Pot Limit Omaha

Following a bad few weeks in December I decided I needed a break from poker. Unfortunately, I also needed money to pay for Christmas and a holiday in February that we have booked, so I decided that I would try some other games instead.

I have played Pot Limit Omaha (PLO) before, both live and online, both for high hand only and hi-lo split (PLO8) and I have a reasonable understanding of the games. So I jumped in at $2-$4 and after a good start at both games had a couple of bad sessions at PLO. I quickly realised that the players at this level were better Omaha players than me and that if I was going to persist with a change of scenery it would have to be at lower stakes. Also, the player pool at PLO8 was very small indeed and I suspected that I was way over-matched in this game.

At $1-$2 the players are a lot worse and I have able to multi-table quite comfortably for a number of reasons. First, there is a bit less guesswork involved in Omaha than Hold-Em. Your own hand is more important to your decisions than it is in Hold-Em: you either have a good draw or you don’t. Secondly, as the game is Pot Limit and there are often multiple draws available, there is a lot less trapping than in NLHE and generally if a scare card comes and your opponent checks it is often very likely that they will fold to your bet.

I have been tracking the big pots again and am quickly getting better at estimating my EV in pots. So far, at $1-$2, I have got my money in quite well although it’s too early to draw too many conclusions just yet.

It’s quite tough to approach a different game, one where my level of experience is way below the game I have been playing. It forces you to get back to thinking about the mechanics of the game. I have been re-reading some chapters from The Theory Of Poker. This book will never be out of date, and is always useful as a reminder of what you should be thinking about whilst playing.

Omaha is quite different to HE in that it’s quite tough to be a massive favourite over another hand, particularly pre-flop and on the flop. However, the river is the betting round where you have either 100% or 0% equity, and this is probably the most important betting round in PLO. I guess the aim in this game is to be strong by the river and be called by a worse hand, or be able to pinpoint an opponents hand and force him to fold when he has you beat but doesn’t have enough of a hand to call a big bet.

Also, as people seem to gamble more in PLO than NLHE, the stacks are often way more than 200 big blinds and this reduces the importance of pre-flop and flop play. It becomes very wrong to try to protect a weak made hand that has little chance of improving by the river.

The pots are almost twice as big at PLO compared with NLHE with the same blinds and this probably means that it’s possible to play tight pre-flop and gain a significant edge over the looser players when you hit your hand on the flop.

So far at PLO $1-$2 my win-rate is $64 per hour ($28.57/table/hr). This is great but obviously based on a very small sample size so I won’t start to get excited about it just yet. My overall win-rate per hour has dropped down after a poor run in December to $39.65. This is much lower than it was in mid-November but it’s actually way above the $25 I budgeted when I started this blog in May.

If there are any PLO experts out there reading this I would be very interested to hear your comments on my thoughts so far. There is very little detailed PLO literature out there and I would appreciate any help to improve my game as fast as possible. I'm sure there is much money to be made here.