Omaha Hi-Lo:
Introduction to Omaha High Low
There are two versions of Omaha. Omaha High only and Omaha High-Low Eight or
Better which is a game where the high hand and low hand splits the pot. Each
version can be played with any betting structure: Limit, Pot Limit or No Limit.
You may hear the split game called Hi-Lo, Omaha 8, or simply Eight or Better.
It is all the same game. Hi-Lo seems to be the most popular with the players an
you will find more of these games than you will Omaha high only in the card
rooms. Low Limit Hi-Lo is gaining in popularity as the players like the chance
of having a split pot. Because the high and low are splitting the pot there are
more players staying in for the River card making many of the pots very large.
In order to have a hand qualify as low there must be no cards higher than 8
in your five card hand.
A flush or straight is ignored when making a low hand. Therefore the lowest
hand is A 2 3 4 5. Since in Omaha you must use two cards from your hand, there
must be three cards on the board that are eight or lower. If there is no
qualifying low hand the winner with the highest hand will win the whole pot.
Two cards, always two cards... Omaha hands consist of three of the
five community board cards, plus two cards from each player's hand -- always
three off the board, always two out of the hand. You can use the same or
different card combinations to make your high hand and your low hand (if any),
but you always use two from your hand, three from the board. This is important
not just from the perspective that it is a rule and you have to do it, but also
in thinking about how your hand must integrate with the board. Your hand must
cooperate with the board. (Cooperation is a recurrent Omaha principle.) You
should never think of your hand in isolation. It needs three cards from
the board for high, and needs three cards for low. (Some new players find it
helpful to focus more on "three from the board" rather than "two from the
hand.")
Nut low means best possible low... Reading low hands often
confuses newbie players -- experienced ones too -- but there actually is a
pretty easy way to do it. First, you must remember the two cards from your hand,
three from the board rule. A board like 87532 might make 2367 somewhat hard to
read but you read your low hand simply by taking the lowest card combination to
be found using three cards from the board and two from your hand.
But what is the lowest? What about when your cards are paired (counterfeited) on
the board? Think of it this way: the lowest/best possible hand is a wheel, a
54321 -- or 54,321. The highest/worst possible qualifying low hand is 87654 --
or 87,654. Read your low hand as a number, starting with the highest card and
working down. The player with the hand/number closest to 54,321 wins (or ties if
someone else has the same hand/number). Omaha players often speak of "the nut
low." This is the best possible low in this particular hand. While A2 combined
with an 876KQ board creates the best low possible, 54 combined with a board of
A23KQ makes the nut low in another case. And, 23 combined with a 764KA board
makes the nut low (64,321), not an A2, which only can make a 76,421. If you get
confused by how your cards are paired or counterfeited by the board, at the
showdown, show your hand and ask the dealer to read exactly what your low hand
is.
Omaha is a game of nut hands, so as hands unfold, practice reading what the nut
low hand is. Then start thinking of your low hand in relation to the nut low.
It's not important to know how low your low is, what matters is how low your low
is in comparison to the nut low.
Why play Omaha?... This website is called Play Winning Poker.
While some newbies reading this Introduction will be hard pressed to do it right
away, the aim is to win at Omaha -- not have fun, or even to irritate yourself.
Frankly, at lower limits, winning at Omaha is easy, if you really are
trying to win because most Omaha players play terribly, much worse than they
play Holdem (which is not so good to start with).
In many ways, Omaha is mathematically simplistic. If you play only good starting
hands and your opponents see fit to play almost every hand, and don't care
whether they play for one bet or for four, soon the math of that will work in
your favor. Omaha is the best game to make money, especially when you have a
small bankroll. $3/6 Omaha requires only about half the bankroll of $3/6 Holdem,
but your hourly win rate should be higher.
Bad players have virtually no chance to beat Omaha over any meaningful period of
time, but they can win big pots, and have really good sessions. This is true of
Holdem too but to a much smaller degree, because Holdem edges are generally
small in loose games. Weak Holdem players can "school" together and get pot odds
on their poor draws and therefore not be playing all that bad. On the other
hand, there is no parallel schooling phenomenon in Omaha where very often five
players draw stone cold dead while two players have all the outs between them
(for example, on the turn the nut flush and the top set are the only live hands,
and five other players with two pairs and baby flushes are drawing dead).
