For those of you who haven’t played, Omaha plays like Hold ‘em with the following exceptions:
1. You are dealt four hole cards
2. In making a hand you must use two from your hand and three on the board (no “Playing the board”)
3. Drawing hands are much more valuable than in any other game, but are possibly even more dangerous to your own stack
4. In high-low (aka 8-or-better), your low must use no card higher than an eight [http://www.pokernews.com/poker-rules/omaha-hi-lo.htm]

One of the problems I used to have with Omaha was tunnel-vision. I would get married to a particular hand off the flop and ignore the changing board. This lead to my friends complaining that I was betting without knowing what had because I would restudy my cards at showdown. The truth was that I was betting the wrong hand, then trying to see if I had a different hand when they put a stronger hand on the board (ex. I bet the nut straight the whole way down and on seeing that they made a flush I would then look to see if I had a full house).

Ok, so that is betting without knowing what I had, but that had to do with not paying enough attention to the changing board texture once I made a hand. A true newbie mistake in any game.

I do know that nowadays I am more conscious of flush possibilities on the board – a weakness in my Hold ‘em play as well. I also watch for the board pairing and the possibilities of higher draws that can beat my hand.

This has lead to a more conservative approach in betting. Not that my friends would notice.

I call a lot more hands pre-flop in Omaha than I do in Hold ‘em.  For Hold ‘em, I play less than 25% of the hands I am dealt (my latest game stats run me at about 18%).

In Omaha I call or raise over 75%.

Now, I happen to be a card-rack, so I don’t recommend playing that many hands to anyone. I get strong starting hands a lot. They are typically my downfall as people will play back not believing I have pocket kings three hands out of five (it happens to me a lot).

In Omaha I have taken to a more passive pre-flop strategy, based on advice I got from Paul Wasicka on how to adjust my game for tournaments with longer blind levels. He suggested calling more and raising less often. This has been working better for me overall.

I have also learned (thanks Nostrabobus) that big pocket pairs in Omaha are pretty useless pre-flop. I was raising, and losing, with a lot of pocket aces. I’m not sure how often you are supposed to see them in Omaha, but I do know it’s way less often than I do. And playing flopped trips or a set can be costly.

But the biggest key to my improved Omaha has definitely been studying the board more before I act. I really think about my hand and my draws, and I call more often with a nut draw if I have the implied odds to make it worthwhile.

When I do bet out, I look to get as much value as possible with limit and pot limit games, versus no-limit where I always look to close out a hand early.

But betting in this game can be a little like playing three-card-monty. Sure, flopping that straight looks like the nuts right now, but your opponent isn’t folding his bottom two pair and flush draw.

Remembering that and saving bets has been saving me chips.

I tend to get knocked out of tournaments with them, or at least lose a key hand that makes getting knocked out inevitable.

I’ve had them broken at two different tourneys at the Borgata (a $500 and $300 buy-in respectively), once for the knock out against Q-9 suited, once to just break my stack and get me knocked out a round later with an A-J suited. Both times killing me when the money is just within sight. A win on either hand and I could have folded my way into the money. Hell, I could probably have folded the hand and cashed.

The worst tends to happen whenever I try to be cagey with them – which did happen at both of the events above. Once we got all the money in preflop, once on the flop. Someone always catches up and makes a hand, or has enough of a draw to call an all-in push and suck one out.

I have an example below from a recent online tourney. Let’s just say that the results are more typical rather than less as I tried to get tricky under the gun. I was hoping for someone to raise or push all-in so I could trap them.

Be careful what you wish for.

