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The Omaha variant of poker has followed Texas Hold’em (with which it shares many similarities) into the limelight recently. Quite popular with online and tournament players, it can be found in many of the same poker rooms and boasts a fairly high amount of traffic with both skilled and new players.
There are a few games which tend to bear the generic “Omaha poker” name, so double-check before you get started. The traditional Omaha Poker is called “Omaha” or “Omaha High“, whereas a common variant is “Omaha Hi/Lo” or “Omaha 8” which combines standards poker hand rankings and lowball reverse rankings.
Omaha can be played no-limit or pot-limit — in fact, pot-limit Omaha (PLO) is an especially popular variant in Europe.
The traditional game is very similar to Texas Hold’em, except that players get four cards instead of two, though they can only use two of them to make their final hand — along with exactly three of the five community cards. Obviously, this makes certain hands less useful than they appear at first (e.g., if you are dealt three of a kind, you only really have a pair to work with!).
The Hi/Lo game is significantly different, in that you make two separate hands — one designed to win as it would in the traditional Omaha game above, and (because it is a lowball split game) one that will win by losing, so to speak. The pot is split between the player with the best hand and the player with the worst hand, and of course one player can take it all if the cards (and skills) allow.
This variant is also called Omaha/8 because you need an 8 or lower to even qualify for the low pot. Using Ace-to-5 ranking, Aces are low and no pairs (a “high card” or “garbage hand”) beats any pairs. Straights and flushes are ignored, so a 9-8-7-6-5 hand would simply be 9-high (and therefore would not even qualify for the low hand!).