Omaha is a game of massive edges; Holdem is a game of smallish edges. Low limit
Omaha games are the easiest poker games to beat -- if you play properly.
Most players do not have the ability, or more important, the desire to
play properly in low limit Omaha games. If you are playing to win, generally
Omaha games are the place to play because they are cheaper (less bankroll), more
profitable (higher hourly win rates) and have weaker players playing much more
poorly. It's deadly dull tho. What winning loose-game Omaha is not is a
barrel of laughs.
So, for less experienced players, there are some contradictions at work here.
Omaha is a great game for good players... but most inexperienced players are not
good... but it is very easy to teach a player to play way-above-average Omaha...
but the basic advice is to play with great discipline... but having discipline
is an advanced skill... and is boring as paste.
Omaha is a game of non-random accuracy... One thing to understand
about Omaha is that since you get a higher percentage of your final hand sooner,
your hands are generally much more defined than in Holdem or Stud. After all,
7/9ths of your hand is known on the flop. Then, when it comes to the betting,
the likely outcome of an Omaha hand is often precisely known. A player with
twenty, or twelve, or four outs has that many outs.
In Holdem random outcomes are common. Facing several opponents, they can win by
hitting oddball kickers or spiking their underpair. On the other hand, Omaha is
far more concrete. You know your outs -- how many cards make you the nut hand.
In loose games there is very little mystery. In tighter games you often don't
need to make nut hands to win, since you face fewer opponents, but in common
lower limit situations (where most Omaha is played), there is little randomness
to the game. Unlike Holdem, before the river card is dealt, usually you should
know exactly how many possible cards make you the winner, and how many don't.
Omaha is a game of information. Holdem is a
game of uncertainty. That's how they were designed! Loose game Omaha is about
ending up with the nuts. Loose game Holdem is far more shadowy and difficult.
Many players seem to draw the wrong conclusions from the greater certainty that
is part of Omaha. They think because their nut flush on the turn gets beaten on
the river when the board pairs that Omaha has some mystical randomness to it.
The opposite is true. There are a precise number of cards that pair the board,
and make you lose. There are a precise number that do not pair the board, and
make you win. On the turn, if you have the nut flush, with no cards in your hand
paired on the board, and your opponent has a set, with no other cards paired on
the board, there are exactly forty possible river cards. Exactly ten pair the
board to make you a loser. Exactly thirty do not pair the board and make you the
winner. That's it -- pure, simplistic math. In the long run, you win three out
of four. This is known. This is Omaha.
Do not let yourself be confused by irrelevant concepts. What matters in any form
of poker, but particularly in Omaha, is the probability of winning -- not who is
temporarily in the lead. Whether you flop a made hand or a draw or a backdoor
draw is irrelevant, what matters are your prospects, your probabilities, of
having the winning hand on the river. What counts is how many cards, in what
combinations, make you the winning hand. Know how many cards make your hand, and
then know that in the long run you will win pots in the mathematically
appropriate percentage: if you have x% chance of making the winning hand, you
better be getting at least the correspondingly appropriate pot odds.
Omaha is a game of accuracy, clarity and concrete information. Sure, sometimes
you will get unlucky, and since Omaha edges are so huge, when you get unlucky it
can be pretty hard to swallow, but since the edges are usually so big, if you
play good starting hands in Omaha, and get unlucky, you can still win.
You just have to keep your discipline.
Starting hands... Unlike Holdem, where post-flop play is far more
critical, winning Omaha fundamentally begins with starting hands. Starting hands
exist before the flop, which is where you get enormous edges in Omaha against a
field. On the turn you will often have times where some players are even drawing
dead, and that is clearly the juiciest money in the game, but the simplest, most
direct, most necessary way to beat these games is to not play crap hands and to
get more money in the pot when you have A255 and several of your opponents have
hands like K965. Getting garbage hands with a low winning expectation to pay
before the flop when they are enormous dogs is a big part of winning Omaha.
