Most respected poker players will do the research on their game be it Texas Hold’em, Stud, Omaha, Omaha Hi/Lo and so on. The intricacies of the game and how well you know them are useful tools in being a successful player. Experience counts for a lot, because even though in the case of Omaha, being a game more about probability than bluffing you can gain an almost sixth sense when it comes to reading people. And any poker game is as much about empathy as having good hands, it’s about clocking the people who know what they are doing and the ones that don’t.
As in all things in life you will come across people who are better than you, you will also need to be ready to play them, but that doesn’t mean you need to lose your cool. Everyone comes across chip leaders who raise the bet every time, but remember to a certain extent that is the chip leaders job! If you are playing behind someone who has lots of chips, lots of confidence and always seems to be playing as if they have an extra deck up their sleeve, then your job is to be patient and only call the very best hands, even being prepared to go-all-in if things go right or fold at a seconds notice if they don’t. It’s a tough break but that’s poker, you cannot control the flop, but there are certain things you can.
In any form of poker you need to accept one simple fact - which is that you cannot win them all! A good player should be winning at least 50 per cent as a target, it means at-least you are gaining most of your money back. It might be argued that at the very least you should be earning your money back, but I think the 50 per cent mark is the difference between a passable good player and just a plain outright bad player! A brilliant player may be winning more like 80 - 90 per cent of games and clearly making a profit.
So lets presume that you can be fairly confident of winning 50 per cent of your games - what kind of games should you be playing? Well really that depends on how much expendable cash you have. And remember all poker money is (or needs to be) expendable - because even if you win every game straight for a period of time, that money has still been put at risk, meaning luck and skill could fail you at any point. In other words there are no guarantees.
Bankroll management applies as much to Omaha as it does to Texas Hold’em, whatever you consider financially to be an expendable amount of money (I.E not the rent or phone bill money) is how much you have to play with. Now the idea of bankroll management is to always have enough of a stash to keep playing without having to add more to it. This is an important concept generally, because if you can live by this rule it means that your poker life needn’t cost you an arm and a leg!
What that means in practice is that you don’t play games which will effectively use up all of your money. A general rule of thumb is to have enough money to pay for 20 times the amount of the buy in or big blind. This is further complicated by the kind of game that you are playing as I will discuss below:
Omaha Poker Sit and Go Tournaments:
In a tournament your cost is going to be the buy-in plus the rake. Often tournaments also have add-on periods as well. If the tournament is a one price buy-in then you can easily see how much it will cost. A good amount to have as a bank roll is between 20 to 40 times the buy-in in this case.
If it is an add-on game then you need to consider how many times you will need to add-on. This can usually be determined by the amount of levels or big blind increase before the add-on period ends. And, you can virtually guarantee that you will need to buy the extra chips. Even low stakes re-buy games can be deceptively expensive, and there is nothing more frustrating than surviving the knock out of two-thirds of the competition to run out of chips near the end. So make sure you have a lot of extra cash before playing one. If it’s possible (in some tournaments there is a set re-buy stage, say after five big blind levels) most players top up from the start to give them a good chance early on, some people even go all-in from the beginning, just to allow them to get a higher chip re-buy. They may even keep doing this until they find a hand that wins big.
No Limit and Pot Limit Omaha Poker:
A No-Limit game can be expensive too, even at low stake blinds, because it could cost you as much as the chip leader has to call a hand. A Pot-Limit game may keep the cost lower, but even then, in a hand where plenty of players fancy their cards, that pot limit could dramatically increase. In this case it is generally recommend that you only play games in which you can comfortably invest 300 to 500 times the big blind! What this means is that you use 5 percent of your whole stash to buy into a game that will allow you to pay for 300 - 500 big blinds. This should still allow you approximately 20 more chances to play the same game again.
It’s important with the above to constantly assess your bank roll, if it dips, then you need to move down a level and play lower stakes games until you manage to win the difference. Don’t be fooled into thinking that by playing higher stakes games with half of your overall stash will mean that you will make more money more quickly. True you could get lucky, but, if you fail you have halved your ability to play games at a level that you can comfortably afford. Meaning after the shock of losing that money you will have to work your way back up to your previous bank roll at even lower stake games!
Focusing back on Omaha it’s important to notice the kind of limits you are playing. Generally Omaha is always aggressive. You need to remember that people are seeing hands that offer all kinds of possibilities, and no-one has the mind of a super computer to work out all the likely outcomes, so many people will be betting on hands that ultimately luck and probability will work out. That’s not to say that you cannot consistently win hands in Omaha, you can, but you need to be careful. For a beginner a Pot Limit Omaha game is a lot easier to handle. As obviously the players can only raise by the amount in the pot, allows new players to invest smaller bets as they gain experience. Until you have gained some confidence, experience and skill in Omaha do not play the No limit games.
Hopefully the above will help to illustrate that poker is a game about luck - yes - but more importantly is about luck management. Bank roll management helps you even out the bad beats, and should help you gradually accumulate a profit. We know it is a fact that no poker player can win them all, so you need allow for this and only ever play at levels that you can comfortably afford. On an individual level this may be slightly different to the general recommendations, but is a technique that works. So basically don’t overstretch yourself financially and you should have a successful poker future.
Mike @ Power Poker Course.
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