure spectulation, but it seems that even in an extremely rigged cooler situation, its still far better to know the actions of the majority of the other players at the table.

Like Zefa said virtually every single online poker cheating scenario where the company was involved has centered around a bad actor with access to hole cards.

Now apps on the other hand....

Burnt out
Feeling the burn out quite a bit. Knew this was gonna happen this month as I could feel the dread of grinding starting to creep up on me. Haven't taken a single day off in the last 60 days except when I flew to Chicago for my sister's wedding for 3 days, and even then I stopped by Rivers Casino to do a quick hit and run PLO session after I landed.

Anyways, november progress + graph update.

Been playing a bunch of 100 and 50 PLO6 as the 1/2 traffic has slowed a bit and a few of the mega action players have been missing from the pool. At level 719 currently halfway through the month, I am technically on pace to still hit 7 star but I don't think I can do it. I most likely will go grind video poker during this 5x tier credit multiplier week and try to pick up the 1k tier + 1k daily bonus + 5k mulitiplier = 7k tier credits. Then, I'd only need about 300-400 more levels for the rest of the month to hit status.

All in EV graphs
I'm still manually tracking my all in EV at 1/2 for november and I decided to to track multiway all in ev separately as well.

1/2 PLO6 HU all ins played: 172 (103-69) for a 60% Win rate though my average equity HU has been 56% so running hot there. Currently running about 3k over EV for HU all in pots.

1/2 PLO multiway all ins played: 38 (11-27) for a 29% win rate for the main pot and my average equity multiway being 35% so running very bad in multiway all ins. Currently running about -1.5k below EV in multiway all in pots.

Corresponding graphs...

Stocks
Haven't really talked about stocks so here's what's up.

Still been holding British tobacco ($BTI) and it's my longest held position so far. Have about 45k worth of BTI, up around 12k on the stock and will probably still keep holding as I think its a nice defensive position. I also have about 44k worth of Philip Morris ($PM) but i'm barely up on that position as I kept loading up on it from as high as $168 and its fallen to currently $155. I will keep holding as I think it will continue to crush smokeless product section especially with the success of its Zyn product.

Crocs stock ($CROX) has been killing me. I'm down about 6k on the stock as I averaged in around $85 and its currently at $73. Have about 37k worth here. I had the opportunity to sell around earnings a week ago at $89 but I decided I'm ok with holding this for the forseeable future as I still believe the product is not a fashion fad and with its aggressive buy back strategy, it has a decent upside of $120+. But with weird trade tensions and tarriffs, who knows.

My Argentinian airport stock is by far my biggest position right now as its ballooned to almost $70k. The stock took a big hit when Milei lost badly in the Buenos Aires election a bunch of Argentina stocks tanked. He was pretty favored to win the election in October so I decided to load up and gamble on him winning which would likely give the argentinian stocks a nice boost. I was telling my roommate about yoloing a bunch of money on this play in september.

Anyways, milei won the mid terms so the stock got a nice jump and i dunno what to do with this position now. I'll prob still hold it until my price target of $25-$30 as they just got a contract with Baghdad airport and its just a solid business imo.

Tobacco, $Crox, $CAAP, $RSG are my biggest positions and then I have a bunch of random stuff on the side. $RSG is dumping kind of hard so I'm stuck like 3.5k on it. It's a waste management company so I plan to pretty much hold onto this forever since these kinds of companies almost always do well long term (see Waste Management $WM graph for example). Not sure why RSG is taking such a beating lately, but its probably a bit overpriced with a high P/E ratio for being a boring non tech company.

Sold my previous biggest position Walmart ($WMT) for a small gain after getting bored of holding it. Just sold all my BRK.B positions but I kind of regret it. Its one of those hold forever kind of stocks. If it takes a dip back down to 480ish region i'll load up again.

Did a medium size play on $KVUE when the idiot RFK's autism bullcrap report came out on tylenol = autism which tanked the stock so I loaded up on that and then Kimberly Clark announced it would buy out Kenvue and the stock bounced back up so that was another nice lucky fun play I had the past month. Sold almost all my $KVUE position.

My other positions are in $RDDT (new), PYPL(new), $CRMD (new), $NU (holding since $15), $HWKN (holding since $160 RIP), $DLO (new). I'm mostly just clicking buttons, I don't really know anything about stocks.

That's pretty much it. Nothing too exciting going on in life. Kind of looking forward to taking a break from poker and dealing WPT in december. Everytime I deal, my brain resets and I get reinvigorated and my motivation goes way up to play poker again so I think that's what I need in life right now.

