Omaha Poker Strategy

blinds will take a toll on your stack. Also there is more room for raising and bluffing in 6 max if you can read players well.

I played the $5/$5 PLO (Pot Limit Omaha) twice a week back when it was $5/$5 (/$10) at Ameristar -- before you started playing (that is if I am guessing correctly who you are) and before it moved to Harrah's, and before it switched to half PLO/NL (at the time I didn't think it a good use of my bankroll to play NL hold'em with the nine best players in STL -- admittedly I am probably not one of ten best NL players in STL) and before it became $5/$10/$20 (which you probably need a $100k poker-only bankroll for). And at the time that I played it, that game was a dying game with the same six or seven players and a bunch of $5k to $10k stacks.

It wasn't a good game.

I got this book a few days ago and love it so far. The info is pretty solid and will take a moron player into an intermediate one pretty quickly.

It's not perfect as I found some of the hand example and quiz answers to be a bit off but it gets you thinking about the right things.

Jeff, can you comment on a couple things. First page 88 at the bottom you repeat the same paragraph you had above. Second, on page 141/142 in Hand #14, question #4, I am unsure if you really have the right answer here. If the player betting the pot has the nut straight like he most likely does then you have only 11 outs at most and he may actually have some cards near there like a K etc which lowers your number of outs even more and with the other player calling the flop, it is likely he also shares some of your outs. I think this is a clear fold on the turn.

Everybody who played in the game knows me. And it wasn't until relatively recently that the game at Harrah's switched back to all PLO (now $5/$10 with a $20 straddle), and at that point we started the $2/$5 PLO/NL $1000 max game at Ameristar, which ran four or five days a week before I left STL for the winter.

Frankly, I'd rather sit with a $1000 in a soft $2/$5 game than with $1500 or $2000 in a moderately tough, very aggressive $5/$10 game.

I should qualify what I am about to say next by mentioning that I spend much of my time on the road, and that I've played $5 blind PLO in Indiana (Caesars and Aztar), both STL casinos, $5/$5 (/$10) PLO in Tunica during a WSOP Circuit, $2/$5/$10 in Biloxi, and a small $5 bring-in game in Tulsa. I also spent much of three weeks playing $2/$5 PLO in Vegas during the WSOP, and I played a ton online back in the Party Poker days, which is where the crux of the book developed. I should also note that the point of the book is to promote smaller-stakes live PLO games along the lines of what we have with the $1/$2 and $2/$5 blind NL hold'em games today, where you don't need a $100k bankroll just for poker (there are other uses for money, such as stocks and real estate).

In other words, I play in exactly the games described in the book.

I also spend three months out of the year in Florida for the winter (I am here again now), made two trips to Vegas in November (SEMA and G2E), spent a week in Florida in October (Florida Gaming Summit and family), a week in Tunica twice last year, three weeks in Vegas during the WSOP, and another four days in Tulsa during the Scotty Nguyen Poker Challenge in May. Plus there was another week between STL-Tunica-Biloxi for the Southern Gaming Summit.

And for the part of the year that I am in St. Louis, I play four or five days a week at Ameristar, where we've had a $2/$3 and $1/$2 ($5 to bring in) mixed PLO Hi and PLO Hi/Lo game off an on once a week for the past year and a half, we also have the other Omaha Hi/Lo games; and then over the past couple of months we've had the $2/$5 PLO/NL ($1000 max) game virtually every day.

So there's a good reason you don't see me.

Frankly, as it is, I've never been a fan of Harrah's as a not-so-player-friendly company and would rather not play there; they would rather not spread Omaha at all if they didn't have to (as an aside, notice that the Horseshoe Tunica stopped giving the poker room rate, and that the PLO game is now at the Gold Strike?). Ideally, we'd bring all of the games back to Ameristar.