Full Tilt Poker Game #18999380972: Midnight Madness Satellite (144275466), Table 142 – 25/50 – No Limit Hold’em – 20:23:29 ET – 2010/03/05
Seat 1: ab03 (1,375)
Seat 2: fatboycustom (4,710)
Seat 3: fox23r (1,985)
Seat 4: shaksha777 (3,145)
Seat 5: UINN (2,150)
Seat 6: vasco campao (6,325)
Seat 7: itheman (5,630)
Seat 8: jojoyvonny (1,455), is sitting out
Seat 9: The Poker Roach (2,400)
itheman posts the small blind of 25
jojoyvonny posts the big blind of 50
The button is in seat #6
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to The Poker Roach [Ad Ah]
The Poker Roach calls 50
ab03 folds
fatboycustom folds
fox23r calls 50
shaksha777 raises to 3,145, and is all in
UINN folds
vasco campao folds
itheman folds
jojoyvonny folds
The Poker Roach calls 2,350, and is all in
fox23r folds
shaksha777 shows [Qc Ac]
The Poker Roach shows [Ad Ah]
Uncalled bet of 745 returned to shaksha777
*** FLOP *** [7s 5c Tc]
*** TURN *** [7s 5c Tc] [3c]
*** RIVER *** [7s 5c Tc 3c] [8d]
shaksha777 shows a flush, Ace high
The Poker Roach shows a pair of Aces
shaksha777 wins the pot (4,925) with a flush, Ace high
*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot 4,925 | Rake 0
Board: [7s 5c Tc 3c 8d]
Seat 1: ab03 didn’t bet (folded)
Seat 2: fatboycustom didn’t bet (folded)
Seat 3: fox23r folded before the Flop
Seat 4: shaksha777 showed [Qc Ac] and won (4,925) with a flush, Ace high
Seat 5: UINN didn’t bet (folded)
Seat 6: vasco campao (button) didn’t bet (folded)
Seat 7: itheman (small blind) folded before the Flop
Seat 8: jojoyvonny (big blind) folded before the Flop
Seat 9: The Poker Roach showed [Ad Ah] and lost with a pair of Aces

Now, this was an online freeroll so there is a high probability I would have been called by the A-Q suited no matter what I did – it tends to be a hand that gets overplayed online (I’ve been working on playing it less myself).  But my opponent had enough chips that a big bet or an all-in ahead of him might have given him pause.  Nowadays it does to me when the table is turned.  I have been throwing away a lot of big aces when I have no reason to risk the bulk of my chips against a big bet preflop.  At the blind level we were at (25 – 50) in relation to our stack sizes, pushing all in on a coin flip is a mistake.  In this case, the mistake was mine.  There was no reason to call an all in bet from someone who had me covered this early in the tournament despite the odds of my winning the hand.  If I had pushed first, his calling would have been the mistake.

By the way, for those who want the percentages:
I went from 87% to win preflop to 63% on the flop to dead on the turn.

The moral of this tale?
No more tricky plays with aces. Take the small pot and be happy you’re still in to play for the money after the hand. I find I can outplay a lot of people after the flop. I’ll save tricky for my suited connectors, which I tend to play most often when I suspect someone else is trying to get tricky with aces.

But I don’t think people use their tells enough.

Mind you, just as you can’t bluff someone who isn’t paying attention to the betting, neither can you effectively use a tell to get a reaction against someone who just isn’t watching the game.

I have a ‘pocket-kings’ tell, designed to get maximum play from an opponent when I’m short-stacked with kings preflop.  My friends mostly all know the tell (having witnessed or fallen victim to it), so I can now (and frequently do) use it when I have any hand and want to pick up an uncontested pot.  There are a couple of other tells I have that I use equally to mean what people expect as well as to get a reaction I want.  I have, however, learned that certain people in our home game don’t care what you’re doing and are just going to splash money around no matter what behavior you show them.

C’est la guerre.

Now, this behavior of mine isn’t movie-influenced.  We’ve all seen Casino Royale and Bond being taken in by a reverse tell.  But my first use of the reverse tell occurred about 19 years ago and I came up with the idea myself.   (Although I do own ‘Oswald Jacoby on Poker’ where he does the same thing to someone he disliked, I hadn’t read it at the time so I credit myself with being original).

