Omaha Hi Lo Poker Strategy

Strategy For Omaha Hi Lo Poker
Omaha Hi Lo Poker Strategy
Omaha Hi Lo Poker Strategy Book

Omaha High-Low Poker Strategy Introduction to Omaha High-Low Split. By Steve Badger: Poker Strategy Articles Texas Hold'em Strategy Omaha Strategy Omaha High-Low PLO8 Double Board Secret of Omaha Dramaha Archie Super Stud 8 Poker Tournament Strategy Starting Hands Poker Math Poker Skills Poker Psychology PokerStars and Poker Boom Stories Site Map. Omaha Poker Strategy – The Main Components Firstly, in Omaha poker each player gets 4 starting cards. If you think that makes for a game with bigger swings, you've hit the nail on the head. This fact also means that the average winning hand in Omaha is much stronger than in Hold'em.

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Pot limit Omaha hi lo, also called Omaha eight or better or PLO8, has been growing in popularity over the last several years. If you are able to master the complex game of Omaha hi-lo you can make a great deal of money. The influx of relatively inexperienced eager to try something other than holdem has created a burgeoning O8 economy.

Unfortunately there are a few obstacles to overcome. The game is a more complex than no-limit holdem. There is also less information available in terms of dedicated strategy content, articles, and videos.

That being said, the following information is a great place to get started. Check out our Omaha hi-lo tips and then get to a table and practice.

Top 5 Omaha hi-lo Tips

1. Your Cards Matter More

Unlike holdem, where you can play position and abuse the tendencies of weaker opponents, in Omaha you will frequently need cards to win. That isn’t to say that you can’t find good spots to take pots away from someone. You can. But because there are 36 cards handed out preflop in a full-ring game of Omaha hi-lo, someone is going to have a very strong hand most of the time.

Look for strong hands with potential to win both the high and low sides of the pot, or very strong potential to win one side of the pot. Use the following guidelines to rank your starting hands, adding value for suited and double suited hands (at least king high suited).

Very strong hands include: AA23, AA2x, AA3x, A234, A23x

Strong high only hands include: AAKK, AAKQ, AAJT, Any double paired hand 9s or higher

Playable hands include: A2xx, A3xx, A-baby and a pair, 23 and a pair

2. Bluff Less Often, Pick Your Spots

Bluffing in Omaha hi-lo should be done with consideration for the situation and the opponent, and in general bluffing should happen less often than in no-limit holdem.

Times when bluffing makes sense: Very scary turn or river, the low misses, paired board on the river, ace on the river.

Essentially you must ask yourself, what is my opponent’s likely holding, and would it make sense for me to be holding a hand that beats him. For instance, if your opponent was representing the nuts on the turn, and you were drawing to a solid low with A23x, and the river pairs the board, you can try to represent a full house.

3. Play for the Nuts

Because so many cards are distributed pre-flop, there is a strong likelihood that one of the players at the table will have the best possible hand by the river. For this reason, the 2nd best possible hand, or second-nuts is a dangerous hand to show up with.

If you have the second best high and the second best low hand in a 3-way pot and the other two players are raising and re-raising, there is a good chance you’re going to lose your stack.

Be careful of king-high flushes, A-3 and A-4 low, weak full-houses.

Ideally you should play for the nuts to at least one side of the pot, and hope to hit a reasonable hand on the other side of the pot. A made high hand with a low draw is a powerful hand and a made low hand with a flush or straight draw is a powerful hand.

4. Educate Yourself

There is less information available for studious Omaha hi-lo players, but there is still plenty of good information available to players who look for it. Cardrunners and other poker training sites like it have Omaha hi-lo content in the form of strategy articles and video content. Additionally there are dozens of helpful players on the twoplustwo forums who are knowledgeable about the game of Omaha hi-lo and eager to help up and coming players.

5. Practice

More important than anything else is practice. Put yourself in tricky situations, use your brain and reasoning skills to try to determine the best course of action, and then learn from your sessions as best you can. Practice makes perfect.

This is even more important with an ‘unsolved’ game like Omaha hi-lo. The more you play the more you will figure out what play style suits you, which moves work and which ones don’t. Check out a quality poker site like Pokerstars with plenty of Omaha action; sit down at the O8 tables, and play!

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Remko Rinkema

'Anytime you learn another form of poker, you'll learn how to play your best form better.'

