Schooling in Omaha

Taken from this article on Omaha strategy:

"Schooling" is a common phenomenon in loose-game Holdem. When several players play badly by calling with weak draws, like gutshot straights or backdoor flushes, these players partially protect each other by making the "price" on each of their calls better. If only one player calls with a gutshot draw, usually that is a significant mistake, but if several players make similar calls, now the pot is big enough to make the calls profitable, or at least much less bad. Properly understanding the strategy involved in schooling is a key skill in loose-game Holdem. (See article on Holdem Schooling here.)

There is no parallel schooling phenomenon in Omaha -- quite the contrary. In Omaha, schooling benefits the favorites, not the underdogs. This reverse schooling phenomenon is what makes Omaha often mindlessly profitable. Players with four outs or less call bets from players with twenty outs, and no matter how many people call, the twenty outs player continues to have twenty outs. Despite the definite reverse profitability of "schooling" in Omaha, poor players engage in it all the time. They look at a big pot and call bets hoping to get lucky, even though they may be drawing totally dead.

Suppose you flop a top set of three kings against seven opponents. The true enemies of your KKK (or any strong Omaha hand) are the first two callers (meaning the two opponents with the most outs). On a flop of KsQd7c for example, we are afraid of AJTx wrap-straight draws. That's the first caller or two. Then we have open-end straight draws. We are the favorite over those (and all the rest of the draws). Next are backdoor flush draws. Then we worry about the lame backdoor straight draws around the seven. Naturally, many of these longshot draws overlap each other. For instance, if the Ace-high spade flush draw calls us, we certainly love the five-high spade flush draw to call, drawing dead. Yes, they may win sometimes, but we love these sixth, seventh, and eighth callers!

With the KKK, if we assume we won't win unless we fill up, and we don't fill up on the turn, we will have ten outs of the forty-four possible cards, meaning we will fill up 23% of the time. Even if we lose to quads the 3% part of that, that's still a one out of five win percentage, for a scoop, while getting six, seven or eight way action. Additionally, we'll normally have our own backdoor draws. If we have two backdoor King-high flush draws, this will further destroy what little power the sixth, seventh and eight callers have, as their backdoor baby flush draws in our suits are contributing totally dead money on that aspect of their hands.

So, building a pot with a raise before the flop in Omaha does not benefit schooling opponents, it benefits players with the good hands. The flip side of this phenomenon exposes another key difference between Omaha and Holdem.

In loose Holdem games, there are a lot of hands you can profitably add to your arsenal, most obviously Ace-rag suited and suited connectors. This is not true in Omaha. Again, the difference in value of hands multiway in Omaha is much more dramatic than in Holdem. The majority of hands simply are never playable (outside the blinds). If you are on the button and everybody limps in, 3456 is still a worthless piece of garbage. It does not matter if you have three opponents or seven, the hand stinks. You can play a small number of additional hands, but for the most part, no matter how loose or weak your opponents are, you can't add too many more hands to your playable repertoire.

The thing to "loosen up" in such a game is to want to play for a raise most hands you play. In tight games, calling when someone limps in front of you is often the right play. In a loose game, raising is usually the correct play because you are playing a hand with way the best of it. You want dead money in the pot, and you want dead hands hopelessly chasing it! And they will.