Omaha Poker
Pre-Flop Strategy
One of the number one most
important phases of Omaha would be the preflop
strategy. There is no other aspect of the game
that is more important. Of course, the entire
hand put together is important as well. Still,
if you have to pick one phase that was the most
important and crucial to your Omaha success, it
would be before the flop.
The reason why preflop is so
important is because that is what will set you
up for the rest of the hand. Your hand selection
and the moves you make before the flop will
carry you through the flop, turn and river. All
of those are important as well, but without a
good preflop strategy, you will be lost. The
kinds of things you will want to think about
will be; hand selection, raising, folding,
calling, watching and observing. One of the best
possible times to get a lot of information on
your opponents is before the flop.
Hand Selection
There is a lot to know about hand
selection, but once you know if you must use it.
That is extremely crucial to your success.
Before the flop you will have a very simple
question to ask yourself. Play the hand or do
not play the hand? That is something you will
have to figure out, based on the strength of
your hand, your position and your opponents.
Once you have figured out if your hand is worthy
of playing or not, you will need to start
heavily observing and knowing what is going on
around you.
Your Opponents
Your opponents are going to
dictate everything you do. Based on what you
know about them, what you think they have, how
strong they are, and many other things; you will
make your decisions based on your opponents.
That is the first thing you should do before
ever looking at your hand. There is a need for
constant observing and watching your opponents.
Try to figure out as much information as
possible, because that will be useful to you in
the future.
For example, pretend that you are
in a hand and you are in late position with a
good drawing hand like KQ of diamonds and 56 of
spades. This is a pretty decent hand (definitely
playable), but it is going to completely depend
on what your opponents do. If you have one
opponent raise and you get a couple of callers,
you would probably just simply call and see what
happens with the good pot odds you are getting.
If you had the same situation
except you felt that your opponents were fairly
weak, and they all limped in, you may want to
take advantage of this moment and raise.
Whenever you have a chance to be aggressive and
take control like that, you should do it. There
is nothing better than being in control of the
hand. Right before the flop is where you are
able to gain that control. Now, your opponents
have no idea what you have. All of this is
starting before any community cards are on the
board.
Folding
Even after you have folded, you
should still be watching your opponents very
carefully. What they do before the flop is
likely to happen again. If you pay attention to
who does what, then at the end when they show
their hands; you will be able to keep that
information in your mind for the next time you
are in the hand.
Example:
If you saw that a player was in
middle position and he re-raised, then at the
end he showed a marginal hand; this would be
valuable information. Later on if he re-raises
you, then you will know that this player is
likely to believe his hands are stronger than
they actually are. If didn't know that
information, you would be likely to fold to a
hand that is not as good as yours. Once again,
this is all because of something that happened
before the flop.
Basically hand selection, betting
and information gathering is what you are going
to be doing before the flop. From there, you
should be able to move through the hand pretty
smoothly. At that point in the hand, you have no
idea what is going to happen with the community
cards. All that you can do is set yourself up
for the best position to get paid off if your
hand does hit, and play the hands that are most
likely to win. If you can handle that, the rest
will all fall into place in Omaha. |
