Q&A #120: Pot-Limit Omaha Starting Hands

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Over the past year I’ve focused almost exclusively on no-limit hold’em questions and answers. There are two reasons: that’s mostly what I’ve been playing this year, and that’s also mostly what most people play.

But I have dabbled some in pot-limit Omaha this year, and I have to say I do really enjoy playing PLO. One thing I like about PLO, beyond the fact that it’s a complex and challenging game, is that there is relatively little conventional wisdom out there about how to play it. So I see many different opponent playing styles when I play, and I have to adapt my strategy more aggressively as a result.

Today I’ll answer a PLO question that spadebidder asked on the message board:

I’m just beginning to learn Omaha since it is a popular side game in the NLHE league I play in. The cash games usually alternate NL holdem and PL omaha each table round, with the button choosing hi-only or hi/lo. I’ve started studying the game after looking pretty ignorant trying to play Omaha the first couple of times.

I have a better understanding of the game strategy now, but my question is about starting hands. There seem to be two schools of thought, with one liking the Hutchinson point system, and the other favoring looking at starting hands as 6 possible holdem-type hands and wanting the most good combinations that can flop big hands like straights and nut flushes so that you hit the flop more often (putting more value on double-suited and multiple-connected sequences like A K 2 3 ). The Hutchinson system seems to be based entirely on showdown value against random hands, and I’m a little skeptical that this is the right way to value your hand, since post-flop play seems to be the critical part of Omaha, and you are rarely all-in preflop. It also seems to me that straights and flushes win a lot more often than full houses, devaluing paired hands.

What are your thoughts on this?

Basically, I think that neither of your two “schools of thought” fully capture the complexity of PLO preflop hand selection.

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