Pre Flop Play in Pot limit Omaha - The big picture
– The big picture
Get the big picture before you play your poker hand
There are a number of factors you need to bear in mind when deciding on what hands to play pre flop in Pot limit Omaha Poker. The cards you hold is the first obvious factor, your position, the earlier you are in the poker hand, the better your hand needs to be to enter the pot, the amount of opponents, the quality of your opponents, the tendencies of your opponents.
Raising pre-flop in Omaha does not equate to raising in Hold Em.
In Hold em you raise pre flop usually because you have a good hand and you want to thin the field and/or also to extract value, making people pay a price to see the flop. While this still remains true in Omaha, it doesn’t remain true to anywhere near the same extent, since few hands in Omaha are a massive favourite over any other pre-flop.
It’s still necessary to raise pre-flop in Omaha
However it is still important to raise preflop in Omaha, unlike in Hold Em where you are nearly always looking to thin the field with your preflop raises.
Raise to build the pot
Sometimes in Omaha the purpose of a raise is not to thin the field, but simply to build the pot with a good speculative hand, so that if you do hit the flop you increase your chances of winning a big pot, and perhaps one or more players stacks.
Raise to steal the blinds
Blind stealing is as rife in Omaha as it is in Hold Em, perhaps even more so. Although the distance between starting hands is less, the value of position in Omaha is higher than in Hold Em, this factor alone means that the blinds if they play correctly will still often have to give up their blinds. O f course better again if you have an extra tight player in the Big Blind, then you can steal even more liberally.
Don’t get carried away with pretty looking starting hands
One of the first things to note is that the distance between starting hands in Pot limit Omaha as opposed to Hold Em is relatively small. AA in Hold em against 2 or 3 opponents stands a good chance of still being the winning hand unimproved by the river in Hold Em, in Omaha more often than not it needs to improve by the river to be the winning hand. In actual game play it gets even worse, since there are so many scary boards for an unimproved A-A-xx-, it can often be forced to fold before the river, even if it is actually ahead.
Play A-A-x-x, but don’t overplay it.
Note, we’re not saying A-A-x-x is unplayable, it’s still a good hand that you will want to see the flop with, but it’s nowhere near as strong as AA in Hold Em. You need to be especially careful that you don’t tip off your opponents that you do in fact have A-A-x-x preflop as having that information will give them a big advantage over you. This is another reason why you should make sure you are raising with enough hands pre-flop that people can’t automatically put you on A-A-x-x
Omaha is a drawing game
As the nature of Pot limit Omaha is such that you can enter a pot preflop for a very small amount relative to the potential final pot, it’s not hard to see that there can be massive implied odds. Big hands with great drawing potential which have both a flush and straight potential such as Js Th 9s 8h benefit massively in Omaha from implied odds.
Beware of trouble hands in Omaha
Of course the flip side of this is that there’s also massive reverse implied odds. A hand such as As Qd 2h 2d would be an example of a hand that can be deceptively pretty, especially to newbie Omaha poker players, but it suffers hugely from reverse implied odds as outside of a flop such as K J T (2 diamonds) there are not many hands you can feel absolutely confident that you are ahead or that your draw is live. These grey areas hands can be a cause of big mistakes post flop in Omaha.
