Omaha General Tournament Strategy

There are a number of different tournament strategies that you can employ in the game of Omaha, however when you take a look at all of them one thing you will notice is that they basically boil down to three different general categories: conservative, aggressive and super-aggressive.

Conservative: This is the initial type of tournament strategy that was used for Omaha and indeed the reason that it is still so popularly in use is that it tends to mimic the cash game strategies that many rocks use very closely. Your goal in a conservative strategy is to sit back, wait for hands and then collect on those hands whenever you can. You should only be playing about the top 10% of hands with this strategy in the early tournament and the rest of the time you should be closely examining your opponents to find the super-aggressive players. Super-aggressive players are the ones that you want to try to milk when you get the good hands, so the conservative strategy centers on you finding and exploiting these players. The conservative strategy calls for tight-aggressive play.

Aggressive: The aggressive strategy is one that acts as an intermediate between conservative and super-aggressive and your basic goal here is to keep your opponents guessing. You want to do this by alternating your play between loose-aggressive and tight-aggressive (try not to play passively if you can) depending on the table conditions and the hands that you are being dealt. Because the aggressive strategy is intended to be as much a strategy of misdirecting other players as it is a strategy of analyzing them, it is best used in the middle-to-late sections of tournaments when players are together at tables for long periods of time.

Super-aggressive: Starting requirements? We don't need no stinkin' starting requirements! This is the mantra of the super-aggressive player and indeed in Hold 'Em you probably already know quite a few super-aggressive players. Phil Ivey and Gus Hansen have made super-aggressive play quite popular around the world and indeed in Omaha super-aggressive players can be extremely scary because of the larger number of cards that they have to try and bluff people out of pots. Super-aggressive players will play around 3-4 hands during each round of a table and while it can be a very good strategy for collecting chips early, it is also a strategy that requires a lot of energy to maintain.