I heard a story a while back about ESPN’s coverage of the 2004 World Series of Poker. When they were looking at which events to broadcast, they chose to ignore the Omaha 8/b events because, to sum it up, “who would believe there’s a game like that?” Well, not only is it a very fun game to play, one that an intelligent player can succeed at regularly, but it’s also one of the most strategic poker games. I’ve seen several P5’s discussion threads recently about the basics of the game, and thought that I would write up a couple of the most fundamental concepts to learn before starting the game. Omaha is typically played as a pot-limit game. Omaha 8/b, what we’ll be focusing on, is usually a limit game, although pot-limit 8/b is fairly common online as well.

The game goes like this. In Omaha, you’re dealt four cards in the hole, a flop, turn and river are dealt, and you make your best hand from two of your cards and three on the board. This means that you are actually playing six two-card combinations in the hand. More on that later. In 8-or-better (commonly written as 8/b), there can be two hands that split the pot. One is the highest hand, the other the lowest hand…an Ace can count as high or low, which makes it a very powerful card. Not every hand will have both a high and a low. For there to be a low, the board must have three separate cards ranked 8 or lower. First, knowing that they have to be of separate rank is important. A board that shows 2233K cannot make a low, because you have to use three of them, and splitting the pairs only gives us a K32. In another column, we’ll talk about the specific math of making a low hand.

You have tremendous possibilities in each hand because you’re playing six combinations, which can make playing everything very attractive. I played in a $1 Omaha 8/b tournament recently where the winner played over 90% of his hands…he was an admitted luckbox during the tourney, and many of his opponents were clueless about the game…but there’s no way you could ever succeed in a Hold’em tournament against any opposition for any stakes playing that way. There’s also a famous story about Ted Forrest where he saw every single flop in a month (some versions of the tale say a year) of playing Omaha 8/b in order to practice his flop play. Just about every hand you play, and every flop you see, will give you some draw to what looks like a good hand. I have no doubt that Scott Fischman is the great player that he is today because he spent thousands of table hours online grinding out 3/6 and 5/10 Omaha 8/b games…he was seeing, calculating, and considering six times the number of possibilities as he would have playing Hold’em.

The attractiveness of those possibilities, however, will also be your downfall if you’re not choosy enough. In most Omaha 8/b hands, especially at low-limits, four or five players will see every flop. THE ABSOLUTE MOST IMPORTANT THING ABOUT OMAHA (I can’t stress this enough) is that all four cards in your hand work in some combination with the others to give you the possibility of a nut hand in either direction. If there’s five players seeing a flop, you’re not playing your cards against four other hands…you’re playing your six 2-card hands against 24 other 2-card hands. If you have just one card that don’t work well with others, you’re cutting your chances of winning a hand in half, especially on the high side. As a simple example, you’re dealt A K Q 8. Three combinations you have, the AK, AQ and KQ play well to make the nut straight. But the K8 is worthless, the A8 will almost never win the low, and the Q8 will only make you the third-nut flush if three hearts come on the board. With so many combinations available, the third-nut will painfully lose a lot of the time, and it will be very difficult for you to lay that flush down. You’re not taking six combinations into battle with 24 others…you’re only taking three, and those three will lose to a flush or full house even if you do make the best hand you can. It’ll be tough to get used to, but throw hands like this away early and save yourself a ton of chips and heartache.

The goal of a split-pot game like Omaha 8/b is to scoop the entire pot. If the only pots you win are split, in Omaha 8/b, you will lose money regularly because of quartering, a phenomenon exclusive to Omaha 8/b. I don’t remember ever seeing a quarter playing Stud 8/b, although I’ll admit I haven’t spend a lot of time playing that game. Quartering happens when you tie for half the pot, usually on the low, although it happens fairly regularly on the high side as well. An example looks like this:

Your hand – A256
Opponent A – A245
Opponent B – AA67
Board – 345KQ

Opponent B wins the high half of the pot with his 7-high straight. Both you and Opponent A have the wheel, the nut low, so you split the other half. Assuming these are the only players who were involved, you contributed 1/3 of the pot, and only got ¼ out of it. You won, but you lost. Over time, this really adds up. There are times when great Omaha 8/b players will fold hands with A2 or A3 pre-flop when a lot of raising is going on, and they read that another player will also make the nut low if the board allows, just to avoid this situation.

The way to avoid being quartered is to have hands where some combinations can make the nut low, and some make the nut high. The very best Omaha 8/b starting hand is AA23 double-suited for that reason. Each combination can make either the nut low, a nut flush, or a nut full house. We’ll take a look at that another time. Next time, if there’s enough interest to make this a series, more on the math of Omaha 8/b, or “Why Playing High-Only Hands Will Cause You To Take Up Croquet”.