Quick 7 star update

I ended up punting -1366 in video poker at caesars during their 5x multiplier. I got bored after 10 minutes so I started doing $25 a spin and ran pretty bad overall, was playing GTO though looking up all the holding strategy online for jacks or better.

My Caesars reward says I need 26706 points to qualify for 7 star. I think I still have the 5000 tier points incoming from the 5x multiplier which hasn't been applied to my account yet so I need 21706 points then. Since you get 20 tier points per level, I need level 1085.3 this month to get it and Since I hit 1092, I should be qualified. The only question remains whether I actually get invited into 7 star.

Gonna probably take the rest of the month off. Have friends coming in to vegas and I booked some rooms for them at Paris so I'll be gone for 3-4 days. Strong finish to the month.

As for all ins November, went 136-100 HU and ran 1.2k above EV. Went 16-38 in multiway pots and ran -1.7k below EV there.

November Wrap Up
Thought i was done for November but I ended up playing a couple hours here and there every day mostly b/c I was bored and didn't have much else going on.

Thought it'd be nice to have a profit graph over time as a function of levels instead of hours so I made that too so here it is.

All in EV
Ran +900ish above EV in heads up all ins and -2.1k below EV in multiways.

Breaking down the numbers, I had 261 HU all ins and went 150-111. My average stack off equity was 56.9% and I ran at 57.5% so decent results there.

I had 65 multiway all ins and went 18-47 for the main pot. Went 30-31 in the side pots if I had a side pot with someone. My average equity for the main pot was 38% and I ended up running 28% so pretty atrocious results there. Side pot equity was somewhat in line at 51% average, and 49% actual. Here are the graphs.

So it seems multiway all ins account for about 20% of my total all ins. It also seems that multiway all ins yield less overall edge than HU all ins. I especially think this is true for preflop multiway all ins where everyone is kind of shooting craps in the dark. Going forward, I may be incentivized to stay a little bit away more from getting into multiway all in spots (particularly preflop) as I feel like more of my EV extraction is gained from postflop strategy.

December plans + videos/course in the works?
My first day for dealing WPT will be December 7 so I'll be pretty occupied for the majority of the months since its usually extremely busy and many weeks I actually get scheduled 7 days. Won't be much volume for me there in poker.

I have been in very light talks about potentially making a course or videos for PLO6. I'm leaning a bit toward doing it but its very much up in the air right now. In december, whenever I do find time to grind, I'll probably start recording all my play footage to start gathering content. Of course, this could be an extremely bad idea since PLO6 is still very unexplored territory and I believe I am one of the best regs on WSOP in that format right now. The pool is very small and niche so any amount of players who learn the game through me should in theory eat up a ton of my edge...probably way more $EV lost than I would gain from whatever I earned through videos or a course. But on the other hand, I've always kind of wanted to make a course in poker. I did enjoy making videos when I did a few vlogs on YouTube and I feel like I could bring a fresh take on it and I also feel like I bring a more unique approach to how I play poker. And just like NLHE and PLO4, it's only a matter of time before more and more people make their own courses so i figure why not just get a jump start on it while I feel I'm quite ahead of the field. PLO6 is by far and away my favorite format in poker now and I really do also wish it grows and casinos or more online sites pick it up. I dunno yet.

Poker Courses Thoughts
When I studied poker over the last 2 decades, I would say I was a person who studied through mimicry or imitation. I was subscribed to all the OG training sites: pokerpwnage, pokerxfactor, cardrunners, runitonce, plomm, deuces cracked, gtorb, and probably a ton more I can't remember off the top of my head. I also bought a bunch of hand histories off sketchy russian database mining sites and upload all the hand histories to PT and just study all the players I considered the best. I remember during OTBredbaron's prime, even before PIOsolver was really a thing, i would just filter his preflop ranges to see what the hell he was doing. Back then, there was a program called pokersnowie and I found out that OTB's preflop ranges had an extremely close correlation with the ranges pokersnowie would spit out. (Post flop was a whole different matter and snowie's post flop strategy was a bit meh). Lifetime, I estimate that I've spent over 20k+ or even 30k+ in my poker education

I also did this for PLO when i transitioned over and just studied a ton of top player's hands through my database. A few memorable discoveries were stuff like seeing Sauce123 having a really weird BTN vs blind strategy where he cbet with 95% frequency on every flop for a 1/4th sizing. I had no clue what that was and no one else was doing it so I just copied that and started doing that on WSOP when I was rising through the stakes. It was effective, mostly due to players having no clue what the hell this was or how to respond to it.

