A common mistake made by even the most experienced players from time to time is misreading the board. for newbie Omaha poker players, they often forget that they must use two and exactly two of their hole cards, i.e. not one or three of them, so if the flop contains 4 hearts and you have the Ace of hearts and no other heart, you do not have a flush, let alone the nut flush. Similarly if the board has trips on it say 5-5-5-J-8, if you have A-K-J-2 you do not have a full house, you merely have a set of fives with an Ace kicker. Anyone with any pair in the hole has you beat.

 

This might seem crazy to Hold Em players, but it’s true, there are times in Omaha where it is correct to fold the nuts. One of the prime examples of this is where you flop the pleasant site of a straight and you happily make a bet, and then all hell breaks out, with raises and re-raises, you may very well scratch your head and think hey ‘but I got the nuts’, but what is really happening here? Ok let’s say you started the hand with 8-7-6-5 and the flop comes 9-7-5, with two suits which you don’t have, it’s a nice hand but it’s got no redraws going for it, the hands that are likely to be in your opponents hands are a duplicate made straight plus flush draw, draw to a higher straight, something like J-T-8-6 has you in big trouble, a set (3 of a kind). Basically the ‘nuts’ here is in all sorts of trouble, it’s unlikely to hold up by the river and even if it does there’s a good chance that it would split the pot. Still think you should never fold the nuts in Omaha!

 

Omaha is not known as the action game without reason. Omaha has more players seeing the flop, and indeed seeing the hand through to the turn and river than Hold Em, making for on average, about twice the size of the pots that you would find in the equivalent Hold Em game. Combine this with the common scenario, where two players correctly get all-in with two hands which neither is a huge favorite over the other, and it makes for a game with massive swings. A look through players in poker tracking software like Hold’em manager demonstrates this via standard deviation std bb/100, it’s typically about 60% higher in Omaha as opposed to Hold Em; this actually translates that you need to have about twice the bankroll to ride the roller coaster that is Omaha, as opposed to Hold Em, at the same stakes. It’s not all bad news though, good players in Omaha do have a higher expected ROI% than their Hold Em counterparts.