Pot Limit Omaha Strategy Articles: ♥ The Rules of Pot Limit Omaha ♥ The Best Starting Hands in Pot Limit Omaha ♥ Advice on Bankroll Management in PLO ♥ The Best Places to Play Pot Limit Omaha Online ♥ Playing Draws in Pot Limit Omaha ♥ The differences between PLO & NLHE. The Pot Limit Omaha Tips Series ♦ Start From The Beginning. Perhaps the most popular form of Omaha poker is Pot-Limit Omaha, which is played by all the best high-stakes pros and is a super fast, super fun action game played at all stakes. The trickiest part of learning to play Pot-Limit Omaha is figuring out how to calculate what your pot-size bets and raises can be on each street. As luck would have it, we've put together a guide to calculating pot.
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-- Bo Belinsky
A newsgroup discussion about Pot Limit Omaha High once started by Peter Lizak writing: 'I would rather play AKQJ over AA24. AA kinda sucks alone. It needs back up. Think of it like chess. The queen is powerful, but you don't shove her into enemy territory without support.'
My view is if a player would rather play AKQJ for all his chips head-up, then he needs to hit the lottery quick. Full table Pot Limit Omaha is not primarily about cards. It is first and foremost about position, position, position. If the chips are deep, position renders everything else trivial. If the chips are not deep, you want to get all-in or close to it before the flop with AAxx. You are a significant dog to nothing, besides a dominating other AA hand, and a good favorite over most.
Raising first under the gun with AAxx is suicide, not because AAxx is bad, but because raising under the gun in PLO is normally foolish with any
hand. Limp and reraise if the chips are short and you can get all-in. If the chips are deep you should either limp/fold or limp/call, with an understanding that the weaker the opponent, the more likely you would call. When playing opponents who are more likely to foolishly dump chips post-flop while drawing near dead, the more hands you can call with.If you are playing with players in the same skill ballpark as you, the biggest reason to play hands out of position in PLO is to encourage other people to play out of position. That is really and truly the main reason. Sure, sometimes you will get lucky and make powerful hands out of position, but that is just random luck, not a good overall strategy. You want to play for a limp, or limp/fold, and only rarely limp/call... while they limp and call your raises when you are in position. If you limp and are allowed to see the flop cheaply, then you just play poker with the hand you flop -- which should be a strong one since you should not play weak hands out of position, nor play after the flop without a clear favorite hand.
If you are playing against opponents much weaker than yourself, then you can play more hands out of position and play them more aggressively than against stronger players, but still, even against very weak opponents your edge will be far greater when you are in position versus out of position.
PLO played with limited buy-ins online is very different than when played with no restriction on stack size in casinos. Buy-in limits prevent players from playing the normally sensible way to play when there are no restricted buy-ins, which in short is to buy yourself a big stack of chips. Capped buy-in amounts require you to begin games by playing small stack PLO (until you win your way to a big stack). In that way, AAxx is generally a better hand with limited buy-ins, since any pot size reraise will often be over half your stack.
There are even more complications online, as some games have higher restricted buy-ins than others. And, you may be in a game with a bunch of short stacks, or the opposite, you could be in a game where everyone has more than the minimum buy-in. Or, you may be in a 6-handed game instead of a nine or ten-handed game. It is very hard to generalize about PLO games online, other than to say that in general the level of play is poor, with people playing from out of position all the time, and even worse, being inattentive while out of position because they are playing several games at once.
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But again, assuming deep stacks, PLO is position and betting. A solid player who understands the game and has deep chips, can play 3579 in position and eat up AAKK, while also playing AAKK in position to eat up 3579.Most any decent hand can eat up a better hand that is out of position.
If someone wants to make a pot raise under the gun with AAKK or AAJT, I'll play almost any hand against them if we have deep chips -- especially if I can put the player on AA with great confidence. The player in position will generally lose small pots and win much bigger ones. This is why you can't get good PLO games with only quality players. They become pointless. You need players playing out of position for a lot of chips for the game to exist. Fortunately such players can be found in abundance online, as most games will have horrible players raising first under the gun with a wide selection of hands, constantly putting themselves at a disadvantage to anyone who calls or raises behind them.
In that newsgroup thread, another person then wrote that in a multiplayer pot you can get more out of the AKQJ, and that such multiplayer pots weaken AA42 quite a lot.
I replied that this was not saying much, unless we know specific hands, and the position of those hands. AKQJ offsuit is a lame hand multiway when AA is also out, and more so when you have other big card players in the pot. The Broadway straight is the #1 sucker hand of PLO where people get freerolled for all their chips. Also, a hand like AdKdQJ is not great because you have the key payoff card that you want in an opponent's hand, the K of diamonds. (When you make an Ace-high flush you want the person with a King-high flush in the pot. You will be able to get larger bets out of that player than one with a Queen-high flush or a nine-high flush.)