It was in a game I’d taken weeks to set up.  I was looking to get even with a guy who used me to get to an ex with whom I was still in love.  There had been a game a couple of weeks before where I was hoping to get him, but that fell apart with too many newbies who didn’t understand the game and decided playing for cash (even the low stakes for which we were playing) wouldn’t be any fun.

So I finally had a game with just a few people interested in really playing, including my target – let’s call him DB.  We met in a dorm room and got down to playing.  Hold ‘em was not one of our games.  No one had heard of it, so it was all stud and draw.

The game went on for a while until it was just me and DB heads up, with my ex-girlfriend sweating his every hand, literally with her chin resting on his shoulder for much of it.

In setting up the game, I decided I was going to give myself a tell.  I had no plans for cheating.  I was just determined to outplay him (my confidence in my game was unparalleled at the time).  For my tell, I started tapping a chip on the table when I was bluffing.  I practiced it at home to make it look natural.  During the game I made sure to do it consistently, and to get to the showdown on some hands so people could see what I was doing.  I also did it on some hands that were good, but that I would throw away if betting got heavy, hoping to give people the impression that they could push me off what looked like a good hand if I didn’t have it.

Three hours of play later and nobody seems to have caught on.   Finally we’re heads up playing 7-stud.  I raise with trips rolled up and a face card showing for my fourth card.  DB raises back with a crap looking hand.  I sit up in my chair and look at the board again to see if I missed something.  Looking at his up cards, all I see is garbage.  When I look down at mine – just to see if I misread my hand – I see that I am tapping a chip.  It had become such a part of me that I didn’t even notice I was doing it.

I wanted to set the hook as this was the first time I had seen a reaction to what I was doing.  What would have made the most sense would have been to fold right then and there, but I wanted to be sure he noticed the tell.  Plus, I didn’t want to give him the pot.  I put on my best perplexed look and called.

The next card out was an absolute blank for my hand.  As soon as it came down, I made a show of putting the chip back on top of my stack and pulling out chips for a bet.  Once they hit the table he folded his hand.  Not only did I have the hand, but I had him.

Over the next hour-plus I pulled the same thing to push him off hands and chip away at his stack.  I didn’t need cards; I had my tell.  I’ve never felt more like a puppet master in my life.

The only problem was that I never had a really big hand any time he did.  He was a very ABC player.  Observant, but not a risk taker.

We get towards the end of the night and I finally have a monster; I’m sitting on a full house with just a pair and a possible straight showing while he’s obviously made a straight.  When the river card hits I pick up a chip and start tapping, leading out at the pot with a good-sized bet.

He raises and I reach for chips to reraise.

“You really don’t want to do that,” he says.

All innocence, I say, “Huh?  Why?”

“I have you beat.  All you have is that pair.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Yes I do.  You’ve been tapping that chip all night whenever you’ve been bluffing.”

I act all shocked and embarrassed.  I sputter and drop the chip to the table.  “All right.  Fine.  If that’s what you think, here,” and I push all my chips in the middle.  “Call me if you think I’m bluffing!”

“Look, you can take it back.  I don’t want to take…”

“No!  If you think you have me, you call this bet!”

Shrugging, he says, “Ok.  It’s your funeral.”  He calls, turns over his straight and reaches for the pot.

I cut him off.  Flipping my boat up in front of him I say, “Don’t read my tells.”

We ended the night there with shocked faces all around, none more so than his as I scooped up the pot.

When we left our friend’s dorm, the satisfaction I got from taking him down exactly how I’d intended was offset by the fact that, while I was leaving with his money, he was leaving with the love of my life.  One doesn’t compensate for the other.  I cried in my car the whole way home.

They have since married and divorced, and she’s remarried thousands of miles away.  I’d hoped to impress her that night by taking down her “champion.”  We’ve since spoken and she doesn’t even remember the game.  Amazing the things we guys think will impress a girl that never get noticed.

