While it seems like you should welcome the similarities that make learning Omaha a bit easier, we often find that things that come easily in life don't mean too much. In this poker situation, the life lesson applies. If you rely on your hold'em experience to guide you in Omaha, you're in for a lot of trouble.
AN EARLY OMAHA MISADVENTURE
I learned this the first time I ever played Omaha. All betting was complete, and I had a straight, but there were two pair, kings and queens, on the board, and my opponent showed me a king. "Full house," I thought, because that would have been his hand's value in hold'em, and I mucked my hand. "What else do you have?" someone asked my opponent.
"Nothing, just the three kings," he said. Oops. Fortunately, this was such a friendly game that the guy actually gave me half the pot when I told him I'd had a straight (this was a LONG time ago). In a casino, or indeed in the vast majority of home games, a post-muck claim of mucking the winner wouldn't even earn you sympathy, much less half the pot. You'd be expected to know that you must use two and EXACTLY two of the cards in your hand in Omaha. You can't just play the board, as you can in hold'em, or play only one card, as I thought my opponent was doing with that king he flashed to me.
It takes longer to get used to this than you would think, and there is no shame in taking some time to stare at your cards to make sure you have what you think you have. Even watching professional players competing at the highest level, I have seen plenty of them misread their hands. I've also watched many comical scenes where four or five pros are staring at a hand that someone has tabled (laid down face up, to show what he has), all trying to figure out what he has.
If pros can struggle with this, so can you, and this is why I strongly suggest you table your hand at the end of the betting in Omaha. Other players in the game are not allowed to suggest that you table it, but if you do table it, the other players and the dealer are allowed to help you read it. You'll be amazed how often you overlook a low flush, because you were concentrating on trying to make an open-ended straight wrap you'd flopped, or how often you overlook a bad low (in the high-low version) because you were focused on your high hand.
TABLING WINS IN COST-BENEFIT ANALYSIS
Ideally, of course, you should learn to read your own hand—after all, all those bets and raises that got you to the river were based on your own understanding—but tabling your hand costs you very little, compared to what you stand to gain. You are giving away information about what kinds of cards you play, and that can cost you a little, but until you have advanced past the point where you read beginner articles, you will almost certainly be making money by tabling your hands, by picking up parts of pots you didn't realize you were entitled to.
Hand values are also quite different in Omaha. Even though occasionally that "two and exactly two" rule makes your hand worse than it would have been in hold'em (like my friend with his lone king), you've got four cards in your hand, and the vast number of additional combinations this creates means it's far more likely (especially in the low limit games you'll play when you're learning, where six and seven players regularly see the flop) that someone holds the absolute nuts, or something pretty close to it.
For example, in hold'em, two hearts flop and a third heart hits the river, you should certainly be cautious without a flush, but you should just as certainly not automatically give up without one. In Omaha, it's pretty safe to assume that someone had a heart draw.
ALL RIGHT, ALL TOGETHER NOW…
This advice applies even more strongly when a straight is possible, because good Omaha players like to play hands wherein all four cards "work together." If an Omaha board finishes up with a nine, a jack, and a queen on it, you can (in a high-only game) be fairly sure that someone has a straight. If you have 8-10 in your hand, you shouldn't be too proud of it. It's probably worth a call on the end, but generally the "ignorant" (low) end of a possible straight can cost you a lot of money.
Position is another matter that changes dramatically in Omaha. In hold'em, position is hugely important: hands that aren't even playable in early position can be worth a call or a raise in late position. In Omaha, position still matters, but far less: the pure value of your cards is more important.
To give you an example, if a group of players offered me an impossible hypothetical deal where I could always have the button, but I'd also always have relatively mediocre cards, I'd take him up on it in a heartbeat in hold'em, but would refuse it just as quickly in Omaha, where I would gladly sit under the gun all night long if I was getting quality starting hands there.
In this week's second article, we'll look more at just what a quality starting hand is in Omaha, and I'll give you one clue. It involves something I've already mentioned: having your four cards "working together." Now we’ll learn what that means.
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