| Trips
- Omaha Poker
T.J. Cloutier and Tom McEvoy
tell us (Championship Omaha by T.J. Cloutier
and Tom McEvoy) that bottom 2-pair is basically
worth nothing in pot-limit and no-limit Omaha.
There's no arguing that point. In fact in
multi-way pots with 4 or more players, any
trips below the top trips are also of practically
of no value on the flop either according to
Cloutier and McEcoy. To be conservative, when
calling with this hand you should give yourself
between a 6.4% and a 0% chance of winning.
Of course this is just as true in Internet
poker.
Let's set up an example: You
are in late position and for the minimum raise
preflop you called with a middle pair and
double suited connectors with a one card gap
from your pair. On the flop you see 2 cards
over ten, a flush draw (not yours) and your
middle card for a set.
Maybe the first player checked
and then the second bet small and the third
raised pot or all in. You are now faced with
the decision of calling, raising, or folding
to what could very well be 2 pair trying to
protect against both draws, an over-pair with
either a draw, a higher set, or some combination
of all of the above.
If nobody has a set higher
than you and they are all holding medium and
high cards you have about a 30% chance of
winning. With everybody all in that gives
you pot odds, but only with around a 5% grace.
In reality it is too hard to
judge these situations and know if in fact
your low trips are the best hand at the moment.
If someone has trips higher than you, you
are simply in a world of trouble. If someone
has two pair and you have bottom trips they
have over a 16% chance of beating you. If
you raise them to try to get a feel they may
very well come back at you thinking you are
the one bluffing. An over pair with a flush
draw has a 32% chance of beating you. Open
ended players have 10-15% of your wins depending
on how many cards make their straight.
A great place to play pot-limit
Omaha is Fair
Poker.
As a smart player looking
at this hand objectively you can see two things,
if you bet pot only the first person to call
you is going to have a hard decision about
paying for their odds and they are going to
assume that someone after them will see the
bet and thus give them much closer to the
odds they need for the draw. The huge amount
of action developing in this hand could be
enough to convince some of the lesser draws
to stick around. That's bad news for your
hand.
In Omaha it is possible to
put a lot of money into hands where you have
more than 5% over pot odds. There is only
about a 0.4% chance of two players flopping
trips at the same time. That said the fact
that someone is madly trying to get their
stack into the pot dramatically increases
the probability that this has occurred. If
one of the players check raised it is even
more likely that you are beat. Calling might
look cheap in this situation but calling for
a one-outer is never a cheap proposition.
In the long run you will have
a lot less volatility in your bank roll if
you stick to betting it all when you know
that: a) you have more than one direct out
and a backdoor straight draw b) you are ahead
of the pot odds by more than 5%.
In conclusion you should either
call cheap bets with the low trips and see
if they hold up or simply fold them. The large
number of betters and raisers presented in
the example all too well exemplify how many
better and improvable hands are out there.
Calling or putting it all in the middle in
a multi-way pot, without the nut trips is
a gamble and not a strategically sound decision.
P.S. If you need a break from
playing poker you might want to check out
online backgammon.
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