A couple of years ago, some friends of mine were talking about me when one said that all I have in my life is poker.  I hate to say that I think he’s right.  That’s not much to keep you warm at night.

http://www.swansonsite.com/W/instructional/game_theory.pdf

The premise is that two players are playing poker with a three card deck, ace, deuce, trey, with the ace playing low.  It explores optimal play given that on any hand you either have the winner, the loser or a hand that can only beat a bluff.  The one codicil is that your actions are limited to checking, betting, folding, or calling.  No raises are allowed.

It is an interesting thought experiment:
If you are dealt a two and your opponent bets, how often is it correct to call?  What is the likelihood of being called when you’re first to act and bet with the three?  I have the ace and can only win with a bluff; do I bet when my opponent checks?

I actually would like to take this game out for a spin for real and see what my friends make of it.  According to the author, unless you or your opponent makes what he terms are “Stupid Mistakes,” two expert players playing “Optimal Strategy” against each other will only break even over time.  Playing “Optimal Strategy” in this game, he concludes, is a defensive tactic. To win you have to break with the optimal enough to force or trap your opponent into making suboptimal choices.

In the real world, winning poker is aggressive poker.

The closest analogous real world situation you find at the poker table takes place in limit poker at the river.  The rules I take away from the three card poker experiment are the same as you find in any poker book, but interesting to have them play out this way (not what the author intended, but what I gleaned for my own use).

1. Bet the nuts on the river no matter how many players are in the hand

In a limit game you are doing yourself a disservice to check the best hand; pot odds will almost always dictate the opponent call, unless they have a busted draw, were bluffing the whole way or have some read that tells them they are beat.

In terms of results:
If you check and your opponent checks after you all you do is give them information to no profit to yourself.  If you bet and they fold, you take the same pot and muck the hand, earning the same number of chips but not giving away what cards you were playing.  If they call or raise you earn more than you would have otherwise.

In limit, the call with a second or third best hand on the river is almost always required with the odds your opponent is getting.  To bet or raise into your bet without the nuts is suboptimal play (and I do know you sometimes get boats into quads, quads against straight flushes and a straight flush facing a higher one, but these instances are few and far between).

2. If heads up on the river, check or call with a second-best hand unless you know you are beat

If you’re not sure, the cost of one big bet hurts nothing and buys you information.  How did your opponent play the hand?  If they were bluffing, did they give anything away in their behavior?  Take away everything you can as cheaply as possible, and maybe take the pot if you actually have them beat.

I played in ring game at a casino against a hyper-aggressive player.  Early on, a couple of hands after he sat down and before I understood his style of play, we had one hand where I flopped two pair and bet out hard.  On the river I bet and he raised.  I re-raised and he threw another bet on top.  I reevaluated my hand, decided he made a straight on the river and folded.  At this point he looked me straight in the face and gave me a big-ass smile which told me I had been bluffed.  I used the information I got from that and his play throughout the hand to take him apart over the course of the next couple of hours.

My first mistake was not just checking and calling on the river.  My second was re-raising him instead of seeing his raise.  I could have gotten my information, and coincidentally won the pot by doing that.  After his re-re-raise I could have just thrown in the extra bet and played it out.  Instead I backed down and made the wrong choice.  Even if I had lost the hand, making the call would have been the right play.

Can you call too much on the river?  Absolutely!

However, the point is to learn enough about your opponent in early hands to make the calls on later hands only when your read tells you that your hand is still viable to be a winner.  And I much prefer to learn my lessons while dragging in a pot to when I have to ship chips I shouldn’t have put myself in a position to lose.

Now, I make a point of specifying limit here since no-limit is a whole other animal that doesn’t mesh with this style of play.  Bets being bigger and more costly, those second-best hands need to be folded unless you have a read or no choice but to call.  A big raise or all-in can push the best hand out of the pot.  Not so with limit (unless you wimp out like I did in that story above).