Not counting AA and perhaps KK, in looser, multiway games Holdem hands run much
closer in value than Omaha hands do -- urban myths not to the contrary. If you
don't know and appreciate this basic concept, you are going to be in trouble in
Omaha. Omaha has a fairly large group of hands that will win at double the rate
of randomish hands. Few Holdem hands can say the same. Only playing good
starting hands, and raising before the flop with many of them, is the basics of
winning in loose-game, low to middle limit Omaha.
Schooling in Omaha... "Schooling" is a common phenomenon in
loose-game Holdem. When several players play badly by calling with weak draws,
like gutshot straights or backdoor flushes, these players partially protect each
other by making the "price" on each of their calls better. If only one player
calls with a gutshot draw, usually that is a significant mistake, but if several
players make similar calls, now the pot is big enough to make the calls
profitable, or at least much less bad. Properly understanding the strategy
involved in schooling is a key skill in loose-game Holdem. (See article on
Holdem
Schooling here.)
There is no parallel schooling phenomenon in Omaha -- quite the contrary. In
Omaha, schooling benefits the favorites, not the underdogs. This reverse
schooling phenomenon is what makes Omaha often mindlessly profitable. Players
with four outs or less call bets from players with twenty outs, and no matter
how many people call, the twenty outs player continues to have twenty outs.
Despite the definite reverse profitability of "schooling" in Omaha, poor players
engage in it all the time. They look at a big pot and call bets hoping to get
lucky, even though they may be drawing totally dead.
Suppose you flop a top set of three kings against seven opponents. The true
enemies of your KKK (or any strong Omaha hand) are the first two callers
(meaning the two opponents with the most outs). On a flop of KsQd7c for example,
we are afraid of AJTx wrap-straight draws. That's the first caller or two. Then
we have open-end straight draws. We are the favorite over those (and all the
rest of the draws). Next are backdoor flush draws. Then we worry about the lame
backdoor straight draws around the seven. Naturally, many of these longshot
draws overlap each other. For instance, if the Ace-high spade flush draw calls
us, we certainly love the five-high spade flush draw to call, drawing dead. Yes,
they may win sometimes, but we love these sixth, seventh, and eighth callers!
With the KKK, if we assume we won't win unless we fill up, and we don't fill up
on the turn, we will have ten outs of the forty-four possible cards, meaning we
will fill up 23% of the time. Even if we lose to quads the 3% part of that,
that's still a one out of five win percentage, for a scoop, while getting six,
seven or eight way action. Additionally, we'll normally have our own backdoor
draws. If we have two backdoor King-high flush draws, this will further destroy
what little power the sixth, seventh and eight callers have, as their backdoor
baby flush draws in our suits are contributing totally dead money on that aspect
of their hands.
So, building a pot with a raise before the
flop in Omaha does not benefit schooling opponents, it benefits players with the
good hands. The flip side of this phenomenon exposes another key difference
between Omaha and Holdem.
In loose Holdem games, there are a lot of hands you can profitably add to your
arsenal, most obviously Ace-rag suited and suited connectors. This is not true
in Omaha. Again, the difference in value of hands multiway in Omaha is much more
dramatic than in Holdem. The majority of hands simply are never playable
(outside the blinds). If you are on the button and everybody limps in, 3456 is
still a worthless piece of garbage. It does not matter if you have three
opponents or seven, the hand stinks. You can play a small number of additional
hands, but for the most part, no matter how loose or weak your opponents are,
you can't add too many more hands to your playable repertoire.
The thing to "loosen up" in such a game is to want to play for a raise most
hands you play. In tight games, calling when someone limps in front of you is
often the right play. In a loose game, raising is usually the correct play
because you are playing a hand with way the best of it. You want dead money in
the pot, and you want dead hands hopelessly chasing it! And they will.
A "river" game?... Some players like to call Omaha a "river game"
because the final card often determines the winning hand. While that is true,
the thinking behind this "river game" idea is very flawed. Poor Omaha players
wait to the river to bet -- when they know they are going to win (or lose).
