Moving From No-Limit Hold’em To Pot-Limit Omaha

In the last issue, I discussed my reasons for preferring pot-limit Omaha as a cash game over no-limit hold’em. Mainly, I prefer the game because it’s more forgiving to recreational players and more friendly to people who are interested in playing more hands. In this issue, I’m going to discuss some of my biggest tips for transitioning from no-limit hold’em to pot-limit Omaha.

While I said above that it’s a game that is more forgiving to players that want to play looser, that doesn’t mean that it’s a good strategy overall. Most people tend to come over from no-limit hold’em and think “I’ve got four cards; every hand looks playable.” Some even say it out loud! This is not really true. If you want to be a profitable player, you can still play lots of hands, but they still have to be structurally sound.

What I mean when I say that is you almost always want to play hands that correlate over all four cards. There are, of course, exceptions. You can play disjointed aces or kings for a small amount preflop and get away with it. For the most part, though, you want to play well-connected, four-card hands.

For instance, many hold’em players will see a hand like A-K-6-5 double suited in early position and want to play it because it looks like two pretty good hold’em hands put together and it might have coverage for low boards and high boards. The problem with that thinking is two-fold. First of all, you only have mild coverage of low and high boards. You have an okay high board hand and an okay low board hand, but neither one is particularly good. Second of all, even if you flop a very strong hand like a six high straight or top two, in neither of those instances do you have a built-in freeroll in case someone else has the same hand.

For instance, if your opponent has A-K-Q-J or A-K-Q-10 and the flop is A-K-X no suits, your opponent has a gutshot and you don’t. If the flop is Q-J-10 in that instance, you both have the nut straight, but opponent has two pair to go with it. If the board is 2-3-4 and you’re against 7-6-5-4, they can hit a five or six to make a higher straight. So, while it may look like a pretty hand, it’s not doing well in lots of situations even when you flop really big.

Instead of looking for hands like that, you should be trying to play hands that make good hands with good redraws like the aforementioned A-K-Q-J, 7-6-5-4, double-suited big pairs, etc. However, and this gets into our second major thing, be very careful when you have a hand with small flush draws. Pot-limit Omaha, especially at the lower limits and at a full table, is a game where you should expect to be against the nuts.

You can tell if someone has the nuts by one simple tell: They’re betting. In general, at low limits, your opponents play very straight-forward poker. It’s easy to lay down what would be big no-limit hold’em hands in these situations because very few people are making significant plays other than betting one or two streets with the naked ace of a suit.

And, my final suggestion in transitioning from no-limit hold’em to pot-limit Omaha is learning more about blockers. In no-limit hold’em, blockers give you some suggestion as to what your opponent may or may not have and what hands might make good candidates for bluffing because of card removal. In pot-limit Omaha, you can have a card that absolutely prohibits your opponent from having the nuts, and you should take advantage of that.

Before I go any further, in case you don’t know what I mean by this, if there are three of one suit on the board and you have the ace of that suit, nobody else can have the nuts and therefore, they will have a tough time calling big bets. This, along with having a pair that blocks a straight i.e. you have Q-Q-x-x- on A-J-10, is the most common bluffing you see in pot-limit Omaha. It is especially useful in a situation where you have a very good draw without the flush draw, but you have the naked ace of the suit. For instance, you have A-K-Q-J with the Ah, but no other heart on a J-10-3 board with two hearts. Non-pairing hearts aren’t actual outs for you, but they’re virtual outs because they’ll slow your opponent down and often get you folds from better hands. If you only ever bluffed with the naked ace and nut-blocking pairs in pot-limit Omaha, you probably have a pretty good bluff frequency to get paid off on your nutted hands in low-limit games.

So, this time we’ve talked about how to transition from no-limit hold’em to low-stakes pot-limit Omaha. It’s important to play hands that correlate across all four cards, you have to realize that when your opponents are betting multiple streets, they probably have it, and blockers are even more important in pot-limit Omaha than they are in no-limit hold’em. Next time, we’ll go over transitioning to a pot-limit split game like Big O. ♠

Gavin Griffin was the first poker player to capture a World Series of Poker, European Poker Tour and World Poker Tour title and has amassed nearly $5 million in lifetime tournament winnings. Griffin is sponsored by HeroPoker.com. You can follow him on Twitter @NHGG