Aces in Omaha

One of the most pleasing sights in poker is a pocket pair of aces in a hold'em game. Except for the incredibly rare situation in which someone else has the other two aces, you are a big favorite against an opponent regardless of what he holds. Typically, your preflop-to-finish advantage will be about 4-to-1, and if he has an ace in his hand, far better than that.

Most Omaha players learn hold'em first, so they start out with a lofty placement of value on two aces. Many bad mistakes are made by new Omaha players in their treatment of hands containing two aces. This applies to both limit Omaha eight-or-better and pot-limit Omaha high. And we must keep in mind that aces are a far more frequent holding in the four-card game than in hold'em, where you have to catch perfect-perfect to get them.

For Omaha eight-or-better, I do not wish to go into any great detail. Suffice it to say that any hand that does not have the flexibility to win either direction is not a premium hand for high-low split. One pair is not a strong holding with which to try to win an Omaha pot; it is obviously not so great to have one pair with which you are trying to win half a pot. So, without an A-2 combination, or to a lesser extent an A-3, you do not have anything to get excited about with your pair of bullets.

Let us now discuss aces in pot-limit Omaha high, my favorite poker form. They are just like any other Omaha hand, in that the cards that go with your best two-card combination greatly affect the value of the hand. You can have two aces in a hand like A A J 3u, or like the incomparably better A A 9 8. These are much different hands, and should be played a lot differently.

In my experience in pot-limit Omaha, in 40 percent to 50 percent of the pots that are raised in an ordinary game, the raiser will have two aces as part of the hand. Rightly or wrongly, if you do not raise a pot, people tend to think you do not have a pair of aces, and if you do raise, the first hand they put you on is aces. So, when I tell you that I seldom raise with the junky aces and usually raise with the good aces, realize that I am not only playing the hand according to its value, but also giving it a certain amount of deception. Let me give you a couple of examples:

In an unraised pot, you have J-J as part of your hand, and the flop comes A-J-8, perhaps with a two-flush. You have second set, and someone acts as if he has something good by raising on the flop. What should you do? You see that there are many possible strong drawing hands out there, plus the bottom card on the board is fairly high in rank. Let us further suppose that the opponent is someone like myself, who often plays his big draws as if he has top set. You see that to be up against the only hand you fear, the opponent would have failed to raise with two aces. It is hard for anyone to dog his three jacks (and bad poker in most cases, as well). He is going to put all of his money into the pot and hope that he's not up against three aces. So, when you do manage to flop a set of aces in an unraised pot, the preflop deception helps you to get paid off.

The flip side of the preceding situation is when you have raised a pot with your aces and managed to flop something good with the accompanying cards. Perhaps you are fortunate enough to catch a great flop to that A A 9 8 hand we discussed earlier, and the board comes 7 6 5, giving you the nut straight and the nut-flush draw. You may get up against a set (who will likely play you for the aces and perhaps the flush draw because of your preflop raise), but not a superior made hand, as well. He will be most unhappy to find out that he is the one on a draw. Or, you may get up against "the nuts with no backup," as they say in Britain (a country that understands how to properly play Omaha), and have a total freeroll at his whole stack. A hand with two aces that has two good sidecards can actually benefit from the fact that opponents give you credit for two aces as the result of a preflop raise or reraise by causing them to misjudge the reason you are contending after the flop.

Of course, on balance, we do not want to tell the opponent that we may well have two aces if there is a lot of money left in our stack after the flop. The ideal situation for aces preflop is to be all in against one opponent. Even so, few people are aware that the math in favor of the weaker type of two-aces hand is scarcely anything to get excited about. For example, our crummy-ace hand of A A J 3, when matched against a bunch of connectors like J 10 9 8, or even 10 9 7 5, will win less than 55 percent of the time. (I did not run this out with Mike Caro's Poker Probe or a similar program that uses simulations, but I am quite confident that what I am telling you is accurate. In fact, it would not surprise me if a reader with the proper software ran this out a million times, he would find that those crummy aces were not even a favorite in these two situations!)

Since crummy aces are not that great even in their element of all in against one opponent, you can imagine that they are at a disadvantage against multiple opponents with a reasonable amount of money to bet after the flop. So, the best advice I can give you concerning the play of aces in pot-limit Omaha is to treat aces with crummy sidecards as the mediocre hand that it is. Treat that pair as you would any other pair that wants to see the flop cheaply and flop a set. Omaha is a four-card game even when you hold two aces.