Another funny discovery during those studies was thinking Ike Haxton and Ben86 were the same player. I knew they weren't but when I cross referenced all their stats as short stacks, they were all pretty much within 1% of each other. I had never seen such identical stats across the board between two players. There had been rumors floating about how Ben86 or maybe it was Ike had a PLO "dream machine" but I think they just had some spreadsheet or strategy they followed and they probably shared it with each other.

But the bulk of my development as a player just always came from watching videos. I basically fell asleep to Phil Galfond's voice every single night watching every play and explain video he made. Watched a ton of Jedimaster, Jeans, OddOddsen vids and very soon I could accurately predict all of their lines on every street before they did them. And thats basically how I got good at PLO. I felt like I knew how the best players would play my hand in each spot so I did what I thought they would do, and then I would figure out the reasons or heuristics on that spot later through mostly just thinking about the logic of the spots.

Nowadays there are a lot of courses. But my personal gripe with these course I've watched is... its just too much damn theory. Presentations, slides, charts, %s. It just puts me to sleep and I'm not gonna remember any of the #s or %s after a few days anyways. I just wanna see a pro sit down, play, and explain what he's doing in real time. I watched a course recently and it was basically all theory videos and some selected replayed hands. There was barely any play and explain stuff on it. I skimmed through parts of the slides and presentations and eventually just sat down and watched the play and explain. When it came down to playing in real time, I thought his play was quite...underwhelming. His presentations and theory stuff sounded all nice but when it came down to it, I disagreed with several basic spots he played. So I just didn't like the course at all.

If I wanna get good at a video game like league of legends, I'm gonna just watch a top player play through ladder games. I'm not gonna learn through him going through slides and theory. If I wanna learn chess, I would rather watch a speed run or just play and explain videos from GMs, I'm not gonna sit there and watch a single theoretical postition as he goes through 100 different lines you can take. For cooking a dish, I wanna see someone just make the dish in real time on YouTube instead of reading a recipe instruction. I'm not saying one method is inferior to the other, I'm just saying this is my preferred learning style and I recently feel like too many courses out there are all just slides and not enough gritty play and explain with live commentary.

Anyways, I had been thinking about how to structure a course IF i were to make one for PLO6. And my idea would be as follows:

-Just make $10k and do it live at max stakes 1/2 with live thoughts: I would record all footage and put it out there if anyone wanted to potentially go through 150-200 hours of footage. But this is raw and unscripted and I think there's a certain authenticity to seeing someone make money from poker unfiltered.

-Edit the actual footage down significantly to a consumable amount: These post footage edits would now include theory, a few slides, deeper explanations etc. Lets be real, most people aren't gonna watch 200 raw hours of play. It would be similar to how I edit poker vlogs down to a 20-30 min episode in a digestible way with a nice pace.

-Street Poker: I consider myself a feel player first and foremost. Nowadays, everyone who makes a video just wants to be "GTO" and try so hard to follow the solvers. Well there are no solvers in PLO6 right now so the strategy is wide open for creativity. You're never playing against equilibrium strategies anyways so I think there should be more courses that say **** what theory thinks, go for the instinctive read based play.

-No hiding reads: People always seem to hold back their reads in videos and courses. This isn't a surprise since they don't want their opponents to see their videos and counter exploit. But I would hide nothing. If I think a reg sucks, I'd just say it straight up and basically tell the viewer what I think his weaknesses are and how I'd exploit it. If someone's a whale, I'd call them one in the video and point out all the awful whale tendencies they have and how I change my base strategy to take advantage. No hiding reads, no anonymity.

-No hiding emotion: Not a big deal actually since I don't really tilt at the tables and I'm pretty well behaved. I actually would like to see more videos though where the session doesn't go well and the video maker starts cursing or calling the players at the tables idiot donkeys or stupid fish or whatever. Just more entertaining cos you know we all think those thoughts when we play.

Anyways, those are just my random thoughts. I may not end up doing any of this since it would hurt my bottom line too much if I want to be a regular grinder in these games. I've spoken to a few other poker players about courses and to my surprise, quite a few of them told me they prefer the presentation theory courses over play and explains. So maybe I have no clue what people actually want in a course.