3. Mix up your play

Again, an obvious one, but I thought it was interesting that this three-card game would lend itself to this in order to have a winning strategy.  So long as you know the optimal strategy inside and out you can start to break with it to improve your results.  Don’t always do what’s expected of you if you want to be a winning player.

Another casino ring game.  I’ve been playing tight, showing down only good hands when I’ve played (which has been less often than I would have liked, but I’ve had few playable hands all night).  I’m in the small blind with a 4-8 off suit.  Most of the table has called the big blind, so I complete the blind for a dollar.  The big blind raises.  With the amount of money in the pot by the time it got back to me, it would have been correct to call the additional two bucks if I only had an ace and no other card to play.

When the flop comes down I hit a straight.  I check.  The big blind checks.  One of the other players bets.  I just call and the big blind raises.  I instantly put him on aces.  I just call.  Everyone gets out of the way as we spar on the turn.  He hits his ace on the river.  I bet, pointing out that I only have three chips left; not enough to match a raise and had to fight to convince him to put me all in.  His tilt-factor on seeing his aces cracked lost me his respect as a player, but won me many more chips throughout the night.

4. Making your opponent make stupid mistakes or suboptimal plays are the keys to improving your chip stack; just beware of falling into those traps yourself

Know your opponent, know yourself.  Play them, the cards and the situation.

There is nothing more pleasing at a poker table than putting someone who deserves it in his place.

I have used the poker table for revenge many a time over the years, but the best feeling in the world (to me at any rate) is watching someone who has been obnoxious about other people and their play reach into their wallet to rebuy.  And rebuy.  And rebuy.

The most recent example happened a few weeks ago in Atlantic City.  I drove up to the casino somewhere after midnight on a Friday (technically Saturday morning) with the intention of finding a $2-$4 limit table full of drunks and taking them to the cleaners.

I didn’t go to one of what I consider to be the major casinos.  Real rounders would fill the place and I am just a rounder in training.  I also don’t play no-limit ring games anymore.  There is a recklessness at the no-limit tables that you don’t see in tournament play, barring rebuy tourneys.  At least then you know people will calm down after the rebuy period.  At a ring game the rebuy period never ends.

I also once got jammed at a no-limit table between two people who were working together to squeeze play the couple of us between them.  It’s hard to prove collusion, but these guys have since become familiar to me – both at tournaments and at ring games – and I’ve watched them play enough to get what they are doing.  I don’t mind playing pros; I enjoy butting heads with someone who works hard at their game.  I do mind being ganged up on.

I like having a better chance to hang onto my money, and at 2-4 limit you can call fairly cheaply or get out of the way without ever really feeling pot committed.

I watched one of the tables from the rail for a while.  At one end [seat 8] was a youngish guy, very serious who knew what he was doing.  At the other [seat 2] was someone just a few years younger than me who had half-the-world in chips in front of him.  If he got those playing 2-4, he had to have been sitting there for days, so I figured him for a no-limit player waiting for an open seat.  Nobody else at the table impressed me much, so I asked the floor to seat me there.  I figured if I avoided those two unless I had the goods and sat in a seat with a buffer between me and them I would be in good shape.

Seat 5 was open.  This gave me the best shot at staying out of their way.

Unfortunately, right before I went to the desk to sign in, this older gentleman rejoined the table in seat 6.  I only watched him for a hand or two before I joined.

How to define him?

Let’s call him old-drunk-racist guy – ODR for short.

I got my first hint of what he would be like when I sat down and bought in for $200.  I have a policy of never sitting without at least 100 times the big blind and only sitting with what I am willing to lose (part of why you’ll never see me at $10-$20 limit; I max at $3-$6).  He instantly started in on me for buying in so big.  I ignored him, but could easily have pointed out that the guy in seat 2 had at least $4,500 in chips in front of him and seat 8 was sitting with a few hundred himself.  I might not want to tangle with them, but I’ll be damned if I won’t have the ammo to fight with anyone.

