After his encounter with Brian Hastings, in the Early hours of yesterday morning, Gus Hansen was playing Tom “durrrr” Dwan on Full Tilt’s PLO tables. Hansen was back in good form winning eight of the top ten biggest hands of the session, including the biggest pot of the session when Hansen’s jack high flush won him the $185,385 pot.
With both the two protagonists suffering lean spells this year, with Dwan turning round a $4 million deficit and Gus now back in winning form, it will always be entertaining when these two meet at the tables.
Earlier this week it looked like Gus Hansen had overcome his recent run of bad form when he came away from a PLO session with a profit of $898,000, only to lose a lot of his profit to Brian Hastings the next day.
Gus has been hitting the PLO tables in the last week and it looks like he is back to his indomitable self. In a session at the $300/$600 6-Max tables at Full Tilt, he was up against the likes of Phil “OMGClayAiken” Galfond, David Benyamine, trex313, sunra18 and Urindanger. It was against sunra18 that Hansen scooped one of the biggest pots. Sunra18 pushed all in after the flop of 2-8-3, holding A-A-K-9 and Gus called with 4-5-4-5 and hit his full house when the 4-8 came on the remaining two community cards, collecting the $172,228 pot.
It was on the $200/$400 tables that Brian Hastings got the better of Hansen. In past meetings between these two, Gus has usually been the victor and this time he was gaining an advantage but Hastings fight his way back and end the session with a $596,000 profit.
Tom “durrrr” Dwan was at the PLO tables on Full Tilt poker until the early hours of Monday morning, playing against the likes of Gus Hansen, John Juanda, David Benyamine, LarsLuzak,and HarrisMP. Despite being involved in four of the biggest pots of the session, unfortunately only one of those would go in his favour. Dwan lost two pots to Juanda, $160,000 and $129,000 and a pot to LarsLuzak to the tune of $155,000.
The pot that did go his way was the biggest hand of the session. Dwan flopped two pairs against LarLuzak and HarrisMP and then hit a set of kings on the river. Neither of his two opponents hands improved so Dwan scooped the $280,000. Dwan ended the session down by $500,000, but he is still in profit for the year, not bad considering he was down $4 million for a while this year.
Sooner or later Niki “KaiBuxxe” Jedlicka’s winning streak was going to come to an abrupt halt and it did yesterday against Patrik Antonius. After winning over $1.5 million during his last couple of sessions, Jedlicka lost over $500,000 to Patrik Antonius in the latest session.
The biggest pot that Antonius took down was $395,668 when he hit a full house, jacks full of fours on the river. but the biggest pot of the session went to Jedlicka who won $409,480 with a queen high straight.
After his successful return to the high stakes tables, Niki “KaiBuxxe” Jedlicka continued his run of hot form when he took on Finnish online superstar Patrik Antonius on the $300/$600 6-Max PLO tables. In this session he came away with over $600.000 in profit, taking down the four largest pots of the night. The sessions largest pot came when Antonius tried to bluff Jedlicka out of the hand on the river when he was only holding one pair and Jedlicka had hit his queen high flush, handing him the $563k pot.
Phil Galfond has become one of the most respected and revered players at the high stakes online tables. He regularly wins on the $200/$400 and $500/$1,000 no-limit holdem and pot-limit Omaha games on Full Tilt. In the last twelve months he has managed to win around $7 million on Full Tilt alone. He has managed to replicate his online success in the world of live tournaments, as he managed to win a gold bracelet in the $5,000 pot-limit Omaha event with rebuys at the 2008 WSOP against a final table that included the likes of David Benyamine, Johnny Chan, John Juanda, Phil Hellmuth and Daniel Nedreanu.
Phil Galfond was majoring in philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison when he started playing poker online, mainly playing. Within eight months he was earning $50 per hour crushing the sit-and-gos and then went on to start buying into the biggest sit-and-go tournaments to be found online, with a $1,000 buy-in, Galfond was consistently winning at that level as well.
It was twoplustwo.com that Galfond started to discuss poker strategies with a group of likeminded young poker pros that included Tom Dwan and David Benefield. In fact Tom Dwan has banned Galfond from taking part in the durrrr challenge due to their close friendship.
It was in early 2006 that Galphond made the transition into the world of online cash games, which at first proved to be frustrating as his attempts to move up in online stakes left a big whole in his bankroll. But his perseverance paid off, obsessevly analysing his game and that of his opponents, by the end of 2007 he was regularly beating the $300/$600 games.
