Playing in the Early and Middle Stages of an Omaha Tournament

If you have played in any kind of a poker tournament before, then you basically already know what strategy you are going to use. Many of the experts will tell you that you are most successful in any form of poker when you play to your personality. This means that if you are generally a cautious person, then you should spend most of the tournament playing more conservatively than the table. Likewise, if you are a less cautious person, then you should be looser and more aggressive. While people have to shift their styles during the tournament if they hope to win, at the same time most players usually have a style that predominates in the way they play.

For pot limit Omaha (the most popular form of Omaha in the world), what you are going to find is that a lot of people will get eliminated very early. The learning curve is steeper in Omaha than in Hold 'Em and therefore the end result is that most tournaments will have a lot of new players that will get themselves knocked out early. This means that very early in the tournament, you should not be worried about stealing blinds that much and focus on getting good hands that you can use to milk the chip stacks of those newbie players. Of course, if you find that your tables are mostly knowledgeable players rather than new players, you might have to shift strategies and try to steal pots every now and then.

Your goal against primarily green tables in terms of player experience should be to milk pots with good hands; in other words, win fewer, but larger pots. Against experienced people, the opposite applies; win more, but smaller pots.

When you get to the middle stages of the tournament, much of what you do in Omaha will be dictated by what the table conditions and your chip stack are like. If your chip stack dawdles below 10 times the big blind, then you need to make a move very quickly. If you are pretty healthy on the other hand, you can try and push some of the smaller stacks around. Big stack and small stack poker are both ideas universal to many different poker variants and Omaha happens to be one of those variants. Try to put your smaller stack opponents to decisions for all of their chips whenever possible and put pressure on them to cause them to make mistakes. As you get towards the later parts of tournaments and players start to worry about making it to the money, you want to play extremely aggressive and take advantage of the new weak way in which many people play around that time.