Omaha Poker is a card game played by two to ten players at the table. The purpose of the play is to win as many chips as possible from Your’s opponents. The chips are won by winning a pot, which is available in two was: having the best hand at the showdown or being the only player left in the pot after all the others had folds their hands.
The general strategy of playing Omaha Poker is a bit similar to Texas Hold’em Poker. Each player is a holder of four cards and has to do make the best hand possible using only two of them plus exactly three of five community cards. Omaha uses a standard 52-card French deck.
What is usually needed is the “nut” hand, or something close to that, to be a winner. The “nut” simply means a hand which can be beaten only by straight flushes or hidden quads.
Omaha players all start with four cards. Every four-card hand contains six Hold’em hands as they must play two cards from their hand and three cards from the board.
Only one of two good hold’em hands are not a very good hand for the beginning in Omaha. However, many players use them as a starting hand. The higher payoffs usually work to player’s advantage when he starts with hands containing four cards interacting with each other to create five or six decent hold’em hands.
The other type of Omaha Poker, called Omaha Hi-Lo is also very popular. Luckily for Omaha High players, it is played to very similar rules, with the only difference at the shutdown. In Omaha Hi-Low Split-8 or better, every player makes a separate hand with five cars and five-card ace-to-five low hand. The pot is split between the high and low, which can be the same person. To be considered as low, a player must be free to play an 8-7-6-5-4 or lower, which is the reason the game is called ‘eight or better’. Each player may play any two of the hole cards in order to make his high hand and any two of them to make his low hand. High hand winner has to split the pot with the best low hand. Acer are played both high and low. A hand for low is not disqualified by straight or flushes, so a person ending with 5 4 3 2 A will have a strong low and a five high straight for high. The player with such cards is able to win both ways or have another high hand better than the straight. If no person qualifying for low hand is there, which is possible, the high hand wins the whole pot. However, scooping the pot often builds the addition to the stack of chips, so it is better to get a half of it. In that case the player is put barely ahead of where he was before playing the hand. Omaha Hi Lo is usually played in the fixed limit version.
