omaha questions

I am a fan of pot limit omaha. just recently i started playing hi lo and i can never figure out when i have a good starting hand. I have people say AA23 is the best but it doesnt work that great for me. ANY TIPS?

- Play hands that play well multi-way
- A2, A3, 23 are really the only good starting combinations when playing for low.
- Draw to the nuts & bet your draws.
- Bet with the high on lock, check and call with the low. If you have just a low, consider mucking if there's a lot of action & the pot is small.

In this game, you lose a lot of your money by getting quartered with just the nut low. If you have a decent hand that plays both ways (nut low + trips or better) you should probably be putting a lot of money in the pot.

One of the most profitable situations in the game is when you have the high on lock, and you have several opponents drawing to a low hand.

PokerStars - I don't consider myself good at O8, I just know enough to make a small profit & get to the stud rounds when playing HORSE.

You said pot limit omaha...do you mean omaha hi/lo? If you're just playing Omaha hi (which is usually played PL), the best starting hand is AAKKds instead.

If it is omaha hi/lo (which is more often fixed limit), then you should just be aware that any hand can lose and almost any hand can win - much more so than hold em. This means that you may have to abandon great starting hands after the flop.

I don't claim to be a great O8 player, but I'd disagree with putting too much emphasis on "any hand can win" thinking.

Hands like 488J can get you in a lot of trouble, as they're limited in their ability to win high and low hands, whereas AA23 / AK23 / AKQ2 at least offer you a range of possibilities.

It's true that you'll sometimes have to abandon what looked like a great hand before the flop (for example - a J23 all clubs flop when you're holding AK23 with just one club is pretty ugly), but taking an "any hand can win" approach is a sure way to bleed to death quickly.

Other brief tips for OP:

- Keep an eye on the low possibilities for the hand (ie: if the flop is 9TJ, there won't be a low pot)
- Try to make notes on the players that like to stick around just to chase the low pot, and make it expensive for them whenever possible.

Oz - no argument with your post. It's certainly true that taking any perspective to the extreme will be damaging.

Not too long after I started playing, I did play most hands preflop, and found that I won money playing that way. But I found that I've done better yet as I tightened and avoided more hands.

Still, there are probably going to be people at the table who are playing
every hand, and they may well win them quite often. Unlike in hold'em, your great starting hands will often get cracked, and that's just part of the game.

One of these days I'm gonna get a good grasp on the HI/LO part of the game and stop playing middle cards.........

There will always be a high hand, there will NOT always be a low hand. I have noticed that I, and a whole lot of others tend to favor, for some bizarre reason, playing for the low in Omaha 8b. In reality, the lo part of the game should probably alway be an afterthought.

In ring games, the absolutely BEST scenario FOR THE HOUSE, is a split pot contest where there are 2 or more nut low hands and a flush or paired board (full house). The betting gets outrageous, and the HOUSE RAKES in the money in a huge rake. Getting quartered is bad news, it is actually worse than that as the quartering becomes less and approaches fifthing (?) as the pot (and thus the rake) increase.

Best advice I can give is never play with "danglers" in either version with a full table eg A239 the 9 is the dangler, no use whatsoever in your hand. JQK 6 = 6 you get the idea.

I could be wrong, but doesn't the house take rake out of the total pot before they split it (ie: whether the pot's split two ways or it's quartered, the rake they take doesn't change)?

correct Oz, and there's a max per hand usually 3% or $3 whichever is lower. Except maybe on Bodog, they seem to take a rake every round of betting.

AA23 has good potential, although you should always consider whether your hand is suited or double-suited as well... the reason for that being that with hands like A2 and A3 you can find yourself with the nut low, but no chance for the high, and the main profit comes from scooping the pot.
If you have a suited Ace, then you have a better shot at making the best high hand as well (even if on the flop it's only a draw or even a back-door draw), which adds value to the hand.
AA23 is great because of the potential, but if the flop doesn't fit, then it should still be thrown away. If you hit an Ace, you'll have trips (in Omaha mainly considered a drawing hand for a full house, although it can sometimes hold up), and if you hit 2 low cards you'll generally have the nut low draw, and with 3 low cards you'll generally have the nut low made. Additionally with A23 in your hand you're less likely to have your nut low 'counterfeited', and have a better chance of making the Wheel (A2345).

Pre-flop hand selection is important, because hands like that are noticeably better than random junk. However, they're not as stand-out as AA is in Holdem. In Limit you'll still be looking at the flop for a fit. A low will hit by the river a significant proportion of the time, but the big leak for a lot of Omaha players is chasing too much, especially when the result wouldn't be the nuts. In Holdem most of the time nobody has the 'nut' hand. In Limit Omaha H/L (full-ring), you expect to see a nut hand a lot more often.