Omaha High/Low Poker [Paperback]

Bill Boston has done the Omaha/8 player a great favor by systematically and exhaustively tabulating the results of playing each possible starting hand.

Another reviewer downgraded his rating because Boston's discussion could be more complete. My take is just the opposite - the extensive tables in this small volume are most valuable when the user studies them to arrive at his own understanding of what works and what doesn't in Omaha/8. For example, Boston shows that any hand with a 7, 8, or 9 is a loser over time. His tables also show that all hands with X as the second low card are also losers over time. I'll leave it to the serious player to study the tables Boston provides to determine the rank of X.

And there's more, but you'll have to dig into this treasure trove of research data to find it.

Could I pan the book because of how the data was collected? Sure. The author made certain assumptions about the types of opponents and my opponents play somewhat differently. He didn't consider suitedness in some situations where I'd like to know more (i.e. AdKd4h2h).

If you are looking for a source that gives you an exhaustive list of conclusions this book is probably not for you. But if you're looking for the raw research results that you can study to draw your own conclusions without doing the tedious work required to generate it I highly recommend this one.

I was pleasantly surprised by the book. I found the advice on playing the turn especially helpful.

A bone to pick. He advocates not raising pre-flop in low limit zoo games, saying you don't want to raise people out of the pot because you can make more money if they stay in. He gives a mathematical example of this. But then he goes and says it's not worthwhile raising because people won't fold anyway. Well, which is it? Is raising bad because people are folding, or because they won't fold?

Just from the standpoint of common sense, if you rate to have a better hand than anyone else, and much better than most, it seems raising must be good. How could it not be? Steve Badger argues for this on-line, and his reasoning makes sense to me.

Apart from that, I didn't see any advice that look bad, and, as I mentioned, the turn advice I found especially helpful.

The main part of the book deals with starting hands, which is very important in O8. The charts are very useful. For example, I found I was over-valuing hands like 2345 or JQKA while under-valuing hands like AA4x, 23KK, or KKJJ.

I agree completely with another reviewer which suggested you can study the charts to come up with your theories as to what works.

The book pictured on this page has been replaced by a new version published by Cardoza in 2006.

Although the title and front cover of the book don't make it clear, this is not a guide on how to play Omaha High-Low. This is a book about which hands to play and which to fold during the first round of betting. If you want an introduction to Omaha High-Low, both Tenner and Cappelletti's books are excellent, and of course cover which hands to play. You can also find good free advice at a website called o8poker.

Knowing in advance the contents of this book, why was I stupid enough to buy it? Well, it's based on computer simulations, and there's a lot that could be done by that method to refine the basic list of playable hands. There's limit Omaha vs. pot limit vs. no limit. There's ring game play vs. tournaments. There's full table vs. short-handed vs. head to head. There's your position at the table. There's the playing style of your opponents. There's your stack size in a tournament. What if there are raisers or callers ahead of you? What if you're in the small blind and need to put in only half a bet?

If you're contemplating writing a book addressing these issues, relax. The author of this book hasn't done so.

The methodology used by the author is. to put it kindly, simple-minded. He used a commercial poker-playing program to simulate the play of fifty million deals at a full-table ring game populated by tight aggressive players. Then he computed how well each particular hand fared. Then he ranked them all in order. These are put in a table that takes up about half the book. Since, as the author points out, about 75% of hands dealt are unplayable, this is quite a waste of space, unless you're interested in whether some unplayable hand ranks 4536th or 4537th out of 5278. Incidentally, since the program has its own built-in standards of which hands are playable, basically all other hands were played only under unfavorable cirumstances from the blinds (with some exceptions to be mentioned later). The hands are listed in order of the cards they contain. It would have been more useful to list them in order of their rating so that you could see which hands were marginal and use that to make close decisions based on other criteria.

The figure of 5278 hands is the author's, based on taking every possible combination of four cards by rank, then dividing them into the categories "unsuited," "single-suited," or "double-suited." "Single-suited" includes all hands with two cards of the same suit, except hands with two cards of one suit and two of another. This category is quite insufficient, as it makes such a big difference whether or not one of the suited cards is an ace that the category should be divided on that basis.

The book wastes another ten pages on two separate and useless tables of two hundred randomly dealt groups of community cards. There is also a mysterious short table that purports to show that AA23 double-suited, considered the best hand, will make more money for a player who is cautious before the flop than one who isn't. Since everybody would play this hand under any circumstances, any difference in results would be due to how you play after the flop.

Rather surprisingly, the book's list of playable hands includes some that, in general, no competent player would open, such as QQ43 double-suited. This baffled me until I realized that the way the poker-playing program was used, these hands would only be played in very favorable situations, namely in late position in unopened pots, "attacking the blinds," as they say. Of course this isn't mentioned in the book.

In the beginning of the book the author states that he gave every hand a grade, based on AA23 double-suited having a grade of 100, to be found in the last row of the charts. This doesn't seem particularly helpful, since he doesn't explain how this grade was arrived at, and since in general you're going to play hands with positive expected value and fold hands with negative expected value. Since in fact the grades don't appear in the charts, the point is moot.

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