No Hold Em’ Zone
By Can someone find my summer and ship it back to me? After shoveling the driveway for the last time, I woke up sitting in front of a laptop near the end of July with an email from a long lost neighbor and Mackey asking me to drop by these parts and impart a little humor and some non-Hold Em’ poker knowledge upon the fan base of Minnesota Poker Magazine.
That’s right there are actually different ways of playing poker besides dealing two cards down to everyone and spreading five face up in the middle that are considered “casino dealt” games. While I won’t prepare you for next poker night with quarter kitchen poker games like Follow the Queen, Bloody Guts, and Chicago, I will be here citing a game that Hwang, Farha, and Ciaffone write about. If these poker authors are a little foreign to you, I’d say you’ve been playing too much Texas Hold Em’ and maybe next time you’re in the casino drop by that table with the kill button in the middle and a likely yellow placecard with Omaha on it in large black letters.
Four Card Bingo or Degenerate Crack are a couple of names you could call Omaha. There’s a lot gamble for those who adventure into the world of wrap draws, and where aces are not always the best hand dealt. Pot Limit Omaha and Omaha Eight or Better have been my “main” games for several years after cutting my teeth with Limit Hold Em’ on PartyPoker (flashback to the bottomless pond of easy money). While I tend to lean towards the split game, Omaha-Hi has become a very popular game amongst the best of the best as seen with the active PLO high stakes tables with $100,000+ pots on Full Tilt nearly every night.
As a disclaimer, you will not find my busty nurse avatar or my son’s picture at the tables with Ivey, Galfond, and Antonius instead I play much smaller stakes where winning the family a decent meal makes for a good night. Being a parent and a bankroll nit (I’ve never redeposit into a poker account since dropping $100 into PartyPoker several years ago), I have limits which I’m comfortable with and can play the game without worrying about my wife throwing my laptop over the deck when I bust a buy-in from a straight flush draw not getting there against an overpair.
In Minnesota to play Omaha live means hitting up a $4/$8 with half-kill Omaha 8 table at Running Aces or Canterbury with 5 or 6 regulars waiting for you to pay them off. Split games can make your average NLHE player yawn with every split pot that ends with the house being the only winner. But, I’ll try to give a few pointers here in later posts to help you bust those regulars or at least walk into the table with the yellow chip stacks holding new found respect for the game.
Omaha isn’t the only game I play, in fact while in a casino setting I’ll seek out a mixed game if one is running with games like Stud-Hi, Stud 8 or Better, Razz, Badugi, A-5 Lowball, and 2-7 Triple Draw being spread. If your poker aspirations put you behind the glass of Bobby’s Room at the Bellagio, I won’t help you get that cushy seat next to Jennifer Harman, but at least you’ll know what’s going when she announces a seven-smooth in Razz.
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