December Fire

Dunno what's going on in December. Just can not lose a session. Including my last session in November, I think I am on a 12 session winning streak. Don't care if I jinx myself with this. This just isn't right. Up 7k in 47 hours of play. I cashed out my WSOP roll down to 10k at the end of November to maybe do a 10k=>20k BR challenge at 200 PLO6 and video record my sessions but probably gonna just grind out 50-60 hours recorded and call it a day.

Also crossed the 1000 hour mark in plo6. I would move up to 2/5 but I keep cashing out chunks of my roll to throw into stocks so I dunno. Maybe make it a 2026 thing.

Work
Today I'll put my last serious session(s). Starting work finally on the 7th for WPT to deal and like every December, they're going to put most of us on 6-7 days/week. Probably have no time to grind online or be too exhausted from dealing to put in hours the next few weeks. It'll be a nice break from poker though and I think after I finish dealing WPT, I might be reinvigorated to play poker again or even jump back into the live streets. Probably need to get out of the house more.

Hands

Ran into my imposter ChristIsLord for the first time in PLO6 at a .5/1 game. Absolutely insane lineup. I think this guy's never played PLO6 before and is super aggro spewy. But his image pays off here against an even more insane player.

He bets flop, pots turn, and Pot jams river for 176BB and somehow gets hero called by naked AA in this spot to win a 650BB pot... lol

Been really reassessing some preflop stack off spots in PLO6 a lot recently. Tracking my all in EV on a spreadsheet has forced me to run equities of hands against each other constantly and made me realize some stuff.

Like this hand got all in pre and probably looks like a degen spew. But I was pretty confident I should stick this in preflop in this spot. 4th player is sitting out so I'm BTN vs SB vs BB here.

Preflop action: I raise button, SB flats AATTxx, BB squeezes. I call, SB backraises pot, BB shoves, and I stack off.

SB is a weak/medium tight fish thats gonna have AAxxxx in this line almost always. BB is a mediocre/inexperienced reg who has AAxxxx in this line 90%+ of the time. BB's inexperience in my opinion will have him squeeze the entirety of his AAxxxx range (which I believe is incorrect, you should only be squeeze top range double suited AA here). With likelyhood of double AA interference between the players and also high likelyhood of not being against two double suited AAxxxx, (I think there will be many single suited or junky AA here), I believed my hand would probably be pushing equity or at least not be doing to bad in this spot.

Turns out I'm 38% which is great for a 3 way preflop all in here. The weak reg's AAK972 is doing quite poorly at 29%. I won the hand and the player threw a donkey or fish emoji at me so I don't think he knows what's actually going on in this spot equity wise. I've been shifting quite a bit away from preflop equity pushing AA nowadays after seeing how these multiway spots play out equitywise. Focusing on moving hands more towards post flop play with AA and I feel like my results are improving from taking the more post flop oriented strategies. In the above example hand, instead of squeezing, had the BB just flatted his poor quality AA, he wins the pot on the turn if everyone is playing standard lines.

So I was gonna just quickly reply this with with a yes/no answer but the answer I think is a lot more complex and nuanced then that. Since I keep track of so many all ins and also since I've started tracking my All-in EVs, I've been forced to input hundreds of equity matchups into the calculator and have started to notice some things... particularly how often AAxxxx is doing badly in 3 way all in spots.

So above are 4 all ins I played recently that all went all in before the flop.

Hand A: 3 way, i need 33% equity here and am in amazing shape with 41%. The SB has just an absolutely bottom trash of a hand having 999 and my hearts are quite unblocked. The AK7655 hand has poor connectivity going for it and has 3 diamonds for its main nut suit which is the suit it wants to hit the most and my own 347 runs pretty decent interference with his 5567. Even still... somehow the AK7655 hand has almost even equity at 32% due to my double suit AA being on the pretty low range end of connectivity and synergies.

Hand B: 4 way all in pre, I need 25% equity and have an absolute trash tier single suit AA. After running the hand, I realized that with 21% equity, I should just be looking to fold this hand if I don't have too many chips committed as this is just losing EV in the majority of 4 way all in spots.

Hand C: This was a very interesting hand I played recently. The BB is a whale who had squeezed here and the UTG player reraised. Although the BB is a whale, I had felt that during the entire session he was a postflop whale and rarely squeezed or played very aggressively preflop. Therefore, I concluded that his most likely holding was AAxxxx and UTG is a pretty tight reg here who I believe to almost ALWAYS have AAxxxx here so I decided to stick my triple suit napkins in here thinking I could be a favorite. Disaster struck when the BB whale actually had mega napkins himself and was just spazz punting and you can see from the results that since the BB and I were running interference with each other, the AA double suited hand (although the connectivity is pretty mediocre) basically found itself in a position of quite good equity. I ran this spot again giving the BB some random AAxxxx hand and under this scenario, I found myself with more than 33% required. Even giving him good double suited AAKJ87, I still had 34% here.

