Moving From Omaha To hold 'em

Where to Play Omaha Online

The biggest poker sites tend to have the best real money Omaha games. If you are looking to sit down and play online, click on the link to the right and head over to the Full Tilt poker site.

Omaha Poker Sites

 

The Essence of Omaha

The game of Omaha is played much differently than Texas Hold 'em. A good Hold 'em player will have a faster learning curve than most people when trying to learn this game, but it's not simply a game of Hold 'em with more cards.

You could talk about Omaha theory all day long, and if you cruise around this site you will find plenty of strategy articles. However this page is not about how to play a particular hand or a particular scenario. It's about learning the essence of the game and what it takes to be successful.

Dealing With Opponents

Above all, this is a game where learning about your opponent is even more crucial than in Texas Hold 'em. There is generally more opportunities to bluff, but this also means that there is more opportunities for a good opponent to try and trap you. This means that learning your opponent is a crucial part of beating the game of Omaha.

In particular, you want to try and identify opponents who are easily frightened by scare-cards on the board. This is really your optimal opponent in an Omaha game, because there will be plenty of opportunities to bluff an opponent like this.

In order to make this happen, you really need to pay attention to your position when playing against a player who uses this style. This is a good concept to learn in Hold 'em, but in Omaha this can make you or break you, and it can change the way you play certain hands drastically. It's as if the same concepts are sometimes at work as in Hold 'em, only their importance becomes magnified.

People are always going to be drawing to some kind of hand that can probably beat you. If you can identify some betting patterns dealing with how your opponents like to play their drawing hands, you can really start to do some damage to their chip stack.

Another concept to consider is that when you do have a great hand on 5th street, it's more likely that your opponent also has a good hand if there has been any action. Thus, value betting becomes an option more frequently in Omaha.

Discipline for Bettors and Trappers

You also need to develop some discipline when it comes to checking your hands down on 5th street. When an opponent fires a bet into the pot on every street, his range becomes pretty narrow on 5th street. In general, I find a lot of situations where it's not worth my time to bet some very strong hands. The main reason for this is usually that my hand will be transparent and somewhat obvious, so I will hardly ever get called by a hand that I can beat. But if you remember what I said at the beginning of this article, there are lots of opportunities to trap your opponents in this game, and it's not uncommon to see people checking the nuts on the river when they are out of position in order to try and induce a bluff, or maybe a bet from the second or third nuts. So regardless of whether you are trapping or pondering a bet, discipline becomes even more important in Omaha than Hold 'em.

Another reason for this is because your opponents will be trying to draw out so often, that's usually the only reason they would have stuck around for 3 rounds of betting unless they had you beat. This means that the best move is to just check call from out of position against an opponent who has missed their draw. There is often no reason to bet the third nuts on the river from out of position.

Big Pairs in Omaha

The last piece of advice for this page is actually about playing a specific hand. Beginner Omaha players can lose a lot of money playing hands like A-A-X-X or K-K-X-X. They are some of the best hands to have in Omaha, but I think for an inexperienced player with a deep chip stack, these hands might actually have a losing value overall. If you make your hand transparent, it can be easy for a good player to avoid you without a hand that can beat you, or a hand that is properly priced in to at least try and beat you. If you only have 1 pair for a made hand, it is usually not very hard to beat you.

To be honest, the best thing a beginner can try to do is find a way to make the pot very big before the flop when they are a favorite. If the stacks are deep enough and you are successful in finding a way to get a big re-raise in before the flop, you might have a higher expected value over the long run. At the very least, it can be enough to narrow the field down to 1 player and make the hand easier to play for you.

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The biggest reason to play this kind of hand aggressively early on is incase someone has K-K or Q-Q in the hole and they have decided that they are going to go with it. A hand like this you actually can have dominated if you are holding A-A-K-Q, and you opponent has K-Q-Q-2.

You can always choose to just see a flop and forget about thinking your 1 pair is ever gonna be good. This is actually a good way to play for a beginner if you can't really build up much of a pot before the flop. Your hand will be camoflouged a little bit, and you are less likely to get outplayed and stick your chips in with the worst hand.