The Pot-Limit Omaha Book: Transitioning from NLHE to PLO

Pot Limit Omaha has made a reputation in online poker circles as the high stakes game of choice over the last couple of years, but the mid and lower stakes have been slower to catch up. The game is certainly more complex than NLHE on some levels, more difficult to effectively multi-table, and has a more fearsome variance built in. As NLHE games become increasingly tougher and the market for training materials becomes more and more saturated, however, PLO is becoming a game that small to midstakes players are increasingly eying as a viable alternative to NLHE. It’s with those players in mind that Tri ‘SlowHabit’ Nguyen authored ‘The Pot Limit Omaha Book: Transitioning from NLHE to PLO’.

Overview
Poker book titles are awesome, insomuch that they generally tell you exactly what the exact focus of the book is. Nguyen’s is no exception – his core aim is to provide a text that will assist players making the transition from no limit holdem to pot limit omaha. The book can also just be read as a cold introduction to PLO, but the phrasing and examples in the book often provide readers with supplemental NLHE – PLO translations of certain concepts and ranges.

The book is only available as an eBook (DRM protected) and is about 80 pages long. Nguyen may be most familiar to some readers as the co-author, with Cole (CTS) South, of ‘Let There Be Range’, another eBook that focuses on mid-stakes NL online games.

Pros
A core advantage of this book is that it clearly fills a need in the market. You simply won’t find more than a handful of books on PLO strategy, and even fewer that are current. Of those, a few provide insights on short-handed play, one or two accommodate experienced no limit players, and none are aimed at modern online games.

Filling this need would be an irrelevant edge if Nguyen didn’t follow through with a well-executed text. From the point of view of a player who fits Nguyen’s intended audience (I’m currently in the early stages of making a partial transition from NLHE to PLO), I can confidently say he has. The book is a no-frills, information-packed primer for experienced poker players who are somewhat new to PLO. Concepts are explained in a tight, logical order, building upon and expanding previously introduced ideas. Nguyen does a good job of digging into the math behind PLO in a fairly accessible manner and provides quick analysis of real-world hand examples to illustrate and summarize core concepts.

The translations of PLO concepts and ranges for NLHE are especially helpful. There are some issues that NLHE players are uniquely likely to have when making the switch to PLO, and also some shortcuts that NLHE are uniquely equipped to employ. Nguyen does NLHE players a valuable service by repeatedly highlighting such points in clear, precise terms.

What about the scope of the content? That’s likely a concern for some potential readers, given the somewhat abbreviated length of the book at 80 pages. Again, Nguyen comes through with a table of contents that provides a comprehensive overview of PLO play on all streets (the river is abbreviated, but that’s not unusual for a PLO text, as river decisions are heavily player-dependent and not as complex as NLHE river decisions). While he certainly doesn’t (and realistically can’t be expected to) cover every possible line in every possible scenario, Nguyen excels at a smarter approach – digging into concepts that give readers the building blocks to analyze the game and construct responses to uncovered scenarios on their own.

Cons
Price: $367. You can also purchase just the first half of the book (covering core concepts and preflop play) for $47 and then purchase the second half for a little over the remainder of the price. The total number may put this text out of reach for a recreational or low-stakes player.

The text would certainly benefit from a quick pass by an editor and another pass by someone with layout experience. Minor grammatical errors and odd phrasing sometimes interrupts the flow for the reader. On the layout side: the blunt manner in which graphs and charts are inserted, along with a very spartan approach to headers and a lack of embedded quotes, results in a reading experience that’s a bit dry, even for a poker book.

Conclusion
If you’re in the target audience for this book – a NLHE player with limited PLO experience looking to transition to SSPLO – you’re unlikely to find a resource to rival it. Buy it now, or at the very least preview the first half on the cheap and make your mind up from there.

Focus: 9/10
Spartan, almost to a fault.

Quality of advice: 9/10
Feels dead on. Only missed a 10/10 because it’s not earth-shattering so much as a quality collection of rock-solid fundamental advice.

Examples: 7/10
They’re always appropriate, but there’s not always enough of them. Nguyen does a great job at cutting to the quick when reviewing hand examples, so it’s odd that there aren’t more included.

Readability: 7/10
Small errors are distracting, and the layout isn’t as inviting as it could be.

Overall (not an average): 9/10
We generally give our overall rating on the quality of the book for it’s intended audience, and by that metric this book excels.

VERDICT: Moving to SSPLO from NLHE? Buy the book. Want to learn PLO from scratch? Start with a cheaper book designed for that and graduate to this when you’re ready to move on and move up.

ThinkingPoker Review:

My One Minute Recommendation: The Pot Limit Omaha Book: Transitioning from NLHE to PLO scores a 9/10. There are probably better books for all-around poker noobs, but experienced NLHE players looking to get better at “the other big bet game” would be hard-pressed to find a better resource.

The Good: Advanced tactics, high-level strategy, strong theoretical grounding, well-explained, genuinely insightful, appropriately calibrated for its target audience

The Bad: Some concepts, including but not limited to certain basic skills, not covered in great detail

The Ugly: A little unpolished, with some typos and minor grammatical errors; feels pretty much like reading a Word document, albeit a nicely laid out Word document

Tri “Slowhabit” Nguyen’s Transition from NLHE to PLO delivers just what the title promises: a strong guide to Pot-Limit Omaha, delivered at a pace and level appropriate for a poker player with a fairly sophisticated understanding of No Limit Hold ‘Em. Though there is plenty of practical advice and hand examples, this is not a soup to nuts “how to” guide offering a ready-to-play strategy. In fact, it could stand to be a bit more comprehensive in its advice for specific, common situations. Rather, it is a rigorously mathematical theoretical framework for approaching the game. It will require a thorough understanding of poker to appreciate the depth of this book, but for someone with such an understanding, it should prove an invaluable text, certainly worth its not inconsiderable $375 price tag.