Hand D: This is just a demonstration of even when I have pretty top range AAxxxx double suited, when I'm in a 3 way all in sharing AA with another player, I'm not in any sort of incredible shape. Although 37% equity is good enough, this again is one of the top range double suited AAxxxx you can have here just for a 3% equity edge. The AAk543 massively overplayed his hand preflop as he's not even double suited and his side cards are quite low end. And an extremely mediocre triple run down with no live flush draws still finds itself with a generous 40% equity favorite here just because it's up against 2 AAxxxx hands.

Drawing heuristics from these hands: So after thinking about potential multi-all in pre spots like this, I don't think we can have a good answer if we try to draw from Solver or assumed equilibrium theory or even just straight up pure hand strength. I think the MAIN determinant of how we stack off in potential multiway spots pre should be player read driven. So many of these players will only stack off with AAxxxx pre and quite a few whales in these spots want to gamble with random double or triple suited run downs. When a rundown whale is trying to inflate the pot and another tight AAxxxx heavy reg is trying to get it in, I think we need to proceed with caution with our own AAxxxx and even consider folding quite a large % of those combos. In a napkin whale + napkin whale + us scenario, of course we should ship most of our AAxxxx. And in a scenario where the other 2 opponents have tendencies to play very AAxxxx heavy, we should be looking to get even mediocre 6 cards in preflop.

So going back to answer your question

emmm i dunno, Sometimes. Maybe. It depends. Probably doesn't matter too much.

what made u want to switch to 6c? seems like the edges are very thin

Think it’s safe to say edges are pretty big for him judging from his graph.

Thats what I figured. Seems like the best defense is the willingness to fold some amount of aa to the 3bet. Particularly the ones with bad playability post flop.

That's very true if your primary goal is to get to show down.

Few reasons.

1. I think edges are a lot bigger. Preflop equity running close doesn't mean edges are smaller. It just means the game edges centers around post flop strategy more. The field is also very fishy and bad so edges are amplified there.

2. I've always preferred poker without solvers. 6c is solverless for now and this is the environment I thrive in.

3. I just like making sets and flushes lol.

4. I'm kind of a nit at heart and the field is a bunch of way too loose fish.

Also... when referring to edge in a game or over a field, I believe the best measurement of edge is winrate over a large sample and I think I have a pretty large enough sample to be confident of my edge.

Enjoyed reading this. Your YouTube channel was far and away the most underrated PLO blog on YouTube. Admittedly, I really liked the way you presented your cards at showdown, nabbing the two cards that play out of your hand, showing them down, then showing your other two. Not sure if that had a purpose or not, but I've been presenting my cards at showdown that way ever since. Any chance for a return to vlogs in 2026 after dealing WPT?

I show the 2 cards that play for both etiquette purpose and also the hurry the game along since 5/5/10 is time rake. I actually wasn't even super aware this was a thing I did til you just mentioned it. I quit making videos mostly due to the time commitment feeling not worth it. For example, the longest video I edited took close to 60 hours. The shorter ones take 12-18 hours. I made on average like $50/video from YouTube lol. PLO feels a bit niche of a market. I am considering possibly live streaming PLO6 but that's even more niche and very bad for my win rate if I expose my secrets in this game.

Dealing WPT
I am in hell. The 1k Prime event got over 9800 entries. They call in every single dealer each day to deal and we are doing endless strings of tournament tables. I sign the E/O (early out) list every single day and I still have to work overtime some days. A co-worker actually told me he did 14 hours the other day during the final flight of the Prime event. I'm scheduled all 7 days this week and I expect maybe 6-7 days next week and I'm so exhausted from working I just come back home and mostly lay in bed til I have to sleep so I barely get any plo6 in. Also, my right leg is really messed up from Sciatica. I herniated my disc deadlifting around covid time and ended up damaging my sciatic nerve but it went away on its own after a while. I think playing all this tennis recently made it flare up again so my right leg is randomly numb/in pain whenever I walk around or standing up. It gets pretty bad when I'm walking around the casino between my table pushes. I'm actually considering looking into acupuncture which I've never tried before after researching sciatica on some internet forums. I've also noticed I'm getting a bit chubby again in the stomach area after gorging on employee dining every day. I refuse to quit dealing at the Wynn because once I power through it, I know I'm gonna be reinvigorated to grind poker again. I'm always hyper motivated to grind poker after dealing a for a couple weeks. Keeps me grounded and more appreciative of how nice the freedom and money I make from poker is.