AAxx should be looking to play pots headup, via a pot raise in position or a pot reraise out of position. If it can't manage one of these scenarios it should commonly be limped before the flop, then folded when the flop misses. If you do see a flop out of position for a limp multiway, AAxx is vastly superior to AKQJ because the way AA will hit the flop is either an Ace, or a nut flush draw with a small pot. In either case you are in fine shape. AKQJ hits sucker flops, two pair against sets, straights against the same straights with flush outs. Only very rarely will you have the best freeroll with the nut straight and top two pair, and that is only four outs. A suited ace, flopping the Broadway straight and having the nut flush draw, there you have a hand, and it rarely comes along!
Even more than No Limit Hold'em, Pot Limit Omaha is a card game that is only a little about cards. Personalities, chip stack size and table position dictate play much more than the spots on the cards.
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In response to emails I thought I better clarify a few things... In a full game, three off the button is in position; in a six-handed game, three off the button is first to act! These situations are not similar. The less players, the more blinds you have to pay, so the impact of the blinds on your play will be greater, as it will on other players too.
You make money in poker by playing when you have a positive mathematical expectation. The weaker the players, the more often you will be able to get a positive expectation... so you can limp with more hands, bluff more hands from both out of position and in position, play more hands out of position for a raise, raise with weaker hands, etc.
A winning PLO player may be able to win from every seat at the table, but generally when out of position you should be playing smaller pots before the flop, while in position you want to be looking for pots to play for all your chips, while ALSO doing what is the core principal of winning poker: achieving and identifying when you have a mathematical advantage over your opponents. This can be from having position, from a liveone being drunk, from an opponent misreading a hand or a lot of other things. Your win rate from the button should be highest of any position, and the seat next to the button should be the next most profitable. The key to PLO is position, but the key to all poker is to play when the math is on your side.
See also Omaha Hand Equity
Pot Limit Omaha is perhaps the second most-played format of poker in the world, trailing only No Limit Hold'em in terms of popularity. Proponents like the action and the strategic complexity that comes along with Pot Limit Omaha, but new players can sometimes get tripped up on the basic mechanics of the game. If you're looking to learn the game, you've found a solid place to start with our guide to the rules of Pot Limit Omaha.
Before we talk about how to play the game, here are some key terms and definitions that will help make our discussion more efficient:
- PLO: The standard abbreviation for Pot Limit Omaha.
- Bet the pot: Since you can only bet up to the size of the pot in PLO, saying 'I bet the pot' or 'I raise the pot' is saying 'I want to make the maximum bet possible.'
- Blinds: Like No Limit Hold'em, PLO forces two players to put in 'blind' bets before anyone gets cards. These forced bets are called the small blind and the big blind, or SB / BB. Some PLO games (especially live games) are played with a forced third blind called a straddle, but this blind is not a part of the standard rules for PLO.
- The button: A disc or other symbol that represents the rotating dealer position.
Pot Limit Omaha: Basic Gameplay
Pot Limit Omaha plays just like No Limit Hold'em except for two crucial differences:
- In PLO, you get four hole cards instead of two.
- In PLO, your maximum bet at any point is limited to the current size of the pot. You can't go 'all-in' in PLO unless your stack size is smaller than the size of the pot.
Otherwise, the mechanics of the two games are identical, so you can refer to this guide to the rules for No Limit Hold'em for a more complete breakdown of PLO gameplay. Abridged version: Players receive four cards each, face down followed by a betting round. The remaining players move to the flop, where three shared cards are revealed followed by betting. Next comes a fourth card (the turn) and a third round of betting, followed by a fifth card (the river) and a final round of betting.
Pot Limit Omaha: How You Make a Hand
Players used to hold'em often have trouble internalizing this aspect of PLO. When you're playing Pot Limit Omaha, you must use two cards from your hand and three cards from the community cards to make your five card hand. You can use any combination of cards following this rule, but the rule itself is rigid. A common situation where players become confused about this rule: Let's say you hold the ace of hearts in your hand and the board has four hearts on it. You have no other hearts in your hand besides the ace. Do you have a flush?
In hold'em, you would have a flush, but in PLO you cannot make a flush in the situation described above. Remember - two from your hand and three from the board. For this reason, it's actually terrible to be dealt three of a kind of four of a kind to start in PLO - you can only use two of those cards.
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Pot Limit Omaha: Betting Rules
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Thanks to a technicality that new players often overlook, betting and raising the pot can be a trickier task than you might think. Let's say you're playing PLO and are in a hand with just one opponent remaining. The size of the pot is $100, and your opponent bets $100. How big a raise can you make? If you said $200, you're wrong - but don't feel too bad about it, as everyone struggles with this part of PLO at the outset. Your actual raise size is $400 total.
Why? Because the size of the pot when you make your raise isn't actually $200. The sequence of betting goes like this: Your opponent bets, you first call that bet and then you raise. Your call counts toward the size of the pot for the purposes of figuring out how big a bet you can make. That means there's actually $300 in the pot, so your total bet would be ($100 call + $300 pot-sized raise) $400.
With the basics of PLO firmly under your belt, it's time to visit some of our top site lists to find your best option for playing Pot Limit Omaha at an online poker room.
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