Brian Cloughley's Poker Journal

Unlike Texas Hold’em where you can get away with playing like a maniac if you know what you are doing, it is almost certainly going to blow your stack away in moments if you attempt to do something like that when playing Omaha. Omaha has a lot more action than Hold’em, thanks to the fact that the number of players with great hands during any given round is much greater. You will almost never see a round of Omaha fold all around. This fact leads to lots of action even when players play conservatively, which is exactly how you should be playing.

Omaha has extremely difficult hand selection and being able to pick hands that are good to play can be very confusing for new players. Additionally, playing with four hole cards changes the math from very straightforward in Texas Hold’em where calculating pot odds and drawing percentages is easy. Calculating odds and draws in Omaha is significantly more difficult. All the added cards in play in Omaha adds another layer of difficulty in statistical calculation for figuring out what your odds are, as well as what your opponents might be holding.

With two cards in Hold’em, placing your FullTiltPoker.net opponent on a hand is straightforward, as they have the two cards and they are using both of them to form the best hand. However, when trying to put your opponent on a hand in Omaha, you could be putting them on the right hand for two of the cards they are holding, but one additional card to the board could change the cards they are using to make their hand into something else entirely. This vast number of different hands that players can make from the cards in their hand makes it difficult to accurate put them on a hand, especially when it can switch to something else so easily.

In fact, each hand a player is holding has six unique different two-card combinations that they could choose to play with as their hand. Instead of one combination that you need to figure out in Hold’em, you are trying to figure out a hand that has six different possibilities for what they could play. That is why in order to be successful and get comfortable with Omaha; you must play extremely conservatively and avoid trying to take any risks. The learning curve for Omaha is much steeper than that for Hold’em and knowing this is imperative. You should almost never bluff in Omaha as well, especially if you are not too familiar with the game, because bluffing usually requires some level of knowledge of your opponents’ hands and a strong chance that their hands are poor.

Overall, adopting an extremely conservative approach to Omaha on Full Tilt Poker, especially when you are new to the game, is vital to having any success. Omaha is really fun and exciting, but without focusing on learning the nuances of the game and sticking to amazing hands, you will most likely find it frustrating and difficult to understand.