Do you play more Omaha hands than Holdem ones
"You play more Omaha hands than Holdem ones ?"
This is true of bad players but not good ones. Winning Omaha causes much smaller bankroll fluctuations than Holdem because that marginal group of hands that exists in Holdem is largely absent from Omaha. If you only played AA, KK, QQ, AK, AQ and JJ you would not have huge fluctuations if only because you would fall into a coma between hands. This would be an awful way to play Holdem because you would be eaten alive by the blinds, but you sure wouldn’t fluctuate a lot. The playable Omaha hands are on par with the weakest of these Holdem hands, but there are more of the Omaha hands. You don’t go into a coma (well, maybe you get close to a coma), and more important, you don’t lose to the blinds. To beat Holdem you have to play many of second and third tier hands and situations. These mostly do not exist in Omaha. There are more good or better Omaha hands, but less playable Omaha hands in total.
Holdem is a game where inspired post-flop play will win a lot of pots without a showdown. Great players can play more hands profitably than average players because they can extract profit from inspired play. Opportunities for inspired play do exist in Omaha, let’s be clear about that, but they are fewer -- and very rare in "normal" loose games.
A sensible betting strategy can greatly increase your Omaha profit. For instance if on the river you have nut low and one pair, but when another nut low (who has no pair) bets, you raise and knock out a player who has you beat for high. There is a lot to Omaha post-flop play, but it pales in comparison to Holdem.
Outplaying opponents is a cornerstone of Texas Holdem. Showing down the winning hand is a cornerstone of Omaha Holdem.
Great players will often be able to identify exploitable situations where the actual cards they hold mean very little. This can happen on rare occasions in Omaha, but for the most part you simply can’t make silk out of a sow’s ear. Crappy Omaha hands are crappy Omaha hands. Before the flop, if your hand is one that normally does not have a solid positive expectation, you will seldom face situations where that hand is transformed into a positive expectation one. In contrast, KTo on the button in Holdem becomes a fine hand if everyone folds to you. Weak Omaha hands very seldom suddenly become similarly "fine."
Of course, in thinking about this topic, we need to compare apples to apples, not apples to oranges. In a very weak, loose, passive Omaha game you should play more hands than a Holdem game with tight, aggressive, excellent opponents. The idea here is to compare parallel/similar type games.
The principal point however is not about how many starting hands to play comparing one game to another. In itself, that is a nothingism. What you should consider is that Holdem is a game of situational post-flop play, while Omaha is a game of making showdownable, nut hands. Choose your starting hands accordingly.
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