That's what Bart Hanson said when we asked him to give us a reason to improve our Omaha hi-low game, and we couldn't have put it any better ourselves.

This year at the World Series of Poker, a total of 12 different games are spread, and only one of those doesn't have its own bracelet event. Badugi will be a part of the $50,000 Poker Players' Championship, but we don't discriminate and every single one of these games will have at least one, possibly more, strategy articles.

Today we're kicking things off with one of the most popular games at the WSOP, Omaha hi-lo. It's also commonly known as Omaha hi-low 8-or-better, Omaha-8, and Omaha 8-or-better, but it's all exactly the same game.

In case you've never heard of it, here is a brief explanation to get you up to speed.

Omaha hi-low is a flop game where every player gets dealt four cards. Just like with pot-limit Omaha, you have to use two cards from you hand, but the big difference is that you can use a different two for the high than you use for the low. On every single hand, the high will qualify, but since this game has an 'eight-or-better' qualifier, the low only comes in when a player has a combination of five unpaired cards lower than an eight.

Example hand:

If you hold on an board, then your high hand is for a four-of-a-kind, and your low hand is . In this example, you have 'nut-nut,' which is the two best possible hands, high and low.

For this first strategy piece, we spoke to the aforementioned Bart Hanson, who's very well rounded in all forms of poker. Hanson has live tournament results in many forms of the game, and six in Omaha hi-low. During the 2012 WSOP, Hanson had his best result in this game, placing seventh in the $5,000 Omaha hi-low event for $45,084. Here’s what he had to say.

'People play this game with different strategies,' he said. 'I really believe — and I'm from the Mike Matusow school of this game — that the correct style is to play a little bit defensive. It's very different from any kind of other tournament and the unfortunate part is that even if you get a good table draw, when players are aggressive it ramps up the variance so much for good players. This is a reason why I love the $10,000 Omaha 8-or-better tournament because guys are not just jamming it every hand, and because you get so many chips it's very hard for them to burn you. You'll be able to overcome that higher variance since you will see more spots and hands.'

Hanson also emphasized the importance of being able to scoop, which means winning both the high and the low portion of the pot.

'The low only comes in about 60 percent of the time, so sometimes high-only hands have value when the low bricks out,' he advised. 'However, you might run an amazing hand against a very trashy hand and it will only scoop about 60 percent of the time. If you can stay in there for cheap, it's good, but fundamentally you want to build on a low. Hands that include ace-deuce and ace-three are really powerful, because once you hit that low you're on a freeroll against high-only hands.'

As an example, Hanson uses the following scenario:

Strategy For Omaha Hi Lo Poker

'Even if a guy has two kings on , which would be the current nut high, you could have or and sometimes even with a flush draw, so you are freerolling for the low with a chance to also make a better high hand on the river.'

He added, 'In tournaments, it's definitely good to play tight in this format, as it's more of a defensive game and saving bets is very important. Unlike, let's say no-limit hold'em, where you just get it all in and win or lose, it's a split-pot game and you're not getting knocked out all that frequently when you get it all in.'

Also in tournaments, Hanson was sure to point out the difference between how many players go to a flop versus when in a cash game, and this cane certainly change one's approach.

'In a tournament, this game is usually a lot more short-handed post flop, but in cash games you need to at least draw to the nuts in one way because there is so much multi-way action,' Hanson said. 'Fundamentally, it is good to draw to the nuts, but if you are in a heads-up pot you can absolutely play more than just the nuts.'

Using an example of this, Hanson elaborated with the following:

'If I defend my blinds and flop a jack-high flush draw and the third nut low draw, I will go with it,' he said. 'It's very unlikely in that scenario that he's beating me both ways, but in the early levels it's different. When it gets limped around seven ways, and I have and the flop comes down with two clubs, I'll just fold that hand. The third nut low draw and the third best flush draw are not very good in multi-way pots, so I would say that the more multi-way the pots are, the more you need to be drawing to the nuts.'

There are plenty of tournament options at the WSOP if you like this game, but usually it's easier to find some cash-game action, especially if you want to test the waters there are lots of tables all over Vegas that spread Omaha hi-low. Based on experience we can say that Omaha hi-low is the second most popular cash game in Las Vegas behind no-limit hold'em.

For remaining WSOP Omaha hi-low events, check out the following schedule: