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Have you ever wondered why there are so few pros who play Omaha exclusively? I don't mean big-name pros with their face all over billboards, the reason there aren't many of those people consistently playing Omaha is because the prize pools aren't big enough to get them endorsement deals when they win. I mean grinders, blue collar professional poker players, guys like me. I find that very few of my peers are playing Omaha for the majority of their living, even though the games are plentiful and filled with fish.

There are number of minor reasons, things like the fact that most people get started in Texas Hold'em, many live casinos don't spread Omaha games, and the high level of variance in the pot-limit games. These things all probably hurt the popularity of online Omaha games, but they don't really explain why more people aren't grinding these games for a living. After a discussion recently with a friend who plays low stakes Pot-Limit Omaha and is trying to move up, I think I may have stumbled across the real reason why there aren't as many Omaha grinders as you might expect given the number of available games. The problem is the transition.

You see fish don't have to change their game to play different stakes, and they don't care what their win rate is as they move up and down levels. Solid players who take a break from Hold'em to play PLO are also not terribly concerned with hourly rate at different buy-in levels. The only people who really pay attention to that sort of thing are the grinders who have enough data to see the hourly rate change as they move up through the levels, and many of those people stop playing a lot of Omaha around the $200 buy-in level because their win rate drops. There win rate drops... but not because the games have become tougher, but just because the games have changed.

At the lower limits, Pot Limit Omaha is a game that requires more patience than anything else. The lower limit games can be beaten by a reasonably experienced player with a fairly simple strategy that involves the following:

1. Play solid preflop poker. Limp along with speculative hands that will make the nuts, don't raise with big pairs unless there is enough money in the pot that you can actually get a big portion of your stack in there, and don't call a raise or even limp in if there is a significant possibility of a raise or reraise behind you.

2. Know your draws and how good they really are. As long as you aren't getting excited about eight-out straight draws (pretty weak in most cases) or non-nut flush draws (even worse) and you can calculate simple pot odds and outs, playing draws isn't too tough. Opponents don't fold much in these games, so semi-bluffing is not a great play unless your draw is really huge. It's usually best to take your draw cheaply and wait until it hits to bet it. If you can't get it cheap then it's fine to muck a draw as well, and just being able to fold a draw puts you well ahead of the typical opponent in the lower and micro-stakes games.

3.Don't slow-play anything. There are rare occasions where it's correct to slow-play in low-stakes PLO, and check-raising is a good strategy a little more frequently. If you have an opponent you are absolutely certain will keep betting, and have a very tough hand to crack, then it's not unreasonable, but if you went your entire low-stakes Omaha career without slow-playing a hand it really wouldn't hurt your win rate much. You make your money from people who call too much with second best hands in these games, not from trickery.
 
That is a basic outline of the approach that winning players in the lower-limit Omaha games take to beat the game. Excellent win rates are possible in these games and many players make a fine side income from them. Some people even multi-table these games for a living.

Beating the $2/4 and higher levels of online Omaha games is a different animal. It's still very doable, but it requires an entirely different approach. Where we assumed the mistakes at the lower limits were from players who all call too much, the mistakes at the higher levels come from all different directions. These players aren't significantly more educated, though they do play better on average and win rates in terms of BB/100 are lower for winning players.  There are still more than enough fish in these games to make a good living. I know that guys like Scott Clements (BigRiskky) regularly put a beating on these games and maintain a nice win rate, but they do it with a very different approach.

Beating these higher games requires a much larger skill set. You can no longer count on all of your opponents calling too much and you can no longer play all of them in the same way. This means the number of tables you can play is reduced because you have to pay attention to each player and make decisions based on your opponents in order to beat the games. Stat tracking software with a Heads Up Display (HUD) helps, but not much has been written about using them in Omaha games and it takes a little more work to make them useful. Even with a good HUD layout you still have to analyze the data available in those stats and make informed decisions instead of playing the hand the way you always play it.

Many players at the higher limits are folding too much, something you almost never see at the lower limits. A player playing the "make a hand and bet it" strategy that works in the lower games will be giving away free cards and free showdowns to this type of player at the higher limits, which can be very expensive. Players who reach this level without a HUD, and without learning to take notes, discover that their win rate plummets and it is often due to the fact that are giving money away to these overly tight players. It may also be due to the fact that they are one of these players themselves and the strategy that crushed the lower levels is now being exploited by a smart player with a HUD who is paying attention to his opponents.

These games will also contain overly aggressive players, something that is less common in the lower games and that many players never learn to exploit. A typical Omaha player will recognize the guy who bets every chance he gets and will always bet your hand for you, but that guy is fairly rare in these games. The over-aggressive players in these games are those who raise with draws too much, who are willing to get all-in with a weak two pair, and those who will always bet the river if you check to them and their draw has missed.

The behavior of all of these types of aggressive players will be hard to deal with if you are playing the very straightforward strategies that we talked about for the smaller games. You'll be folding too much to draws, paying too much for your own draws, or folding reasonable made hands on the river when many of the draws your opponent is likely to hold have missed.

I think the players who start at the lower limits have trouble as they work their way up and try to cross that border from $1/2 to $2/4, and end up learning to play another game instead, leaving the higher limits to the serious Omaha students and those who move over from Hold'em where they have already learned about playing each opponent differently. Most of the grinders start out small, hit that ceiling, and give up on it quickly because they have had so much success moving up through the lower limits and they get frustrated easily when that success is harder to come by.

If you haven't suffered many setbacks they can be hard to handle, and for many Omaha players the move from the very smallest games up to $1/2 doesn't take long and has very few setbacks. They aren't used to having trouble, and quickly move to a different game. They may discover trouble there as well, but they don't come back to Omaha very often if at all, because they remember it vividly as a frustrating game at the higher limits, even after they have learned more than enough about watching their opponents from other games to come back and beat it.

There is also the fact that reading a hand in Omaha, even for a very experienced player, takes longer than reading a Texas Hold'em hand. In Hold'em you often know exactly what you will do after the flop for any given flop texture, while Omaha requires at least a moment of consideration quite frequently. This makes playing more than four tables much tougher than it is in Hold'em, and many of today's cash game grinders need to play more than four tables to keep their win rate high enough to support them.

That's just my guess as to why there are so few working pros grinding it out at the PLO tables. I could certainly be wrong.


I'll see you at the final table,
Chris "Fox" Wallace

P.S. Check out my new site at pokerwhip.com

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Articles by Fox

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Poker College (Part 2) Aug 10, 2009
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A Quick Update Jun 02, 2005
Thanks to Beanie and Annie May 27, 2005
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Playing Multiple Tables May 12, 2005
Meeting Beanie and Feldliss May 09, 2005
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A Frantic Week May 02, 2005
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