Anyways, here's december progress so far, my volume is garbage after starting work but still on a mega december heater.

Stonks
Finally pulled the trigger and sold all my CAAP @ a little over $26 which was my largest position and ballooned to overweight 80k position. I actually ended up selling almost everything. BTI, CROX, PM, emmm a bunch of others since they all had nice run ups.

I have 2 positions I hold great interest in.

1st is Cogent Communications (CCOI).

A few years ago, I had invested about $10k at around $9-10 price range into LUMN (previously century link) as I was chasing their juicy 9-12% dividend at the time and I just thought Fiber internet was a safe solid play but their debt ballooned quite a bit and they cut their dividend. This ended up crashing their stock down as low as $1-$2 and was the worst investment I ever made. I still held on to the LUMN bags for a couple years until this year where it finally recovered quite a bit where I exited my position at around $6-$7ish for an overall 35% loss. Point is, investors HATE it when a stock cuts its dividend and massive selloffs will follow.

CCOI seemed to follow a very similar pattern. Last month, after a long streak of paying out dividends, the company very reluctantly slashed its dividends by 98% since its debt had ballooned way too high. It had just bought a ton of fiber lines from T-mobile... like $20B worth for $1 b/c T-mobile just couldn't keep up with the maintenance upkeep of the lines but I'm not really gonna go into the details of this sale. Basically it felt similar to my LUMN trade and the stock tanked from $38 to $16 after cutting dividends. From 1 year ago highs of $80, I felt like this stock was way oversold especially as an overreaction to the dividend cut so I thought this could be a good gamble turnaround play. No clue what my exit price or plan really is here. I'm just gambling on this one mostly.

2nd is Abacus Global Management (ABL)
This is an idea I basically piggybacked off someone. During my days of sitting at my computer clicking buttons on my screen, I get bored and just read about random stocks. A guy whose ideas I really like is Unemployed Value Degen and I actually have a yearly subscription to his substack. He's REALLY big into ABL and after hearing his thesis on it and listening to some of his commentary on videos/podcasts. I became sold on this position. I actually think this business is super interesting from a poker player's perspective.

So only in the USA, you can actually buy/sell life insurance contracts on the secondary market. People get life insurance, they pay yearly premiums, and if they die, it pays out. But apparently, 90% of life insurance contracts just expire. I guess when people get old, they realize they don't really need it any more cos their kids all grew up and are doing fine, so they just let it lapse instead of paying the increasing premiums until they die. And this is a $14 Trillion industry which is larger than the real estate market in the US. So Abacus comes in, offers to buy out the life insurance policy (they apparently pay 7x market rate)... and now they take on the premiums and I guess they wait til the original policy holder dies or something. But they mostly also package up these policies and sell it to private equity and funds at 20% premium rather than hold the policies. I'm sure they have super good mathematical models that show the EV of a contract as a function of people's life expectancy and stuff so its a super interesting business. The stock had tanked earlier this year because there was a short report released on the company but a lot of it was based on negative stuff that a competitor named Coventry or something had said about ABL. Convetry is the #1 biggest name in this market and private and ABL is 2nd but publicly traded.

I dunno... I kind of wish I loaded up on this more when it was sub $7 but its had a very nice run up since then and could run up a bunch more. If it dips again, or even if it doesn't, I may load up even more on this as the premise of this business is pretty interesting and people dying is just a sure bet. A major threat to this business would be some crazy miracle drug or treatment that extended people's lives, but I'm a pessimist and I feel like the economy kinda sucks, society is decaying, everyone's just gambling their lives away, our healthcare system is horrible, social security will collapse etc... so yea... life probably looks pretty bleak for most of America in the future. In conclusion, very bullish ABL.

Also as a side note... I sold my entire crox position, about $42k worth @ $89 and now I have sellers remorse as I actually still really like the thesis behind it. If crox dips back down in the low $80 range, I'm yoloing back in.

