I Stared Down the Devil....... and I Lost

There's a card game where you get 4 cards dealt to you instead of two. Surely this must be twice the fun of hold'em then?

After all if you have 4 cards to choose from then you can make so many more hands and it must be easier to win? Right? Wrong?

Well the game is Omaha and answer is Omaha is the DEVIL....!!

I have been playing this maniacs game for a short while now on the side and began okay. I started at PLO2 and beat that. I had bouts of variance at PLO5 and PLO10 but just about beat them too. I then moved up to PLO25 and started to read books and learn and came face to face with big variance.

This variance was visibly far greater than in hold'em even in my small sample of hands. The problem with Omaha is that your opponent is very rarely drawing dead. So they often get there and you take a bad beat.

In holdem if you are 80/20 to win 3 times in a row and you lose all 3 that is pretty bad running. However in Omaha you might be 65/35 or 60/40 when the money goes in and suddenly lose 20 of these in a row in very quick succession.

Even though the game is pot limit the money often gets all in with the numerous draws that exist.

I thought it might be interesting to look up the PTR pages of regulars that play this game and the results were very interesting.

What I found was that consistent winners in one league were suddenly big losers in another league and there was no decipherable pattern. The luck and variance factors seem to contribute a bit more than I like in this game.

In this example you can see the difference in stats of each league this player plays in:

It's just totally random.

In No Limit Hold'em winners are usually winners across each level they play and losers are the same.

Here is an another example:

This is just 2 examples but I saw this time and time again over many accounts.

What this tells me is that it is very hard to figure out who the really good players are and who the really bad ones are as there is often very little between them due to the gambling nature of Omaha.

So does this mean that I insta quit this game as it is unlikely that I can win consistently? Well you would think so, huh.... but... and here comes the but..... I have a small problem:

I F***ing Love this game and I am addicted

I am going to play once or twice a month only and not go above PLO25 but I am determined to find a way to beat the DEVIL. I could lose this battle big style but I have to give it a go.

If you want to know how sick this game can get then watch this short clip and take note of the outs and equity percentages that each player has.