Omaha Poker Rooms

Introduced to the Las Vegas casino circuit around 1982, Omaha, also known as “Omaha Hold’em” was a essentially a version of Texas Hold’em with a more complicated arrangement for constructing scoring hands. It was an instant success with Pro poker players, who enjoyed the more complex strategic options it provided, and for a while was the most popular pro poker game in Europe.

 Although now not as popular as Texas Hold’em, Omaha still ranks as the second most popular form of online poker, almost all online poker rooms offer Omaha tables, and many live events and online tournaments have Omaha side-events.

The basic game mechanics of Omaha are almost identical to Texas Hold’em, with the following exceptions: In Omaha each player is dealt four cards instead of just two in Texas Hold’em, also at the showdown, a players best five-card hand must be made up from 3 community cards and 2 private cards.

Game play in a typical Omaha game is usually slower than in the equivalent Texas Hold’em game, although the action can be far larger. It’s best to stay patient and wait for a strong hand, then bet aggressively.

Good players can win more money playing Omaha, with less variation, which is one reason it has remained a stable fixture of most online poker rooms. There are also less experienced Omaha players around, although this is slowly changing.

There are several popular variations of Omaha, of which the most common is Omaha Hi-Lo. In this variation, at the showdown each player makes both his highest possible 5-card hand, and also his lowest possible 5-card hand, normally eight-high or lower to qualify. The pot is then split between the players with the highest and lowest hands, although of course these can both be the same person.

Pot-Limit Omaha is most popular in Europe, where it is normally played high-only, although it can be played Hi-Low. It is sometimes played with more than 4 hole cards, with 6 card Omaha being the most common variation.