Nguyen could be more explicit about his intended audience, though the title and I imagine the marketing strategy will likely make this clear enough. The introduction does promise, accurately enough, to “teach you the nuances of PLO and what variables you should consider during hands to turn yourself into a more profitable player,” with the ultimate goal of getting the reader “crushing small and mid-stakes PLO.” The text assumes a sophisticated understanding of crucial poker concepts such as equity, hand ranges, semi-bluffing, and planning ahead. None of it should be beyond an active reader of 2+2 or my blog, but this is not a mass market book. The Glossary includes only two terms and offers a superficial description even of those.

The only time this affects the quality of the discussion is with Nguyen’s use of the term “outs”. I’ve generally understood the term to mean something like “cards that could come to win you the pot when you are not currently ahead”, but Nguyen sometimes uses it to talk about cards that will improve a hand, whether or not that improvement is actually enough to win the pot. Given that it is so important in PLO to distinguish between nut and non-nut draws, it couldn’t hurt to define these terms more explicitly.

Though the book is definitely written with a NLHE player in mind, it should be useful to any serious poker player. There are a lot of helpful analogies, though, where Nguyen considers similarities and differences between how specific concepts function in the two games or explains that holding X hand in PLO is akin to holding Y hand in NLHE. Being primarily a NLHE player myself, I found these very insightful and helpful tools.

It also helps that many of the hand examples, integrated into every chapter via convenient sidebars alongside the relevant text, seem drawn from the author’s own transition from NLHE to PLO. It is both welcoming and encouraging to see him admit to misplaying a hand as a result of a misunderstanding common to NLHE players learning PLO. I found I was able to recognize specific mistakes that I had made and begin to understand why my past forays into PLO had not gone as well as I hoped- and that was before I got to the “Common Mistakes” chapter.

Such reinforcement is nice, because while Transitioning from NLHE to PLO rekindled my excitement for the game, it also made me realize how much I don’t know and how much work will be required to master hand reading and equity calculation, both of which are far more complicated than their NLHE equivalents. It’s not that the tools aren’t there. The text provides plenty of examples and in-depth analysis of advanced concepts like blockers, backdoor draws, and floating. It just makes me realized what a tall mountain there is to climb. Thankfully, Nguyen also emphasizes how many players in today’s PLO games don’t have an inkling about any of this stuff, which is reassuring.

It does beg the question of the book’s longevity, though. There’s a mix of tactics that seem fundamental to playing the game well in any context and those designed to exploit mistakes and tendencies common in contemporary PLO games. It will be interesting to see how long the latter remain viable. Since Transitioning is an e-book, Nguyen could theoretically update it, though to my knowledge he hasn’t promised anything like this.

I’m not particularly familiar with e-book technology, but I would guess that Transitioning falls somewhere in the middle of the spectrum with regard to balancing the reader’s convenience with the protection of the author’s intellectual property. The book is protected by LockLizard Safeguard, meaning that you need to download and install a special PDF viewer, then register your version of the book, before you can read it. This sounds like a hassle, but the instructions were clear, and it took me less than five minutes to set up. After that, I had full rights to read and print, though not copy and paste, the document indefinitely.

The other potentially intimidating aspect of the book is the math. It isn’t actually that complicated, and the author does a great job of explaining it, but there are a lot of graphs and calculations and even some algebra. Next to The Mathematics of Poker, it’s the most math-heavy poker book I’ve seen.

Not that that’s a bad thing. In fact, these were probably the best parts of the book. I particularly liked a chart enumerating the possible hands on each street in PLO vs. NLHE, and Nguyen’s quantification of the heretofore nebulous concept of “post-flop playability” struck me as pure genius. Understanding it does require interpreting a graph of hand equity on all possible flops, though. Again, the text offers a crystal clear explanation, but I’m sure a good high school math education helps.

The other concept I found very helpful, and which seems to motivate Nguyen’s general approach to the game, is equity realization. Basically, because hand values tend to run close together in PLO, Nguyen places a premium on bluffing, fold equity, and winning pots without showdown. He argues quite convincingly for making a lot of turn and river bluffs, often deferring aggressive action on an earlier street in order to make a better, often more aggressive, decision later in the hand.

Amidst all of the more advanced theory and strategy, certain concepts do feel a bit glossed over. Although the chapter on pre-flop hand selection is one of the longest, it still offers relatively vague advice about exactly which hands to play from which position and how to play them. It’s consistent with Nguyen’s general approach of “here are the key considerations, work through the specific situation yourself”, but readers will probably be accustomed to finding more specific starting hand advice in a poker book. That’s probably as much the nature of PLO as it is a flaw in the book, though.

More disappointing is the “River Play” chapter, which covers barely three pages. As much emphasis as Nguyen places on river bluffing, it was disappointing not to get more hand examples and an extended discussion of key concepts like value betting and inducing bluffs.

Nguyen’s writing style is less professional than I’m accustomed to seeing in a poker book. Some will find the casual tone welcoming, though nits like myself will be perturbed by minor grammatical errors, none of which influenced my understanding of the text.

Overall, Transitioning From NLHE to PLO is a fantastic book for a veteran No Limit Hold ‘Em player who wants to make a serious effort at learning Pot Limit Omaha. Nguyen requires a substantial investment of time, effort, and money from his readers, but it’s hard to imagine any smart poker player not getting very good at this quite complex game if he spent enough time working with this text.