That's just not sensible or profitable. Omaha is not a "river game"; it is a
game of preparation.
Before the flop: you should play hands that have a high expectation; you should
manipulate the pot size; you should try to manipulate your opponents so that
when you have a hand that plays well against fewer opponents you are playing
against fewer opponents and when you have a hand that plays well against a full
field you are playing against a full field.
After the flop: the flop is critical. Here you should begin to roughly calculate
the probabilities and deduce how favorable your chances are to win. Again, here
a player should be manipulating the pot -- get more chips in when the odds favor
you, try to minimize when you have a longer shot.
The turn card is the least important aspect of Omaha but it's the end of the
main math part of the game. In loose games, you can pretty much calculate
precisely your chances of winning some or all of the pot.
Whether a player then makes or doesn't make their hand on the river really
doesn't matter. You do everything right mathematically up to this point, and
lose to a one outer, that is fine -- just do the same things again and again the
next times. Omaha (and all the other games) is about having the best of it in
the long run. There is no "leader money" in poker. The "best" hand is the one
with the highest winning potential (including the understanding that some hands
will win more bets than others). Don't think what just happened was an aspect of
a "river game". I can't emphasize this strongly enough: All the truly
important actions in this hand occurred before that river card happened to
bring you bad luck.
Another thing to consider is that only a tiny percentage of money action is on
the river in Omaha. Poker is about money. Omaha is not about the river. That's
naive. Omaha is about getting money in the pot in a mathematically advantageous
way before the river. Omaha is an anti-river game!
Put another way, if you play a coin flip game against a guy, and he says he'll
give you $5 for every time it comes up heads, but you have to give him $1 for
every time it comes up tails, it would be wrong to refer to this situation as "a
flip game"! The key part of the game was in the pre-negotiation, not in the flip
itself.
Driving the pot... Loose game Omaha is mostly about nut hands. If
there is a flush, you sure want the nut flush. If there is a low, you sure want
the nut low. The obvious reason, of course, is because you have the winning hand
rather than the second or third best hand. But that's not the only value to
playing nut hands.
Again, winning Omaha requires pot manipulation -- get more money in when you
have clearly the best of it; play for cheap when you don't. Nut hands and nut
draws using quality cards can "drive the betting" where non-nut hands cannot.
For instance, let's look at the enormous difference between KK and JJ -- not in
terms of how much more often KK makes the winning hand, but in terms of the
difference in the pot sizes. KK is a much more valuable holding in part because
KK can drive the betting in many pots that JJ can't -- like on a turn board of
KQQ7 versus a board of JQQ7. The difference between those two situations is
enormous. There are other reasons why KK is a major holding while JJ is a minor
one, but the difference in how each can drive the betting (or not) offers an
excellent illustration of what situations you want to be in when playing Omaha.
Likewise, there is a very large difference between A23x and A2xx on a 87K flop.
The latter hand should win less money, not just because it will be counterfeited
sometimes and not make the winning hand, but because it cannot drive the betting
nearly as much (if at all) as the A23x can. A256, A247, A269, all these hands
should win extra money not just because you make winners more often, but because
you should be driving the betting with them far stronger than with the
one-dimensional A2.
Cooperation... Greedy players make lousy Omaha players. Foolish
greed often costs players bets because they simply don't recognize that the game
frequently requires cooperative betting. Suppose there are three people in a
pot. On an 8s7s5c flop, Player A bets and is called. The 9h comes on the turn.
Player A bets again, Player B calls, Player C raises, Player A reraises, B
calls, C caps, A and B call. Now the river card pairs the board with a flush
card, the 9s. What now? Often Player A will bet, with no high hand, and Player B
will raise, with no low hand. This will drive Player C with a straight and a
weak low out of the pot. Translation: stupid Player A and Player B. Instead of
cooperating to get at least one bet from Player C, they got none. If Player A
stupidly bets, Player B should call, and hope to get one bet from Player C, or
perhaps an idiotic raise. The better play though would be for Player A to check,
have Player B bet, get Player C to call, then have Player A checkraise, and have
Player B now call. This way you get at least one bet from Player C, and perhaps
two. Think about how you can use cooperative betting between high and low hands
to extract bets from players in the middle. Don't be greedy and cost yourself
money.
