Tips from the Pros: Playing a Short Stack in PLO

The differences in Pot Limit Omaha (PLO) strategy between playing short-stacked and deep-stacked are so great that it’s almost like they’re two completely different games. When you’re deep-stacked it’s all about setting up major pots with huge hands, like the nuts with redraws or monster wrap straight draws. You have to think ahead a lot. You also have to be willing to fold extremely good hands from time to time. None of that is the case in short-stack strategy.

For this article I’ll define a short stack as under 20 big blinds (BB). Of course, that’s sort of a random cutoff, and being short-stacked is more of a continuum. But when you’re under 20BB deep, most of your real decisions will come preflop, and that’s the key difference in short-stack play. It’s not that preflop play isn’t important deep- or mid-stacked, it’s important in a different way. With a normal stack, you’re choosing your preflop hands based on how they perform in large pots (can they make the great draws/made hands that it takes to win a big pot postflop), not their current all-in equity.

If you’re on a short stack, you’ll often get all the money (or most of it) in preflop, meaning that postflop decisions are irrelevant. Therefore you want to play hands with high showdown value, all-in equity. Big pairs become much more valuable, and having high cards is more important. Also, low flush draws (under ace-high), which don’t add much value to a hand deep-stacked, are quite helpful. If you’re all-in, you’re guaranteed to see the river. That can be great in Omaha because four-card hands create so many backdoor (runner-runner) possibilities.

One major difference between PLO and NLHE is the preflop all-in value that hands can have. In NLHE, a high pocket pair, especially aces, are often a massive favorite, 4:1 or higher. It’s extremely rare to have anything close to that big a discrepancy between the favorite and underdog in an Omaha preflop all-in situation. Generally, getting 3:2 is about as well as you can hope to do.

You might think that a smaller edge is bad news for short-stackers. That’s not really the case though. Pots often have a fair amount of dead money in them preflop. It’s from either the blinds or other players who folded when the betting got too heavy. Relative to a small stack, this dead money can be significant. When you keep in mind that you’ll rarely be a big underdog, this dead money means that you’ll have positive expected value (EV) a lot of the time.

The key to short-stack play is finding good situations to get your money in preflop. In order to do so, you must play good all-in hands, and also create and recognize situations where there’s dead money in the pot. When you do see flops, it will often be straightforward. With top two or better, or significant nut draws (10 or more outs, generally), you’ll usually quickly get all-in.