High-Lo Gweilo

So it took a few weeks, but we finally got a planned PLO8 game off the ground at Deerfoot last night. I'm guessing only about a third of the fourteen players who added their names to the list were present, but they it got off the ground. We can always look to improve things moving forward.

I was a little apprehensive going into this game as I've only played 1-2 (granted with straddles and double straddles much of the time inflating it to 5-10 pre-flop), and this was 5-5 adjacent to the 5-5 PLO which is frequently playing as basically 10-20. My roll is still no where near suitable for this game but I wanted to take a shot, and I was selling off 50% of my action across several friends who thought I should play it.

When we got the game off the ground it was incredible. we must have had 5/9 players who had never even thought of playing a hand of this before. They were on the game because there wasn't a seat for them on the 5-5 PLO. Shortly thereafter (30-45 minutes maybe?) they did end up opening a new 5-5 PLO and virtually all of those players jumped ship leaving our game four handed. There was even some discussion amongst two of the players on our game of switching it to PLO in order to offer a seat to the two action players that walked in the room since there weren't seats open for them on PLO. I said that I did want to support this game running, but I wouldn't stand in the way of that decision if everyone agreed. The fourth player was decided on playing PLO8 though, and we just left it at that.

We limped along short handed for awhile, which was nice since I've never been in that situation before and perhaps largely due to receiving a decent run of playable hands I was finding a lot of spots where I could play comfortably. Lots of limped pots, lots of open raise call-call-call, though it was rare for us to end up in three-bet pre-flop hands. I was min-raising out of position when I liked the playability of my hand, and while I recall seeing a limited amount of min-raises pre from other players I don't think they were approaching that from the same perspective I was.

Looking back on of the field of players I saw on this table from when it began until it died, the very small amount of research I've done into this game has put me considerably ahead of the learning curve on this game. A friend of mine saw me playing some and they said that I seemed super confidant while I was playing. I know that I definitely felt like the big bad wolf, and while I've felt like the Alpha on a table before that's generally because there just aren't any other good/great competitors there.

Everyone's going to feel like the King/Queen of poker when they're catching cards and have built up a stack. This is in a game I feel like I'm just learning how to jog... and from what I can see most players aren't even interested in trying to crawl in it.