Last Friday, I managed to introduce the concept of Dealer’s Choice at a 5€ buy-in home game. They caught on fairly quickly with Omaha, Omaha 8/b and Crazy Pineapple and even with 7 Stud, 7 Stud Split and Razz. It was great fun and as I was the only person with (however meagre) experience in any other game than NL Hold’Em, I expected to win a couple of nice pots, which I did.
Two kinds of questions arose, however, and although this is a HE-oriented message board, I’ll post them here (because you seem like an extremely helpful bunch).
(a) Betting structures
Although Belgians are rather fond of surrealism, the Stud games were being played limit (0,10/0,20, but I’m planning of upping them to 0,15/0,30). The other games were no limit (0,10/0,20), and that includes Omaha and Omaha 8/b. It didn’t cause much trouble then, but I can imagine that Omaha isn’t really the game one wants to play no limit, right? Being the dealer was enough of a challenge with three-way all-in pots being quartered and counting the pot every time a player wants to pump it could be a bit too much asked.
Limit Omaha is hardly an option as it took quite a while before they accepted limit Stud.
This question is two-fold: 1) Is NL Omaha (Hi/Lo) fundamentally at odds with the laws of the universe? 2) Are there any reliable NL Omaha (Hi/Lo) strategy guides available on the Web?
(b) Specialisation vs Diversification
As I said, I enjoyed that round of Dealer’s Choice very much and most of the others did too. While occasionally a player would call for NL Hold’Em, most in fact chose Omaha Hi/Lo and *drum roll* Razz. The question I’m faced with now is whether to stick to Hold’Em and getting better at it, as for the moment I I - quite frankly - suck and it’ll probably be the game of choice in the long run anyway, or to start concentrating on the other games.
Two reasons I can think of to opt for the latter choice are 1) increasing my edge over players who I suspect won’t be studying these games but will play them and 2) improving my "meta" poker skills, so to say. Playing games I had never played before for real money, my basic preflop thinking was: "Will I be able to get some value out of this hand, and if so: how?
Compared to my HE thinking, that’s a world of difference, and I think that indeed I should incorporate that kind of thinking into my HE game
Of course, I’ll continue to study several aspects of Hold’Em in any case. I’m asking, however, because the player who routinely takes every penny at that home game playing HE, argued against diversification, adding that statistics proved that not concentrating on one game is a bad plan, money-wise.
In sum:
What about NL Omaha (Hi/Lo)?
Concentrating on HE, or steadily learning the basics of the games mentioned? And why?
(I’ll probably post my views on how they play HE later and in another topic, because I could do with some friendly advice there.
Incidentally, I read on Ed’s MySpace that he’s very much interested in languages. May I ask which ones?)
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