Good /= on your adventure.,!!! ±++++++

It's 2025 and I'm stuck in the past🤔🙄😅👌❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️😊🤣🤣😭😂😉😔😣😑☺️😋😋😋😋😋😋😋😋😋😋🤣⚽⚽⚽⚽⚽⚽⚽⚽🙄❤️👌👌👌

Just curious since you live in the live poker Mecca but do you ever mix it up between live and online like play 3 days a week live and 3 online or do you like to just focus on one of those as a time?

I know the play and strategy can be very different but sometimes I just hate the feeling of being at home all the time when grinding online.

I mostly focus on one on a month to month basis. I think its more efficient to not really mix the two short term and I feel like its better for the brain to settle into the groove of one particular environment for a period of time.

I'm a bit of an introvert so being home all the time doesn't really bother me, I actually prefer it more than not. But the isolation does sometimes creep in and get to me after a few months and when I finally start getting bored or losing interest on the online grind or hit a big downswing, I'll usually take a break from online and go pretty hard for a month or two on the live streets to keep things fresh. The main catalyst for me swapping over to a different venue will primarily be frustration over a big downswing/breakeven stretch though lol.

10k complete

Well that was a super fast 10k (9951 to be exact but I actually have $50 worth of unredeemed Rakeback) challenge completed in about 65 hours. Unofficial BR challenge of course but when I cashed my roll down to 10k this month, I had a 10k challenge in mind and wanted to record everything. I ended up only recording about 50 hours of it so I'm just sitting on a bunch of live footage and I don't have any plans with it currently. I actually ran into a PLO pro while dealing at the Wynn who had made and sold a PLOMTT course and he was kind enough to share with me how much revenue he had made from selling his course. PLO4 MTT is a bit more niche than PLO4 Cash but after hearing his numbers (it was much less than 100k) , I've been reconsidering whether or not I'd make a PLO6 course. Assuming even a handful of WSOP regs purchase the course, I think it could really cut down on my win rate significantly enough that the lowered win rate from sharing knowledge would no where be balanced out by the profit made from selling a course, especially since PLO6 is such a small market. When I think about the next 5 best winning regs in the pool, I still think there's a ton of leaks and very suboptimal betting lines/sizes in their overall strategy which I prefer not to help them correct. Maybe the saying "Those who can't do, teach" has more merit than I gave it credit for and I will just sit on my strategies for a while longer while the WSOP pool is still incredibly soft and while PLO6 is still solver-free. But yea, December has been a very hot month for me and I was lucky enough to get off work early the last couple days to fit in a few small sessions here and there. I find that coming back from work, I'm a bit more fatigued and unable to put in very long session hours despite having the available time and I'd rather just lay in bed mostly watching YouTube or browsing reddit.

Multiway All In
Studying multiway equity interactions have definitely seemed to improve my overall edge in multiway all in spots.

In November, my average MW all in equity for the main pot was 38%. In December, I'm averaging about 40%. Not a super huge sample size but I definitely feel like my preflop all in spots have been a lot more well calculated.

This is another example spot I probably would never take a few months ago where I correctly identified their AAxxxx heavy ranges from preflop action sequencing and player reads and shoveled in my hand pre 3 way as 40% (+7% edge). I was actually a bit deeper with the BB for the sidepot where we had 140bb starting and the SB had 70bbs. The BB piling in 140bb pre with a 29%er is actually a line he could likely avoid as his double suited AAxxxx is of mediocre to below average quality imo and the likelyhood of SB having shared AAxxxx was extremely high in the line. If he played his line as a flat to the SB, I'm forced to flat pre as well since I can't put BB on shared AAxxxx. He can then donk pot flop and I will be forced to fold my hand on the flop and he wins the pot.

Positional Strength Hypothesis
I've always felt that position was more important in PLO4 than NLHE. I feel this is amplified in PLO6. I ran up a few numbers drawn from solvers to see if solvers would possibly back up my thesis. (GTOWizard for NLHE, and PLOTrainer for PLO4 and PLO5) Numbers were ran using GGpoker rake structure at mid stakes ~500 NL/PLO

1. For SB vs BB opening frequencies, NLHE seems to to open a higher % as SB (OOP) than PLO4, and PLO5 this % also decreases as well. I think in PLO6 the % should drop even further which would support an argument that as you add more cards, the out of position disadvantage becomes larger. But this remains inconclusive as the % number differences seem to be fairly small.

2. Testing BTN reaction to CO, which would be another interest point of seeing how much a solver would value position, we see that NLHE VPIPs significantly less than PLO4 and PLO5 but the PLO4 and PLO5 #s seem extremely similar leaving me unable to draw concrete conclusions from this node.

