Top Poker Rooms

Bonus :$500 Bonus :$600 Bonus :$600

Poker Room Reviews

Poker News

It’s a Freeroll Party

Saturday, November 29th, 2008 by Phil

So I haven’t been around lately. I put a few posts up on the site late in the summer and haven’t been writing anything since. I’ll be honest, I was completely burned out after the summer. I never played that much online poker ever in my life. I was regularly playing in all the daily tourney’s on one site from 5 in the afternoon until 2 or 3 in the morning. That’s in addition to the sit n go’s played simultaneously which actually covered my entry fee’s into the tourney’s. Let’s be honest, cashing in tourney’s doesn’t come around that often. So sit n go’s is what kept me above water while i wasn’t cashing in the daily’s.

Now I was playing at the low limits, usually anywhere from $5 – $25 entry fees. The thing is, the fields are usually 350 + for the tourney’s so it becomes pretty exhausting trying to outlast those kind of fields on a daily basis for hours on end. As the summer started out I was playing mostly hold em and doing fairly well, but one evening I entered an Omaha hi low tourney. I ended up doing fairly well, I final tabled the tourney and finished in the top 3. As the summer progressed I played more and more Omaha and had more success at it. I began to realize what is probably well known now in poker circles. Most people are used to only hold em and the gap between novice and pro has shrunk and continues to shrink, while Omaha is on the rise and still an unknown game to many people.

So what does this mean, if anything at all? Well, for one it actually means that people are looking for something other than no limit hold em. Second, and most important to poker players, is that most people have no clue how to play the game. I don’t consider myself  a very good Omaha player , in fact I really never liked it before this past summer. However, once I started playing, I realized how bad the OTHER players were. In most cases I could just wait until I had a cinch hand and just bet right out for the max and get more than a few callers to call me down and pay me off.  I ended up playing more Omaha than hold em as a result, all be it Omaha high low which is different than pot limit Omaha since you have a chance to play for the low and a high each hand. The high low variety is a bit different in that sense, but I also found out that weaker players’ mistakes were compounded even more in the high low variety since they would be likely to chase both ends of the pot only to lose most of the pot anyway.

I’m sure top notch players have noticed this in the past few months or even year, and I’m sure many of them are playing plenty of pot limit Omaha or some form of it and reducing their time at hold em. There’s more of an edge for pro’s and very skilled poker players right now since Omaha is huge and still played by weak players. After all, isn’t getting the edge what it’s all about?

p.s.

see you all tonight at the tourney