Customer Reviews

How Good is Your Pot-Limit Omaha?

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This book consists of fifty quizzes based on real poker hands. Each of these hands Rueben either participated in or watched happened. For example, Rueben will say he was dealt KKQJ double suited in late position and the book quizzes you a.) fold b.) call c.) min raise d.) pot raise. Next the flop comes T93 rainbow and three players check to you. What do you do, the book asks, a.) check b.) small bet or c.) big bet? And so on until the river. At the end of each hand, Rueben explains what he thinks the correct decision is at each step, his rationale and what really went down. It is up to you to think about whether you agree or disagree with his decision making processes. This book is not a "how to play pot limit omaha" manual for beginners.
For the most part, I disagreed with his style of play. I thought he was overly aggressive. But you have to remember he has made a lot of money playing poker and I have only made a little.

This book was quite instructive, but I found it annoying how many hands I thought should have been folded before the flop, and Stewart agreed with me. Once we get that question right, what is the point in going on with the analysis?

I also found that the games that these hands came from were much more aggressive than the low-limit games that you find online. I don't think that these strategies are completely appropriate for those games. But, if you are playing for thousands at the Grosvenor Victoria, this is your handbook.

Still, in the end, I would say that it improved my game. Plus, there is very little written on the subject of Pot-Limit Omaha, so you are going to end up reading all three of those books, anyway.

I enjoyed this book, but it will not give a beginner a very understandable picture of how to play the game. It is more like a series of anecdotes from the omaha metagame. There are lots of nuggets of situational wisdom, but a lot of the situations are situations that you should only run into when you are super-advanced and know how to selectively bluff your way to profit with bad hands and smart plays in ultra-loose games. Also, there are lots of stories about case cards hitting, miracle flops, and other things you will not run into that often. The grading system is strange and it takes a lot of flipping back and forth to follow the lessons.

A lot of examples...

Be careful when playing at this style...a lot aggressive poker!!!!

I had to post a review because these reviews are highly suspect. This is not an analytical book on proper PLO play. The author uses very little analysis of why he made certain plays, and sometimes his answer is simply that he was bored. Yet he still docks the reader points if you chose to fold! Many instances in the book his answers are factually wrong (ex. page 97 he states that Ah, 3h, 5d, 6d is 50% against Qh,Qc,2s,2c on a board of 9h,4c,2h, your choices are 40-60% in increments of 5%, while they answer i got on my PLO calculator was 46.46%. Are we rounding everything up?). The only redeeming quality for this book is to spot obvious errors in his play. A much better book on the subject is Secrets of Professional PLO.

wrong based on his plays. This is still a very good book to learn from but like the highest level books...holdem for advanced players , You MUST determine the intrinsic value of your hand for yourself as you will be the one playing in the casino. So read the quizes and take them for what they are worth. I labeled all the quizzes with a headline at the top after I wrote it. Some read MEANINGLESS ENTRY...nothing to be learned but this was maybe for 2 of the first 10. Take it for what it is worth...if you have the extra 13 bucks and want to improve your game I say go for it.

This book was short on technical information. It related how the author took long shots and got lucky

A terrific book for thinking through how to play a number of pot limit Omaha hands. It is not quite as well written as his later book on Pot Limit Hold Em, but I think Reuben is a better Omaha player than Hold Em player.

The simple fact is, there is no definitive book on Omaha, and maybe the subject is too complex for there to be one. I've learned from this book and the Cloutier/McEvoy book, but there are still gaps in my education that I am filling with experience, some of it not so pleasant.

The technique is to present a hand and ask you what you would do at various betting points in the hand. I sometimes disagree with his advice and do not play hands because I'm bored, as he does. So, we sometimes disagree about my score. The explanations of the correct strategy, which are often not the same as what Reuben did, himself, present many ideas we need to ponder to improve our games.

His phrasing is sometimes odd. I know, he's English and he can't help it. In one hand, he describes a player as making a straddle bet on the blinds. Huh? I trade options for a living and play straddles all day long. Whatever he is describing has no relationship to anything I call a straddle.

Still, a great book that would be even better with a nice, pretty English nanny translating it for me.