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.