Just a couple of weeks ago, Thang Luu, took down more than 900 other Omaha 8 players for his SECOND CONSECUTIVE gold bracelet. That’s probably two more bracelets than I would ever have in a lifetime, and he got them in two years? That’s why I call sick. And guess what, he came in second the year before his first.

I used to think he was just plain lucky. How on earth can you play his way and end up 2 and 1 in two years? What kind of Omaha poker strategy works like this? So ok, that made me sleep better at night. But to finish as the champ again? Wow, there’s got to be something there now. Even the most skeptical of poker skeptics can’t probably make any excuses, especially since there’s like 1000 people every event every years. You can’t tell me there aren’t even a handful of great players from that number enough to challenge Thang Luu.

I know his cash game style is wild, to put it mildly, but I would need a super-duper omaha poker calculator to play that well. I missed the final table but if it’s anything like last year, I believe he’d have tried to play nearly every hand at the final table. My question is can this really work in Omaha/8 consistently, even with variance? Granted, that he only plays every hand when he’s up in chips as per many other people and my observations but that’s like trying to beat the odds. But if he’s gone 2, 1 and then 1 again, who’s to argue? Maybe there’s something there despite what the poker math says about it.

Watching his play sometimes, you can see that he’s obviously very aggressive, but what’s not obvious is that he seems to know exactly where he is in the hand, the same way you have to know in any other poker games. So even though he’s aggressive, he can maximize his gains and minimize his losses. I think it was Odell who said the same thing about Luu, that even on aggressive mode, he always knew where he was in a hand. I’m even thinking of adapting this loose, wide-open style and try a couple of hundred hands on the online $5 HL.

I must concede now that tournament Omaha/8 requires a lot more skill and savvy than HILO cash games. But still, though I now concede that it is skill that brought Luu the 2-1-1 finish for the last three years, he’s got to have mounds of luck to pull off what he did. But luck or no luck (I’m betting he had his fair share) let’s not lose focus – this is a great achievement. It might even challenge the other pros to into tournament Omaha 8 now.

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