Poker Raising - When To Raise -Omaha
Submitted: August 31, 2007
By Sportsbook
Most of the poker strategy you read online centers around Texas Hold Em, both limit and no limit. As a poker writer, I know I’m guilty of centering a big proportion of my topics around Texas Hold em. Keeping this in mind, I decided to vary things for this week. I decided to throw a little Omaha into the mix. As a general rule, you should never raise before the flop from early position in Omaha. Why? Well, when you’re going to have to act first on every street, you’re at a tremendous disadvantage in this game. This is regardless of whether or not you hold a superior hand as sometimes, the better your hand, the worse the disadvantage at when you raise from up front because you will then feel the need to protect your hand.
Let’s look at an example. Suppose you raise from up front with a very good hand that contains a pair of aces or kings and you don’t hit the flop. All you have is that pair of Aces or Kings and the flop looks innocent. You’re first to act and you want to win the pot, so you make a continuation bet. Then, to your dismay, somebody comes over the top with a raise. You almost have enough money in the pot that you have to call. What do you do with your pair now? See what I mean?
The way I see it, pot-limit Omaha is a game in that you shouldn’t like to play from up front. Instead, you should take flops with good hands but you don’t want to raise with them from a front position. The basic problem with raising is that you’re highlighting that you have a good hand. Typically, players don’t want to raise with a low hand, so your opponents have the tendency to put you on a high hand. Of course you can be somewhat deceptive and raise with a drawing hand, but you must be prepared to call a reraise behind you. Also, when you raise from up front in pot-limit games, you’re giving the other guy twice more reason to play back at you. This can be particularly dangerous if you don’t have an uber-strong hand.
That’s why I suggest that as a general rule, you should not raise before the flop from under the gun or from the two blinds, because you’re going to be in the lead from then onward. Most of the time when you have a big hand up front, you’re going to limp. Most of the raising in pot-limit Omaha is usually done from two or three spots in front of the button or on the button.
Here are some general tips on when to raise in Omaha.
In the early stages of the play of a hand, you typically raise the size of the pot. On later streets, you may choose not choose to bet the size of the pot. This reasoning is simple. There are so many possible draws in Omaha that when you have the best hand, you want to get your opponent to put in the maximum money to draw to his hand and you don’t mind his folding so that you can take the pot. Betting the maximum amount of money serves both these purposes quite well. For example, suppose you have a set. The last thing you want to do is to make it profitable for him to call with a flush or straight draw with one card to come because he will be able to fire on the river if the board changes. And since you don’t know for sure whether he is on a straight or flush draw, you will be at a disadvantage. In other words, you don’t want to set up the proper odds for your opponent to call your bet when, in fact, you don’t want him to call.
To recap, you don’t want to raise from up front because you are committing yourself more fully to a hand than you want to. It’s much better to be committed from the backside because, not always but a good percentage of the time, players check to the raiser on the flop. When you raise from behind, if the flop is scary, you can take off a free card if you feel like it, whereas if you raise from the front, you have to declare what you’re going to do before anyone else acts. The bottom line is that you’re simply putting too much money at risk when you raise from up front.
I hope you find this thinking helpful.
Until next time, may the chips fall your way.