3. Seeing BB reaction to defending vs a HJ open, we again see that in NLHE it defends a lot more OOP than PLO supporting the case that positional disadvantage is amplified with more cards. One MAJOR CAVEAT with the NLHE testing though is that the opening size is usually 2-2.3x compared to PLO's 3.5x sizing so it could simply be a matter of pure pot odds rather than positional differences in these tests.

4. Taking raise sizing into account, when seeing RFI from the BTN, NLHE opens significantly less despite a smaller sizing (which would increase open frequency %) so we can probably conclude that position has a greater value weight in PLO than NLHE from this test. However, the differences in PLO4 and PLO5 are not supporting any arguments between the two variation of games.

So based on these numbers, I really can't back up my claim that in PLO6, position is far more valuable than it's PLO5 or PLO4 counterparts. But my intuition and experience tells me that this IS the case... at least vs the human opponents I play against. Its possible that solvers just play in such a way that it far outperforms human counterparts in terms of ability to over-realize hand equity out of position. And this may be in part due to GTO equilibrium strategies falling under the assumption of being "fully aware" of its opposition strategy, an assumption that doesn't exist in Human vs Human play. So for now, despite the solver patterns suggesting that I RFI around 48% of my hands in PLO6 from the BTN or that I only flat 14% of BTNs vs CO, I will ignore this and continue to over RFI the BTN at maybe a 60%+ rate or flat 20%+ of my BTNs vs all other opens as my gut tells me this is the superior way to play against the field for now.

OMG Frank. Long time no see. When I was in vegas first few times in early 2022, I met up w Zefa at aria. Great PLO mind.

Cross variant analysis. Very nerdy. I love it!

Keep up the good work. When are you going to start playing for bracelets and mastering mixed games?

Hope to visit you again in Vegas eventually.

Nice thread,I'm also playing PLO6 on GG but sometimes i think this game is a little too much for me,Do you rely on PLO4/PLO5 solvers to study PLO6 or only other tools like PPT + hand history ?

Very glad you're posting again on here, we win when you cash out for stonks and you grind to rebuild. I'm also a big fan of your Reddit posts and hope you do another one of your dealer breakdown after the WPT ends.

PLO Mastermind just launched a 6 card PLO course for 1k, would be curious on your thoughts on it if you ever get through it.

Lol hope you guys are doing well. I've always wanted to get into mix but never any good online venues to practice it. I've dabbled in it here and there at casinos to eventually segway into mixed games MTTs.

I only use PPT calculator + hand histories. I think a very large portion of edge in PLO6 comes from understanding equity matchups between hands. If you simply run dozens of equity calculations every single day and get a really good feel for how hands matchup, I think you'll get very good at PLO6.
With regards to solvers...especially for mid to low stakes in soft pools, I think the way many people try to apply solver lines in games is very detrimental to their win rates. People usually get confused about solver lines that show equilibrium solutions and think this is GTO best line but its not. They use the phrase GTO and equilibrium interchangeably. If you could node lock into a solver the way the field actually plays, the output solutions would be VASTLY different and this would be the true GTO solution. But right now, people just look at market solver equilibrium solutions as the optimal solution which is just wrong.

I'm very much instinct/feel/player read based, which is just another way of saying I use my experience and brain to do node-locks in my head the way you might use a solver to node-lock fish ranges and tendencies. So while I'll look to certain solver lines to see how a line should be played at equilibrium, no one in the field is playing this way so I typically go with my own developed lines that are catered to the way I perceive my opponents. I would lean more towards solver studying if my competition gets a lot tougher and theory based as my exploitative strategies will obviously underperform vs solver type opponents, but it massively overperforms vs fish.

This was the first time I didn't keep track of any dealing stats. I can pull out my old stats from previous years but I've found that the dealer earnings remain fairly consistent at roughly $45ish/hr during peak tournament seasons.

I'm probably not going to comment too much on the PLO6 course on PLOMM as I have made videos for them in the past and there's a very small chance I could make a competing course for PLO6 in the future. My main gripe with that course is the lack of play and explain videos. The course is not my style of course as I simply prefer watching live commentary and play and explain and I find the theory stuff extremely dull and not super practical for the pools I play in. I did watch the 1 play and explain video that was in the course and felt like the instructor played fine for the most part but there were definitely a few spots I disagreed with and some I considered straight up incorrect but all in all, he's a winning player and if you're new to PLO6 its not the worst place to start though I think you get better bang for you buck if you find a good plo6 coach.