Pot Limit Omaha $1/$2 Hand Analysis

Preflop: You’re playing $1/$2 Pot Limit Omaha. The game is 6-handed and your stack is $200. You’re in early position, with AJJ10. A strong hand. You can either call or raise. I don’t like to raise preflop in early position too much, because positional advantage is extremely important in Pot Limit Omaha. Let’s say we call. There is another limper behind us, and then the button raises the pot. The blinds both fold, we call (our hand is not strong enough to reraise), and the other limper calls. There’s $36 in the pot and we have $189 left.

The flop: 963. We have the nut flush draw, and an overpair (JJ). That gives us 10 outs against most made hands. If we go to the river we have a 38% chance of winning. A good draw but not a monster. However, if we do hit, we hit the nuts, which is very important in Omaha. First we have to consider our opponents. The player on the button is aggressive; he’s hard to push around but also pays off in big pots more than he should. The other guy is a rock, if he makes a bet or a raise watch out. The button has us covered and the rock only has $70 left.

Analysis: Let’s first consider betting out. If we bet and both opponents fold, it’s great for us. We want to give ourselves a chance of this happening, so we would bet at least 2/3 of the pot, $25-$30 is a good range. What if we make a bet in this range and get raised? If the rock raises us, we have to call. He’s almost certainly got a set, but the pot odds would make it crazy not to call. If the aggressive player raised it would be a tough decision, because we each have a big stack. If he does raise, calling would be bad because he’d be able to put us on our flush draw for sure, and therefore wouldn’t pay us off when we hit. Reraising all in isn’t great because he would have to call (pot odds again), and he’s more than likely a favorite against our draw.

Let’s consider checking. If it checks around we get a free chance at our good draw; that’s not a bad outcome. If the rock bets, it’s an easy fold (unless the bet is too small, under ½ the pot, in which case you should call). If the button bets we can raise, knowing that he bets a lot of hands here, and there’s a good chance he’ll fold and we’ll win a decent sized pot (probably around $65). So checking seems like the better option.

We check, the rock checks and the button bets $30. We check-raise, but how much? There’s now $66 in the pot and we could our raise could be as big as $96. Even if we only raise $60, we’re still pot committed and have to call if he re-raises us all in. (We would have $100 left with over $300 in the pot and a much better than 1 in 4 chance of winning). But since we would prefer that he fold, we should make a big bet to give him further incentive to do so. So, we raise the max, $96, to $126. The rock folds and the button does to.

You can see how many possibilities we had to process before we could decide on the best plan for the hand. Poker is a complicated game, and if you want to excel you have to be willing to do mental work like this. There’s no way to simplify your strategy without giving up profit.