Navigating The Flop And Beyond In Dramaha

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While the most important aspects to success in Dramaha is adherence to the Golden Rule and proper hand selection, playing well after the first betting round is crucial as well. Let’s examine various important concepts regarding post-flop play.

Disguising Your Holding

In Dramaha it’s very important to gauge whether or not your draw hand is probably best heading into the draw. It’s a huge benefit to us when our opponents play in a manner that signals one way or another if this is the case.

Suppose a player opens from the button and the big blind wakes up with a strong holding such as two pair or trips. The vast majority of players will play in a straightforward manner and reraise those hands, however, this is mostly counterproductive as it signals to the button the nature of their holding.

Since the button is going to bet the flop the vast majority of the time they could often be able to reap the same value via a check-raise and playing in this manner gives the impression that one hit the Omaha side very hard. This is particularly very useful when holding low trips in Draw, thus making it very difficult to make a strong Omaha hand.

Deception is very important. If you reraise before the draw and take two, an astute player will realize trips is your most likely holding and will make looser Omaha call downs. However, when you represent more possible Omaha strength via a check-raise an opponent is forced to lay down more hands on the turn and river.

When you always reraise your strong draw hands before the flop, then the times you do not reraise preflop but check-raise the flop your opponent will correctly surmise your strength lies mostly in Omaha and can play accordingly. Your opponents will often give away key information regarding which side their primary strength lies, however, we should try and avoid making that same mistake.

Discard Decisions

The importance of your Draw holding has been discussed ad nauseam; however, you should often sacrifice some amount of draw equity in order to increase your prospects in Omaha and thus maximize your overall equity. A clear example is when you hold A♦ A♠ 7♥ 6♠ 2♣ and the flop is J♠ 9♠ 3♥. Regardless of whether or not you believe that you currently have the best Draw hand you should draw two cards to A♦ A♠ 6♠ in an attempt to make a nut flush for Omaha.

In Dramaha we are often trying to improve upon a single pair so let’s examine how likely we are to do so depending on how many cards we are discarding:

Improving a pair drawing 3 Improving a pair drawing 2 Improving a pair drawing 1
Two Pair: 16.0% Two Pair: 17.2% Two Pair: 12.8%
Trips 11.4% Trips 7.8% Trips 4.3%
FH 1.0% FH 0.8% FH 0.0%
Quads 0.3% Quads 0.1% Quads 0.0%
28.7% 25.9% 17.0%

As you can see there is not a great penalty from going from three to two discards, but going from three to one is a significant drop-off. However, even going from three to one is not a great concern if you believe that you hold the highest pair.

For example, examine the following equities of a pair of aces versus kings when we draw different amounts of cards:

AA (D3) vs KK (D3) 77%
AA (D2) vs KK (D3) 76%
AA (D1) vs KK (D3) 74%

As you can see when you hold the best hand there is not a great penalty thus when you hold aces and your opponent draws three cards you can be somewhat liberal in drawing more cards in an attempt to maximize your total expectation. For example, suppose you open on the button with A♦ A♥ J♣ 9♣ 7♠ and get called by the big blind. The flop comes 4♦ 5♦ 6♣ and your opponent check-raises you and draws three.

Your opponent can have a few different holdings here but one likely hand for him to play this way is a flopped set. If we keep the seven in addition to the pair of aces any of the remaining threes, fours, fives, sixes, eights, nines, or tens will either give us a straight or a straight possibility in Omaha. Drawing two to A♦ A♥ 7♠ will increase our Omaha equity from 32 percent to 39 percent at very little cost on the Draw side. Note that our chances of winning Omaha are increasing even though we are reducing our odds at picking up another diamond which would give us a nut flush draw.

It’s important to not miss these opportunities, limit is a grind and we need to continually capitalize on and wherever possible enhance our small edges. Even when our opponent currently holds a straight, drawing two is still the right play because we will almost always at least chop and still have a chance (albeit possible slim) to overtake his Omaha hand.

The situation is different when you hold the lesser pair as there is a greater penalty the times you draw fewer cards:

KK (D3) vs AA (D3) 23%
KK (D2) vs AA (D3) 20%
KK (D1) vs AA (D3) 13%

As we alluded to earlier, drawing two isn’t that bad; however, you can see that when you take just one card your odds of ending up with the best hand is almost cut in half. When we hold the best pair, our odds are only reduced by around four percent when we draw only one card.

Players often run into problems when they habitually enter multi-way pots with hands such as J♦ 10♦ 9♠ 7♠ 7♣. These hands look pretty with multiple prospects, however, with such holdings you are often drawing one in order to try and improve in both Omaha and Draw. You will often have to get really lucky just to get half but more likely than not you will end up with either nothing or just a payoff hand.

A Few Post Flop Thoughts

Depending on your holding and the action you will often have to decide whether it’s more advantageous to try and knock out players or lay out the red carpet to keep them in. In a three-way pot with a hand like three eights and zip for Omaha it is often correct to try and keep the pot three handed if another one of your opponents seems to really like their hand.

If instead you have three aces it may be worth it to try and knock the other player out. If the board is not “locked down”, meaning that A-A could be good for Omaha or has a chance to be by the river, this is often the better play. Increasing your scoop chances always increases your overall expected value.

Let’s discuss a somewhat common situation; suppose you open from early position with aces and get reraised by the cutoff. The flop is of no help so you end up drawing three while your opponent draws two. Your opponent is heavily weighted towards trips thus it’s going to be hard for him to beat you in Omaha given his trip handicap on that side. Thus given the size of the pot, this is simply going to be a check-call down the majority of the time. That said there are a few boards we can fold.

One prime example is a board with three of one suit especially when those flush cards are live. With trips in his hand a flush is the most likely way that your opponent will end up beating you in Omaha.

You should call down fewer boards in this situation when your opponent only draws one card. This is due to the fact that with two pair your opponent is more live to hit sets and will also make more straights. And when there is three of a suit on the board by the turn, a fold is almost automatic because now trips plus a card kept for flush purposes is squarely in his range as well.

If instead we have an unimproved K-K we should only be folding slightly more. If you recall if we had opened from UTG our kings should often be accompanied by an ace kicker. The reason is two-fold. When we flop an ace our kicker will play against a hand such as trips that may also have an ace. But more importantly, having that ace makes it 25 percent less likely that we will bump up against aces which we fare badly against. While it’s also not good to run into trips or two pair we fare much better against those holdings typically having more than 40 percent in overall equity.

Dramaha is an incredibly fun game because the action is often furious and you frequently run into many interesting discard and post-flop decisions. However, when you build upon a foundation of strong starting hands your decisions will typically be easier than those of your opponents.

This ends our discussion on High Dramaha but hold those tears as next issue we switch gears to Deuce to Seven Dramaha! ♠

Kevin Haney is a former actuary of MetLife but left the corporate job to focus on his passions for poker and fitness. He is co-owner of Elite Fitness Club in Oceanport, NJ and is a certified personal trainer. With regards to poker he got his start way back in 2003 and particularly enjoys taking new players interested in mixed games under his wing and quickly making them proficient in all variants. His new mixed-games website Counting Outs is a great starting resource for a plethora of games ranging from the traditional to the exotic. He can be reached at [email protected].