If you’ve got K-K, you raise, right? You probably wouldn’t hesitate to re-raise, either, and, unless you’ve got an uncanny read on your opponent, you’d probably even push all your chips in the middle.
If you’re playing Omaha, not only is it suicide to go all-in before you see a flop with a hand like K-K, it may not even be correct to raise at all.
Welcome to Omaha, where one of the toughest things for new players to learn is when, and why, to raise before the flop.
Raising when you’ve got a big pair just isn’t automatic and may be a big mistake. Raising with A-A could even be a mistake, especially when you’re in early position and you’ve got a “trash” A-A hand, a hand, in other words, that isn’t suited and with no real straight possibilities.
So when do you raise before the flop? Well, as with Holdem, you should always ask yourself what you’re trying to accomplish with the raise.
Usually the answer is a simple one: You’re trying to reduce the number of players in the hand, or even get against another player heads-up, to increase the chances of your good hand holding up.
But in Omaha, that’s difficult to do. Omaha is most often a pot-limit game, so you don’t really have the option to raise an amount that will drive many players out of the pot if they like their hand. And more often than not, players see too many possibilities in their four cards instead of two to fold.
Isolating can work, but sometimes you have to take a chance that you won’t get in a raise to do it. When you’re in early position with an A-A hand, you might limp and hope for another player to raise. Then you can re-raise him, and now that the pot’s bigger, that raise might actually get other players out of the way. It might even get the original raiser to fold, allowing you to take down a pretty nice pot.
So when do you raise first before the flop in Omaha? That’s easy. You do it when you want to put more money in the pot. That’s it.
You do it when you’ve got a big hand, such as A-A-J-10 double suited, or you do it in late position when you’ve got a better chance of acting last.
When you’re raising at an Omaha table before the flop, ask yourself if you’re ready to play a big pot with the hand you’ve got. That’s what you’re starting by making the pot bigger in a pot-limit game.
The only time you want to do that is if you’re in late position or when you’ve got a huge hand. Either way, you’ve got an advantage over other players at the table, and those are situations that make you money.
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