Damn Ringer's Poker Blog

This article is a continuation of Part 1 from a June 3rd, 2008 post.

Last time, I discussed a few game selection and very general concepts of playing PLO (Pot Limit Omaha). After reading that article a few times and receiving feedback, I think that article has a few concepts that people didn’t necessarily think about. I think this article will have some more specific Omaha tips and should therefore be a better article for a FRNLHE (Full Ring No Limit Holdem) player to start to wrap their head around PLO.

You have found the perfect omaha game. You have a table full of deepstacked 1 tablers, and a bankroll of 100 buyins. Now how the heck do you play this game? (and no i’m not going to explain the rules, if you don’t know those please stop reading). Now take the maximum number of FRNLHE tables you play, and cut that in half. That’s the correct number of omaha tables to play. You have so much action/thought at all times, that mass-multitabling is almost impossible. Unlike FRNLHE, there are many many situations that warrant you stopping everything and thinking about that table and bet.

Omaha Preflop:
Let me start this section by saying there are many correct ways to play omaha pre-flop. This happens to be my preferred method at mid-stakes omaha.

Concepts:

Postion is God in PLO – if you don’t know what i mean you soon will (random: just make me think of that old barenaked ladies song)

We want to play hands that give us the best possible way to make the nuts.

It is rather easy to outplay our opponents postflop in position as it is typically difficult to continue out of position without the nuts or a monster draw (which your opponent won’t have most of the time).

Hands we fold:

• Hands Overloaded in one suit – If you have 4 clubs and an AQ45, your hand really loses alot of value unless you are stealing on the button. The optimal number of a suit in your hand is 2. If you have more or less, its bad typically. You are less likely to make your flush draw and therefor you have less opportunities to make a real hand
• Completely Unconnected Garbage – An adage that has stuck with me is the following: If you can’t make at least 2 playable holdem hands out of your omaha hand, your hand is a fold. This has been one of those tips i picked up along the way that I pretty much use all the time. When i’m not sure if i should play a hand, i just default to that rule and actually try to pick 2 hands out i’d like to play in that spot. So for example JT36 is not a playable hand even if double suited (unless from the button in which case its likely a raise).

Hands we open-raise:

• Double Suited Connectors – aka 8s9sTc6c – Hands like these flop amazingly well or amazingly terrible. However alot of the hands we make aren’t going to be the nuts (but they will be close), so we want to put pressure on our opponents and hopefully get few players to the flop.
• Hands that draw to the nuts – These are my favorites. Hands like As9s7c8d which don’t seem like monsters are really amazing hands. You wake up with just silly combo draws on a regular basis when seeing the flops with these kinds of hands. You have a number of straight draws and the nut flush draw in your hand.
• Basically anything that isn’t complete garbage on the button – This is just common sense. Having position alone is usually enough to win the hands, so with that in mind, we take our position unless we have a hand which simply has no chance of flopping well.
• Since position is so important, we are opening pretty much any hands that have 2 playable holdem hands from the CO and Button. We are also c-betting at a headsup pot no matter what and likely check/folding a multi-way pot unless we flop a real hand.

It is so tough play hands out of position in omaha that pretty much raising any cards that aren’t complete rags and c-betting is profitable. Players typically avoid playing out of position postflop without a big hand.

Hands to 3-bet with:

• AAxx – this is kind of a no-brainer but let me bring your brain into this one. Don’t 4-bet AAxx unless you can get 40% of your stack in pre-flop against multi-person fields. You will have no choice but to get it allin on the flop usually. It is sometimes correct to just smooth call a 3-bet with AAxx, there are a few reasons for this. First, it doesn’t define your hand to your opponent completely. Your opponent can flop 2 pair dueces and 4’s on a 24K board after you 4-bet and be VERY sure its good whereas if you put pressure on without giving away AA you get alot of fold equity by trying to get it in on the flop. Also, you can really disguise your hand. If the flop comes Ahigh, you really get alot of spots where you can let your opponent bluff pot on the flop of an Ahigh board because he thinks he’s represnting AAxx. Generally we are trying to get all our money in pre-flop with AAxx but if we can’t get enough of it in to commit ourselves post- we are really giving value away and playing our hand face-up against an opponent with a wide range.
• Sneaky hands. Sneaky hands in position is the place i win most of my money. I define sneaky hands as those which don’t hit the kind of board our opponent thinks our hand would hit from our 3-bet. I love 3-betting hands like 3h5h4d8d or 234s5s. These kinds of hands never are seen coming and still hit a high number of flops. When we flop the nuts on a 256 flop, our opponents usually think we have AAxx due to our 3-bet and think its a great flop for making a play (which typically it is). We also take down alot of pots we don’t hit especially A-high boards. Opponents are so quick to put you on a monster pair that they often just avoid giving any action on an A-high board in a 3-bet pot. So by c-betting alot of boards we don’t hit, our opponents just give up. Make sure you have a hand that can call a 4-bet tho so make sure your hand can play well against AAxx. This leads me to my next point.
• You don’t want to 3-bet a hand that doesn’t play well against AAxx or KKxx. Players make the mistake of raising hands like AK45 or AJT4. I think these are very poor choices for isolating and really look strong to the untrained eye but seem to be the equivalent of KJ in holdem.

That should just about sum-up my pre-flop ideas on PLO. And that will sum up part 2. I realize this one is kind of all over the board, but I wrote it over a few days so i appologize if i left something out. If you have a question or think i’m full of it, please write it in my comments.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 9th, 2008 at 2:34 pm and is filed under Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.