More thoughts on Pot Limit High/Low Omaha

I hit a bump in my online playing, dropped a hundred bucks over two weeks, which is a pretty big drop for me, then took a break.

Now I'm back at it again and having 90% winning sessions. The strange part of this game is just when you think you got it, things fall apart.

I'm playing mostly PL Hi/Lo Omaha on Bodog, usually at the .10/.25 level but sometimes one step higher or one step lower. It seems to be getting harder and harder to find tables with high flop view percentages, but there are individuals at most tables who are loose and aggressive. LAG is an absolutely terrible strategy for HL PL, and these people are very clearly idiots who confuse the goals of poker. They play as if the goal is to win pots, and they make a lot of big pre-flop bets, killing the blinds and possibly drawing in other fools. If they have bad hands, they're going on a wing and a prayer, and if they have good hands, they are not building the pot. They're playing it like NL Hold Em, and PL Omaha is a very very different game. They annoy me because their pre-flop raises, though stupid play, prevent me from seeing a lot of flops. But on the other hand, they make me play tighter, and you can never play PL Omaha too tight. Much moreso than Hold Em, tight is right. So I don't play many hands and it gets kind of boring, but then when I do get a good hand and am able to connect on the flop, these guys with their hold em style aggression do the betting and build the pot for me. One of the hardest things in PL Omaha against good competetion is building the pot - so if you can be patient and play quality hands, this difficult issue takes care of itself.

Meanwhile these maniacs have a lot of volatility, winning and losing big pots, passing the chips back and forth to each other, but invariably at some point losing their whole stacks to one of the quality players at the table. I saw one guy yesterday rebuy four times ($100) within 15 minutes, but never altering his play - seeing every flop and calling or raising every bet, apparently never questioning whether it was working or not. In Hold Em, unbridled aggression is usually a mistake, but it can be a successful style when tempered with hand analysis. In HL Omaha, it's death.

Among experts there is some debate about whether it is EVER a good idea to raise pre-flop in HL Omaha. The heart of the game is post-flop, so you're either betting on a big unknown or, if you do have a good hand you're eliminating callers and limiting the pot size, which in a PL game can be a major problem. Yet I was playing yesterday and I saw two guys go all-in pre-flop with full stacks. Is that ever called for? Hell, even if I had AA23 double suited, I wouldn't bet my whole stack on it without seeing the flop - and I'd certainly not want to kill the pot. Anyway, these guys went all in. One had a pair of aces with two low cards, and the other had KK47. For some reason, that looked good to him (two cards under 8 and a big pair?).

I got involved with a hand where the flop gave me a pair of tens with a nut flush draw and nut straight draw and no low. I liked my drawing odds and ended up all in against two maniac opponents. My draws did not pan out, yet I was amazed that I won the pot with my pair of tens! Sixty dollars (in a $25 game) with just a pair of tens. Amazing. Those showdowns flash so fast and the hand history on Bodog is so atrocious that I don't even know what these guys were betting on.

While playing my PL HL Omaha, I run a couple tables of the UB (I know, it's bad) STEPS tourneys. Lots and lots of suckouts, both for and against. Really hard to prevail in turbo tourneys on skill alone. But it really highlights the hierarchy of variance. Omaha high is a high variance game where advantages are small and it's nearly impossible to protect made hands against draws. Hold Em is pretty high variance. You win when you shouldn't and lose when you should, but hope that the stats hold up often enough that in the long run you're on the positive side. And HL PL Omaha is a real grind with lots of static siatuations and small moves, peppered by the occasional - often rare - big pot. It's like pulling teeth. Probably the most profitable, lowest risk game for the patient knowledgeable player, but just a real grind. I play it because my goal is profit.

What is a good day? I like winning sessions, even though you really shouldn't evaluate you success on the basis of individual sessions. But most of the time, I can play for an hour or two and run my $25 up to $35 or $40, and sometimes much higher. Sometimes I'm disappointed if I don't double my money, but that is perhaps a pretty lofty expectation. I think about that, that I'm making $5 or $10 an hour, and that's not much. But it translates to 50% or 60% profit most of the time, which is darned good in the world of finance. I don't hit that in my stock portfolio over the whole year! But the problem is, it's a 50% profit on a small investment, so the only way to make real money in this game is to move up in stakes, where the competition is better and there might not be as many clueless maniacs. So I would expect the profit percentage to come down. I'm wondering where the sweet spot is as far as stakes.

Anyway, I have lots of projects for the summer, so I'll probably be playing less poker. I hope to come back to it and figure out a way to make a steady profit. I think some of you guys are doing that, and you hear about these college kids who make so much they quit school. I'm wondering what is the trick. I'm smart, I work hard, I study and I think. Why aren't I making thousands of dollars? I guess there's no such thing as easy money.

Gary