I then had the option of posting or waiting for the blind to come around.  There were a couple of people I hadn’t seen play so I decided to sit out a round.  It was at this point that ODR’s sour-wine breath started hitting me as he gave me a hard time for not putting up the cash to play immediately.  He made a point that I was letting myself out of a share of the bad beat jackpot if someone hit and wasn’t it stupid to miss the chance of winning.

I ignored him again and tried not to breathe until he turned his head away from me.

As I watched the round, ODR couldn’t refrain from commenting on everyone’s play, on how slow the dealer was at selling chips and making change from pots.  In addition, nasty side comments were made to me on specific people around the table.  He didn’t get the hint that I wasn’t interested in his commentary.

I finally played my first hand.  Against seat 8.

I folded top pair with a busted draw on the river when the board two-paired and I realized he had a boat and wasn’t bluffable.  And ODR let it be known that he would have played that hand better than we had – not that he ever saw our cards.

I played my second hand.  Against seat 2.

This time I had a decent hand.  But seat 2 made a reraise on the river that forced me to reassess the hand.  ODR started in on me about the amount of time I was taking for the decision.

“Why don’t you just throw the money in?  It’s only four dollars!”

At this point I have a public service announcement:
Never let other people make decisions for you with your money.  They aren’t your friends at the poker table.  It isn’t their money and they don’t care what happens to you or it.  A lesson I have ignored a few too many times and the reason I keep my chat off when playing online.

My response – much more polite than it should have been – was, “I don’t like to lose more money than I need to.”

I folded and was shown the flush that would have beaten my two-pair.

I’d dropped $40 dollars on two hands against the two people I’d intended to avoid.  And I had a drunk sitting to my left and poking my arm to let me know when he had a new and profoundly nasty comment to make (I still feel soiled).  I decided to lock it down, pick more carefully and utterly ignore anything coming from my left – especially his breath.

It wasn’t till the point when he started calling an African-American woman at the table a crack whore and insulting the other black people at the table that I decided to destroy him.  I was not alone.

Now I am pretty much a pasty-faced person.  My mother was from South America, but her parents were European, and I’m fourth-generation American on my father’s side where they came over from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, so what little Latino is in me doesn’t show.  I just have serious issues with racial/ethnic insults despite the fact that they are rarely applied to me.

So I kind of lost it when ODR commented, “These people think they can just sit down with $20 and play poker by throwing their chips into the pot no matter what their cards are.  And they’ll keep buying in, with just one 20 after another.  And you know who I mean by these people,” as he pointed not-so-subtly to the only people who were darker than a tan.  I kept it inside, but vowed to take him down.

And down he went.

ODR kept losing hand after hand.  We all charged at him.

He kept denigrating our play, our personalities, the casino, the staff, poker in general.

And he kept reaching into his wallet and pulling out single 20-dollar bills to buy back in with.  “I have a hundred dollar bill in my wallet,” he kept saying.  “I can buy in for whatever I want and take you all apart.”  But he kept pulling lone 20s.

Around 8 AM, he opened his wallet for the eleventh or twelfth time and I looked in.  Behind the last, lonely 20-dollar bill was indeed a single hundred.

He put the 20 back.

“Forget it.  I’m going over to a real casino where they know how to play.”

About two hours before, an Asian woman joined the table and sat to his left.  He had been insulting her from the moment she bought in with comments that were sexual in nature as well as idiotic regarding her coming over to clean his house as that was “all your people are good for.”  She took the insults, playing dumb in her comments back to him, all spoken with a heavy accent.  But as ODR stood to leave her accent faded and she said, “Well, if you’re that out of cash, maybe I can hire you to clean my house.  I have all your money to pay you with.”

I remember applause.  She deserved a standing ovation, possibly an Oscar.

As I savored my breakfast, bought with his money, I thought about ODR.  Had he been a nice guy I might have felt bad about his state at the end of the session.  Instead, the jam on my toast was that much sweeter.