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When you play a lot of Hold’em, it’s easy to forget that there are poker situations that don’t arise in Hold’em but are important to the correct analysis of other games. I was playing in a Pot Limit Omaha game when I faced a unique situation that got me thinking about some very broad and very important aspects of poker. I was dealt 9-9-x-x and was heads up against an aggressive opponent. The fl op was 9c 8c 6d. My opponent check-raised the pot in the fl op; when he bet the pot on the turn, I folded. My analysis at the table was that my opponent was very likely to have held a made straight, and that I didn’t have the odds to draw to a full house. Although these facts were true, my analysis was incomplete.
In Omaha, on the fl op, hand values are not always transitive. That is, hand A can be a favorite over hand B, and hand B can be a favorite over hand C, but hand C can be a favorite over A. The hand above illustrates this:
Flop: 9c 8c 6d Hand A: 10h 7h 2h 2s Hand B: Ad As 9d 9s Hand C: Ac Ks Js Tc
Hand A is the nut straight; hand B is top set, and hand C is the nut fl ush draw with an open-ended straight draw. Hand A has 59% equity heads up against hand B, and hand B has 60% equity against hand C. The nuts is ahead of a weaker made hand, which is itself ahead of a draw. It is tempting to appeal to instinct and conclude that the nuts is therefore ahead of the draw, but that is false: hand C has 55% equity heads up against hand A.
This is why I went wrong over the table; I didn’t account for my opponent’s full range. That is, I knew that I was an underdog to a straight, but I didn’t note that I was a favorite against some hands that a straight was an underdog to. In Hold’em we often think like this: “Well, I have top pair, but I can’t beat two pair, let alone a set, let alone a straight.” The implicit assumption is that the hands later in the list are all favorites against all the earlier hands. In Omaha, you have to abandon this sort of linear thinking: You’ll forget to account for draws, you’ll overestimate the strength of parts of your opponent’s range, and you’ll underestimate the strength of other parts of it.
If I consider my opponent’s range to be all hands that can tie or beat the nut straight, some analysis reveals that I am in better shape with top set. My equity against the current nuts is quite bad, but top set does better than the nut straight with no redraw. Here is that analysis:
Board: 9c 8c 6d
So what did I learn here? Well, the result is close, but I should be more inclined to reraise and get it all in with top set than with the nut straight, if that is my opponent’s range. In both cases, though, I have less than 45% equity. Whether to shove or not depends heavily on my opponent’s bluffi ng frequency, but that’s an article for another day. What is important here is that you learn to think unconventionally, and work even harder in Omaha to make sure that you know how your hand behaves against your opponent’s range.
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