Omaha High Low Strategy
Introduction to Omaha Hi Lo
This is an introduction to the key strategies behind the
game. While it's not meant to deal with the most advanced
concepts, it does deal with concepts that should benefit
many experienced players too, not just novices.
"Omaha" here refers to the most common variation of Omaha
Holdem: Limit Omaha HiLo Split, Omaha8, Omaha/8, Omaha
High-Low, Omaha Split, Omaha Eight-or-Better. Omaha is
also played Limit High Only, Pot Limit High, and Pot Limit
HiLo Split. While concepts here are sometimes applicable to
the other variations, sometimes they are not. Some readers
may want to begin with the Omaha
Rules page to go over game basics, then return here.
Omaha Fundamentals
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. 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?... 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 though. 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 as 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.
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 longrun. 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. Limit Omaha High Low 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 longrun. That is
Omaha. The introduction to it anyway...
Omaha Poker, Hi Lo Qualify 8 -
How to play?
Omaha Hi-Lo Split
Strategy
Poker Hands Rankings
|
