I can’t promise you that reading this book will transform you from a beginning Omaha player into a high-rolling professional, but I can assure you that it will give you a good shove in the right direction. If you’ve never played a hand of Omaha in your life, I would suggest you start off as I did playing limit high-only for stakes low enough that several losing sessions in a row won’t wipe out your entire bankroll. While getting your feet wet, concentrate on playing the game the right way. Fold everything but the best starting cards. Use your position at the table to your advantage. Don’t chase long-shot draws. Pay special attention to the pot odds you’re getting on each hand. Manage your bankroll wisely. Ideally, you should be playing with other people’s money; that is, money you have won during previous sessions. If you can manage to do all this, your confidence will grow, and once it does you can start moving up the ranks, playing at higher and higher limits.
As your game evolves, it’s important that you learn how to read your opponents. If you insist upon playing poker at the casinos the same way you do while sitting in front of your computer at home, you will never advance very far. Poker is a people game, and if you can’t read people you can’t expect to win. I didn’t tell you that story about beating another player heads-up without looking at my cards to brag. I did it to emphasize how important the other aspects of the game, besides the cards in your hands, truly are. Neither is more important than the other. You need to master them both before your game can advance from weekend hobby to potential career.
Only after your confidence has reached a certain level playing limit Omaha—you should be striving to know where you’re at in a hand at all times—would I suggest you start playing pot-limit Omaha. If you jump into a game of pot-limit before you’re ready, your confidence as well as your bankroll could end up taking a big hit. Pot-limit Omaha is one of the most difficult poker games, if not the most difficult poker game, you could ever learn so you need to start off playing for stakes that won’t hurt you too much should you lose. For experienced players the beauty of playing pot-limit is that you can really punish your opponents when you’re getting the best of it in a hand, but for inexperienced players there is very little beauty at first because they are the ones who usually end up getting punished.
When you do make the switch to pot-limit, I would suggest that you start off playing the right way. If you play conservatively you’re not going to get hurt as much as you would if you adopt an overly aggressive style. I definitely would not recommend you try to play the game my way until you have built up a large bankroll and a tremendous amount of confidence. My style is not an easy one to learn. It has taken me years to perfect, and it’s still a work in progress. That’s the thing about poker: the day you stop learning, the day you think you know everything there is to know about the game, that’s the day the game is going to remind you, in as cruel a manner as you can ever imagine, that your development is far from over.
Lastly, you shouldn’t put too much pressure on yourself to be an overnight sensation. You should be patting yourself on the back instead. The fact that you’re reading this book shows that you have developed an interest in poker beyond the limiting confines of Texas hold’em, and when the current craze for hold’em finally reaches its inevitable conclusion you are going to be way ahead of the curve.
I would close by saying good luck, but if you remember even half of what I’ve told you, then you won’t be needing very much of that.