Luck... While the emphasis on the non-random mathematical nature
of the game above makes the point, I'll mention a few things about luck as it
applies to Omaha. All poker has luck involved. Omaha is the most mathematically
straightforward poker game -- very little randomness, very much known
information. So, when someone makes a miracle one-outer on the river, some
people will mistakenly think of Omaha as having a high degree of luck, when the
opposite is plainly true. Omaha is a bit like a roulette wheel. If you have bets
on all the numbers except one, when it happens to come up that other number that
is really bad luck. But, now suppose the person who bet on that one number also
put up as much money as you did. You had thirty-six chances to win, he had one,
playing for the same prize. The longrun outcome of this game is surely not going
to be determined by luck! You will crush your opponent, either very soon, or a
little while later. When he gets lucky, he gets super-lucky, but that's just
fine, as long as he is willing to keep making the same bet over and over.
Holdem has far more random luck than Omaha (or Stud). That's why it's the most
popular game. Poor players can do better, longer. Somewhat bizarrely, Holdem
also has more long-term skill. Winning Holdem is a game of exploiting tiny edges
often. Winning Omaha is a game of exploiting huge edges less often.
In most ways, Omaha is a far simpler game. When played by good players, Omaha
games are horrible -- unless the blinds are huge, forcing players to gamble.
This is why Omaha is often played with a kill, to generate action in a game that
should have very little. This is also why Omaha will never be "the game of the
future." Poor players have no chance. Good players eat them alive. In many
localities, Omaha games burn brightly for a while, and then burn out as the bad
players go back to Holdem games where random luck gives them a fighting chance.
Quartered... In loose games you should hardly ever think about
being quartered (when you have the same low hand as another player). It's almost
never very costly to be quartered in limit Omaha. In loose games, one of the
principal plays you should always have on your mind is how you can get
three-quarters of a pot with hands like nut low and one pair. Too many weaker
players obsessively fixate on being quartered with this sort of hand instead of
focusing on getting three-quarters of the pot occasionally. The quickest way to
get over a pathological fear of being quartered is to just do the math on
various situations where you get one-quarter. It's hardly ever much of a loss.
Now compare that to similar hands where you manage to get three-quarters of
different size pots. You'll quickly see that many tiny losses getting quartered
are more than compensated for by a few occasions where you can snatch
three-quarters.
Scooping... High-Low Split poker is about scooping the pot --
winning it all, not splitting. Many weak and beginning players think they are
playing decently because they focus on hands with A2 or A3 that make the nut
low. These hands are playable obviously, and getting half a loaf is better than
none, but this is most definitely not why you should be showing up to play Omaha
(or Stud HiLo for that matter).
Once again, just doing some simple math is very illuminating. Scooping a pot is
not merely twice as good as splitting. Suppose you play a five-way pot. Everyone
puts in $80. If you split the $400 pot, you get back $200, a profit of $120. But
if you scoop, you get $400, for a profit of $320. That's not twice as good, it
is 2.67 times as good. In a three-way pot where you all invest $80, if you split
you get $120 for a profit of $40. If you scoop, you get $240 for a profit of
$160 -- four times as good as splitting.
The real reason to play A2 hands is not for the benefit of making the nut low
and splitting a pot. The reason to play this hand is because while it is
splitting the pot some of the time, it allows other parts of your hand to be
aiming to scoop the pot. When you play A2, you actually want to be using some
other aspect of your hand, something that will scoop. A2 just makes it safe for
you to play, including often giving you the chance to make backdoor straights
and flushes that you otherwise would not have stayed in the pot to make. This
again goes back to "driving the pot". A2 allows you to drive the pot in
situations like where you have A2JT with the nut flush draw and the board is
4678. Your A2 allows you to stick around for the gutshot straight draw, and
allows you to aggressively bet your nut flush draw. That is where the money is,
not in splitting the pot with the nut low.
