Highs and lows

Pot limit Omaha hi-lo is a funny game given all of the potential ways you have to win -- and lose -- a hand. But I'm comfortable with O8, much more so than plain old Omaha. One of the bloggers recently referred to O8 as a literal game because everything is pretty much laid out for you. If someone is betting it, the chances are extremely high he actually has it. It makes reading your opponents hands fairly simple. And people likely bluff far less in O8 than in other games, it makes it pretty easy to steal chips from late position, at least in low-limit donkaments.

Perhaps it's no accident that I'm a literal person in life. I do tend to accept things at face value. Thos 3,000 hands of low-stakes NLO8 earlier in the year probably helped as well.

I doubled up in the first couple of minutes of the tournament then mostly treaded water for the next couple of hours. (PLO8, by the way, is one sloooooooow-ass game. It took more than seven hours to complete.) I had blinded down to T1800 about 30 spots from the bubble when I went on a little that got me into the money. I continued to play solid, hit some of my big draws and stole a decent amount from position and was fifth in chips when we reached the final table.

Down to four, I was the small stack with 175K, but third-place guy (the eventual winner) had only 13K more than me. The chip leader was at 483K.

That's when I got aggressive and began opening more pots and hitting some big draws to build my stack to just over 700K and take the chip lead. That's when Eventual Winner got even more aggressive and began to either outplay or outdraw me to take over the chip lead. Likely a combination of both. I sensed he was a much better player than me.

Eventual winner had a 5-1 chip advantage when we reached heads-up. He finished me off a couple of hands later when my As-2s-8d-Th got outkicked by his Ac-2d-8h ... Qc on a board of 8s-9h-5d-5s-5h. Chips went in preflop.

While the payout ($277) is chump change for you ballas, it provides a much-needed cushion for my anemic bankroll. Sadly, it's by far my biggest MTT cash in the more than 35o I've played on Stars and Tilt since the beginning of the year. If I happen to be standing at the precipice of an online heater, I'm more than ready to take the plunge.