More recently Galfond has been instrumental in the launch of Bluefire Poker, an online poker training site that focuses on cash games. Bluefire Poker made headlines recently when the site challenged President Barack Obama to a $1 million game of poker.
Austrian online poker sensation Niki “KaiBuxxe” Jedlicka made a return to the high stakes tables this week when he was back on Full Tilt Poker playing $200/$400 6-Max PLO and $300/$600 6-Max PLO. It was playing the pot-limit Omaha cash tables in 2007 that Jedlicka managed to win over $3, million in a year. Unfortunately his run of form did not last and the Austrian ended up losing a lot of his winning, so Jedlicka has been absent from the high stakes tables for a while.
His return to the tables has seen a return to his previous form as he managed to win over $1 million from the likes of Dwan, Patrik Antonius and David Benyamine. Jedlicka managed to win several $100,000 pots, the biggest being $161,447 when he hit the nut straight on the river.Tom Dwan was the biggest loser during the session losing over $800,000.
Don’t forget that you can catch all the High Stakes action as it happens when you join Full Tilt Poker
With the end of the 2009 WSOP, the high stakes action tables are now back in full swing. Late Monday night, instead of the usual heads-up action, the players could be found at the full ring PLO cash tables on Full Tilt Poker. Among the players seated at the tables were the usual high stakes suspects including Tom “durrrr” Dwan, Gus Hansen, Ilari “Ziigmund” Sahamies, Phil “OMGClayAiken” Galfond, Brian Townsend, Di “Urindanger” Dang, David Benyamine, John Juanda and Sami “LarsLuzak” Kelopuro.
The action was at the $200/$400 pot-limit Omaha tables and at the height of the action there was nine tables in play. Obviously with this kind of action going on, there was a lot of big pots to be fought over and the biggest pot of this session was won by the Danish Full Tilt pro Gus Hansen. Hansen hit the nut flush draw after Dwan had pushed all in on the turn with two pairs and a flush draw. John Juanda also called Dwan with a set and a gut-shot straight draw, but neither player’s hand improved so Hansen collected the $459,846 pot, which is one of the top ten biggest online pots of the year so far.
Despite the big pot win it was not Hansen who was the nights biggest winner, that was Dwan who finished the session up nearly $800,000 after a couple of $300,000 pot wins.
Join Full Tilt Poker and as well as play Pot-Limit Omaha, you can sit on the rail as the worlds best Poker players do battle.
For those of you that found Jeff Hwang’s Pot-Limit Omaha Poker, was their PLO bible, now the man has brought out a follow up covering more advanced principles of this brilliant game. In his first book Hwang covered the how to get the most from your big drawing hands, in this book he goes into such topics as using your positional advantage, stack-to-pot ratio and a host of advanced skills. This book is not for the new Omaha player, but if you are comfortable with the concepts in Jeff’s earlier book, this will take your Omaha play to a new level.
This book will explain how to incorporate advanced bluffing techniques into your play, and how to use these techniques together with your positional advantage to force weaker players out of the pot.
The book uses over 200 hand examples and walk throughs to clearly demonstrate the strategies and advanced concepts that are tackled in it’s pages. We will have a full review coming soon on our Omaha Books ReviewPage.
We have stated before that if you are holding a top pair (A-A, K-K, Q-Q) preflop your hand will be stronger if your other two cards connect with your pair in some way. If your aces or kings do not improve on the flop, they are big underdogs to take the pot, so your pairs really do need some sort of back up with the other cards you are holding.
Any pair that you are dealt in PLO really does need some kind of connection with the other cards you are holding, because even if you hit a set on the flop, any overcard could give an opponent a higher set, so that means you are have just one out in the whole of the remaining deck and that is not a very good position to be in. You really need to be very cautious if you decide to play any pair lower than a nine, as you are always going to be vulnerable to any overcards that hit the board and any connected cards on the flop means that you could also be up against flush or straight draws as well.
It is in situations like these that you really need to be able to read the board and get an idea about what sort of hands you could be up against. It can be so hard to fold a flopped set to a a big raise. If you are holding 2-6-8-8 and the flop comes K-J-8, if your opponent makes a pot sized raise he could be holding a pair of either kings or jacks, the best you can hope for is that he is holding two pairs, even then they could hit a full house. Any opponents that have connected cards like Q-K-A-X means that your set is very vulnerable to straight or flush draws.
If you want to fine tune your Pot-Limit Omaha skills and sit on the rail as the pros play the High Stakes tables, go toFull Tilt Poker.
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