Four card units... The above illustration also should help make
the point that Omaha hands are four-card units. Despite the "must play two"
aspect of the game, Omaha hands should not be looked at as six two-card
holdings. Doing so is to fundamentally misunderstand the game. The
RGP Posts
section of this website addresses several fallacies involving Omaha point count
systems, and starting hand charts in general. There are a lot of reasons these
systems are a bad idea but one basic flaw is they view Omaha hands as several
two-card units.
It should be easy enough to see though that while 3d3h is a basically useless
Omaha holding on its own, when combined with an As2s it now becomes a powerful
aspect of a coordinated hand! Viewing the 33 out of the context of the A2 is a
serious error.
Beyond the simplistic thinking about starting hands, it is critical to think of
Omaha hands as four card units after the flop. You may play As2s3dQd, but end up
with a flop of Qs9c2c. Before the flop no point-count system would assign the
Qd2s aspect of your hand any value, but now here on the flop it is part of your
whole hand, and you must think in terms of how you have two pair, a backdoor
flush draw, a back door nut low draw, a backdoor wheel draw, etc. Omaha hands
are multifaceted and multi-dimensional. They should be viewed and analyzed as
integrated wholes, not separate parts. An Omaha hand can be greater than the sum
of its parts, sometimes even less, but Omaha hands are always four cards.
Situational analysis & starting hands... All winning poker
requires situational judgments. Some folks just hate that. They want easy,
cookie-cutter answers. Sometimes difficult problems do have easy answers, but
more often they don't. Holdem is a more situational game than Omaha, but because
of that, when situational judgments are needed in Omaha, they are usually very
critical -- inspirational even. For example, bluffing is not something that you
should do much of in loose game Omaha, but there still is a lot of profit to be
made from bluffing, precisely because nobody thinks it is a big part of the
game!
Most players play a lot of hands in Omaha, more hands than they play in Holdem.
The proper play is the reverse. However many hands you play in Holdem, you
should play less in Omaha. (Again, Holdem is a post-flop game where playing junk
before the flop can often be situationally correct.) If you are in an Omaha game
with people violating this concept, as most Omaha players do, then you should
only be focusing on playing strong hands and, in the correct situations, a few
highly speculative hands that make for big scoops. The latter group boils down
to KKxx, and QQ with two decent other cards. All other hands should either
contain A2, A3, Ax suited, or be highly coordinated (KQJT, QJJT, 2345). The
weakest of these are also more speculative (like the three examples). They
aren't very good, and don't hit that often, so you want to try and play for only
one bet, but when they do hit, they pay off nicely, so in weak, loose games they
should be played. In tougher games they should normally be mucked.
A very good, but not spectacular, hand like A23K with a suit on the King will
scoop somewhere between 20 and 50% more than a random hand, depending on number
of players and positional factors (and will split far more than random hands).
If you are on the button and don't raise with this hand when everybody limps in,
you are playing lousy poker. On the other hand you normally don't want to raise
under the gun with hands like A234 because you want players. You want to play
your very good hands for a raise, you want to try to put in an extra bet when
you can, but sometimes you can't.
A very general starting point for loose-ish games is: AAxx, A2xx, Ax suited,
A3xx, four cards ten or bigger (except trips), KK with two decent cards. That's
mostly it, but there are definite exceptions like AKsQs4. Don't look at these as
rigid rules. AK54 is a far superior hand to A397 offsuit. Solid "one-way" hands
are okay. You want to win the whole pot. Big cards win big pots, but they have
bigger fluctuations.
The end of the beginning... Advanced Omaha strategy goes quite a
bit beyond the above, but most Omaha players go nowhere near as far as we go
here. Once you think correctly about your approach to the game, like correctly
viewing how much better scooping is than splitting for instance, advanced
strategy concepts become more readily apparent, and your play will evolve and
adapt.
One big reason good players beat bad players at Omaha is because good players
are thinking about the right game. Don't be concerned about losing pots. That's
defeatist tunnel vision. Instead, be concerned with getting money in with the
best of it time and time and time again, and then letting the math take care of
things in the long run. That is Omaha. The introduction to it anyway...
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