Omaha
Omaha is a community card poker game similar to Texas hold 'em,
where each player is dealt four cards and must make his best hand
using exactly two of them, plus exactly three of the five community
cards. The exact origin of the game is unknown, but casino
executive Robert Turner first brought Omaha into a casino setting
when he introduced the game to Bill Boyd who offered it as a game
at the Las Vegas Golden Nugget Casino (calling it "Nugget
Hold'em").
Pot Limit Omaha
Pot Limit Omaha (shortened to PLO) is popular in Europe, online,
and in high-stakes "mixed games" played in some American casinos.
It is more often played high only, but can also be played high low.
Even more so than Limit Omaha Hi-Lo, PLO is a game of drawing, if
you are drawing, drawto the nut hand. Second best flushes and
straights can be, and frequently are, beaten. Furthermore, because
of the exponential growth of the pot size in pot-limit play, seeing
one of these hands to the end can be very expensive and carry
immense reverse implied odds.
Redraws
A great hand to have in PLO is the nuts with a redraw. For
example, if the board is Q♠ J♠ 10♥, and you have A♠ K♣ Q♣ Q♥, then
not only do you have the current nuts (your ace-king), but you also
have a redraw with the two queens in your hand because if the board
pairs, you will make queens full, or four queens. If your hand is
A♠ K♠ Q♣ Q♥ , your hand is even better because you have flush and
royal flush redraws as well. In fact, with the Q♠ J♠ 10♥ board, A♠
K♠ Q♣ Q♥ is approximately an 80-20 money favorite over a random
hand containing ace-king (see freerolling). Even a pair of queens
with any two spades is better than 55-45 against a random ace-king
hand. Flopped nut straights, flushes and even sets can often be a
double-edged sword in pot-limit Omaha.
Variations
Sometimes the high-low split game is played with a 9 or a 7
-high qualifier instead of 8-high. It can also be played with five
cards dealt to each player instead of four. In that case, the same
rules for making a hand apply: exactly two from the player's hand,
and exactly three from the board. In the game of "Courchevel",
popular in Europe, instead of betting on the initial four cards and
then flopping three community cards for the second round, the first
community card is dealt before the first betting round, so that
each player has four private cards and the single community card on
his first bet. Then two more community cards are dealt, and play
proceeds exactly as in Omaha. Pot Limit Omaha high can also be
played with more than four hole cards, the most common variety
being six card Omaha which can be found in many casinos across the
UK.
History
Omaha Hold'em gets its name from two types of games. In the
original Omaha poker game, players were only dealt two hole cards
and had to use both to make a hand combined with community cards.
This version of Omaha is defined in the glossary of "Super System"
(under Omaha) as being interchangable with "Tight Holdem". Across
all the variations of the game, the requirement of using exactly
two hole cards is the only consistent rule. The "Omaha" part of the
name represents this aspect of the game. "Hold'em" refers to a game
using community cards that are shared by all players. This is
opposed to Draw games where each player only has hole cards, and
Stud games where each player has their own visible cards.
Source: Wikipedia.com.
