Poker Strategy - Omaha Poker Strategy, Page 2
So, building a pot with a raise
before the flop in Omaha does not benefit schooling opponents, it benefits
players with the good hands. The flip side of this phenomenon exposes another
key difference between Omaha and Holdem.
In loose Holdem games, there are a lot of hands you can profitably add to your
arsenal, most obviously Ace-rag suited and suited connectors. This is not true
in Omaha. Again, the difference in value of hands multiway in Omaha is much more
dramatic than in Holdem. The majority of hands simply are never playable
(outside the blinds). If you are on the button and everybody limps in, 3456 is
still a worthless piece of garbage. It does not matter if you have three
opponents or seven, the hand stinks. You can play a small number of additional
hands, but for the most part, no matter how loose or weak your opponents are,
you can't add too many more hands to your playable repertoire.
The thing to "loosen up" in such a game is to want to play for a raise most
hands you play. In tight games, calling when someone limps in front of you is
often the right play. In a loose game, raising is usually the correct play
because you are playing a hand with way the best of it. You want dead money in
the pot, and you want dead hands hopelessly chasing it! And they will.
A "river" game?... Some players like to call Omaha a "river game" because the
final card often determines the winning hand. While that is true, the thinking
behind this "river game" idea is very flawed. Poor Omaha players wait to the
river to bet -- when they know they are going to win (or lose). That's just not
sensible or profitable. Omaha is not a "river game"; it is a game of
preparation.
Before the flop: you should play hands that have a high expectation; you should
manipulate the pot size; you should try to manipulate your opponents so that
when you have a hand that plays well against fewer opponents you are playing
against fewer opponents and when you have a hand that plays well against a full
field you are playing against a full field.
After the flop: the flop is critical. Here you should begin to roughly calculate
the probabilities and deduce how favorable your chances are to win. Again, here
a player should be manipulating the pot -- get more chips in when the odds favor
you, try to minimize when you have a longer shot.
The turn card is the least important aspect of Omaha but it's the end of the
main math part of the game. In loose games, you can pretty much calculate
precisely your chances of winning some or all of the pot.
Whether a player then makes or doesn't make their hand on the river really
doesn't matter. You do everything right mathematically up to this point, and
lose to a one outer, that is fine -- just do the same things again and again the
next times. Omaha (and all the other games) is about having the best of it in
the longrun. There is no "leader money" in poker. The "best" hand is the one
with the highest winning potential (including the understanding that some hands
will win more bets than others). Don't think what just happened was an aspect of
a "river game". I can't emphasize this strongly enough: All the truly important
actions in this hand occurred before that river card happened to bring you bad
luck.
Another thing to consider is that only a tiny percentage of money action is on
the river in Omaha. Poker is about money. Omaha is not about the river. That's
naive. Omaha is about getting money in the pot in a mathematically advantageous
way before the river. Omaha is an anti-river game!
Put another way, if you play a coin flip game against a guy, and he says he'll
give you $5 for every time it comes up heads, but you have to give him $1 for
every time it comes up tails, it would be wrong to refer to this situation as "a
flip game"! The key part of the game was in the pre-negotiation, not in the flip
itself.
Driving the pot... Loose game Omaha is mostly about nut hands. If there is a
flush, you sure want the nut flush. If there is a low, you sure want the nut
low. The obvious reason, of course, is because you have the winning hand rather
than the second or third best hand. But that's not the only value to playing nut
hands.
Again, winning Omaha requires pot manipulation -- get more money in when you
have clearly the best of it; play for cheap when you don't. Nut hands and nut
draws using quality cards can "drive the betting" where non-nut hands cannot.
For instance, let's look at the enormous difference between KK and JJ -- not in
terms of how much more often KK makes the winning hand, but in terms of the
difference in the pot sizes. KK is a much more valuable holding in part because
KK can drive the betting in many pots that JJ can't -- like on a turn board of
KQQ7 versus a board of JQQ7. The difference between those two situations is
enormous. There are other reasons why KK is a major holding while JJ is a minor
one, but the difference in how each can drive the betting (or not) offers an
excellent illustration of what situations you want to be in when playing Omaha.
Likewise, there is a very large difference between A23x and A2xx on a 87K flop.
The latter hand should win less money, not just because it will be counterfeited
sometimes and not make the winning hand, but because it cannot drive the betting
nearly as much (if at all) as the A23x can. A256, A247, A269, all these hands
should win extra money not just because you make winners more often, but because
you should be driving the betting with them far stronger than with the
one-dimensional A2.
Cooperation... Greedy players make lousy Omaha players. Foolish greed often
costs players bets because they simply don't recognize that the game frequently
requires cooperative betting. Suppose there are three people in a pot. On an
8s7s5c flop, Player A bets and is called. The 9h comes on the turn. Player A
bets again, Player B calls, Player C raises, Player A reraises, B calls, C caps,
A and B call. Now the river card pairs the board with a flush card, the 9s. What
now? Often Player A will bet, with no high hand, and Player B will raise, with
no low hand. This will drive Player C with a straight and a weak low out of the
pot. Translation: stupid Player A and Player B. Instead of cooperating to get at
least one bet from Player C, they got none. If Player A stupidly bets, Player B
should call, and hope to get one bet from Player C, or perhaps an idiotic raise.
The better play though would be for Player A to check, have Player B bet, get
Player C to call, then have Player A checkraise, and have Player B now call.
This way you get at least one bet from Player C, and perhaps two. Think about
how you can use cooperative betting between high and low hands to extract bets
from players in the middle. Don't be greedy and cost yourself money.
Article property of Steve Badger
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