Customer Reviews

Pot-Limit Omaha Poker

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Jeff Hwang has written the most helpful and insightful book on Omaha poker available. I also purchased Bob Ciaffone's 'Omaha Poker' and 'Pot Limit & No Limit Poker' by Reuben and Ciaffone. All three of these cash-game oriented books are valuable additions to a well rounded poker players library. However, Hwang is far more systematic in his presentation of key ideas, his prose is lucid, and his insights are gold. Those insights have provided 90% of improvement in my game that I have gained by reading these books.

After a brief intro, Hwang jumps right into his core thesis: you only want to get involved with hands that have big play potential. Big play hands have structures that allow you to bet strongly when flopping the nuts with redraws to even better nuts by the time you reach the river. He then goes on to map out all of the types of big play potential hand structures in a clear and systematic way. While the big play notion, and the importance of counting nut outs have been made before, the systematic and lucid presentation in 'Pot-Limit Omaha Poker' really make it shine.

If you are hold em player who is branching out into Omaha you should buy this book. If you don't, please invite me to your game.

I just got this book a week ago and have spent more than ten hours reading it and taking notes. I'm blown away. I actually was a little afraid to come on here and tell others how good the book is, but I realized there was no need to worry. Only the most studious and stable players will get a lot out of this book. Most players, even the ones who read this book, will continue to play naked ace-deuces in pot-limit Omaha hi/lo, and call off their entire stacks with only a low draw. So I don't care if a few people get educated by studying the game of Omaha through this book. For every one person who really studies this book and improves, there will be another hundred who couldn't care less. I suppose all poker games are like that, especially in online play.
I should mention that I bought this book, thinking it would cover Omaha high only. But the pot-limit Omaha/8 discussion, which only covers about 50 pages of the book, is worth the purchase price in and of itself. The Omaha high discussion in this book has already been seen, for the most part, in previous books.

I am a semi-pro player out of Florida and I will confess that Omaha has been my weakest game since I began playing. I never really got the gist of it. But I bought this book about 2 weeks ago and I must say, the ideas, topics and overall presentation of this book were so simply presented, that I will swear that my game has improved significantly.

Applying these strategies is a bit tricky, however the excercises and out counting regognition teqchniques used in this book are what will improve your game. If you study these guidlines your game will improve dramatically.

This book shows you betting patterens, real situation semi-bluffing techniques and a ton more. If you are really interested in playing Omaha read this book.

P.S. There are additionally chapters covering Omaha hi/lo that are staggeringly informative.

Hope this helps any aspiring pros, or anyone wanting to improve their game.

I have read several poker books on Omaha; Ken Warren's, Bob Ciaffone's, T.J. Cloutier's, and recently Rolf Slotboom's book. None of them helped me with Omaha the way this book did. Yes, there are a few typographical errors, but it certainly should not stop you from buying this book if you want to play Omaha. It's not just Omaha High, but the High Low section is excellent.

Jeff is systematic in his approach to each starting hand. The understanding of which drawing hands get you into trouble (i.e. your outs are not the nut outs)and which ones can turn into monsters is something the other books left out. Warren's book is very elementary but a good starting tool. Ciaffone's book is very thin, good information, but no examples. Rolf's book has an interesting style for short stack play, but once you double up his big stack play is not as clear as Jeff's. After I read T.J.'s book I thought no one should play a hand unless it was the Broadway wrap. This book is the only Omaha book you should buy.

This book is mainly for cash game play. There are a few examples from tournaments, but this book concentrates on the cash game arena. This book is a tremendous value for the price they charge.

PLO seems to be the game of choice among big cash-game players, and it is growing in popularity among lower-limit players too. I was a casual PLO player going into the reading of this text, having spent most of my time playing No Limit Hold 'Em.

In my opinion, no one should venture into PLO without having studied the nuances of the game first. With so much action post-flop, you can go broke fast if you don't know what you're up against. Mr. Hwang's book is a great place to start.

The first third of the book is dedicated to PLO, then there's a brief section on miscellaneous topics like bankroll management, maintaining emotional discipline, etc. and then the second half of the book goes into Limit Omaha Hi/Lo Split and Pot Limit Omaha Hi/Lo Split.

I read this book just for PLO for now, and I am a better player for it. I still make some donkey plays and go on tilt (which is more prevalent in PLO than in Hold 'Em, because everyone is speculating in this game and people hit bigger hands on the turn and river almost every hand), but that's my issue. Understanding run-down, one-gap and two-gap straight wraps; the percentages in draw vs. draw situations, why one shouldn't necessarily get excited by flopping the nuts, etc. has helped me make regular profits in online small-stakes PLO games. I played as I read my way through the first two sections of the book (I can't recommend doing this highly enough) and I felt so much more confident about the choices I was making.

Hwang includes enough math to open your eyes, but not so much that you feel overwhelmed. His book is both as reader-friendly and instructive as Dan Harrington's NLHE books.

Get the book if you want a solid PLO foundation. Hwang also recommends several other PLO books out there (especially Ciaffone's), so you'll know where to go from here. See you at the tables!

This book was very helpful for me and I highly recommend it, especially to relatively new Omaha players. The best part was Hwang's analysis of the different types of starting hands and their structures (which is more complex than you may expect). He also does a good job of explaning the thought process that you should go through on the flop when you are deciding whether or not to continue with your hand. He favors a solid, tight/aggressive style which I agree with.

However I did have a few issues with the book:

1. Not enough postflop play. I know he is saving most of his advanced plays for the next book, but still, there wasn't enough discussion of postflop play for me. The turn is an especially tricky street, and he doesn't discuss turn play nearly as much as I had hoped. For instance, what if you have a solid 13-card draw on the flop, but you don't hit it on the turn? For the most part he says to keep betting it on the turn, but surely there are times when you should slow down, or even fold your hand on the turn. So, I found his discussion of turn play to be very short and overly simplified - he basically just says that if you liked your hand on the flop, then you should keep betting it on the turn, no matter what the turn card actually is.

And I don't think there was a single hand in the book where he advocated going for a check/raise. This seems strange to me because the check/raise can be a very powerful move, even in PLO.

There wasn't enough discussion on reading your opponents based on their betting habits, and he made no mention at all of using deception and varying your play in order to make yourself harder to read. This is another area that he will probably cover in the next book.

2. The book stretches itself a bit too thin. He covers pot-limit omaha high, limit omaha 8/b, and pot-limit omaha 8/b. I would have liked to see the entire book devoted to PLO so that he could cover it in more detail. Omaha high/low could have been covered in a separate book.

Having said that, it's a very good book and well worth the price. I just hope that volume 2 covers some of the "trickier" aspects of Omaha that were not discussed here.

Echoing the sentiments of another reviewer -- I would not want to be playing Omaha against anyone who has this book in his or her arsenal. This is currently THE book on Omaha, but as was mentioned before, you will only get out of it what you put into it. The amount of detail contained within will probably be lost on most players, especially the uber-in-depth look at the straight draws (holy cow!). This book has improved my game immensely, and will most likely do the same for you.

Mr. Huang does what is no easy task in this book. He boils down the fundamental strategies of winning PLO play into a systematic and understandable text that will vastly elevate the game of most novice and intermediate PLO players. I have often had significant trouble explaining to friends some rules to follow to avoid the common mistakes of beginning PLO players. Many times while reading this book I found myself thinking "Yes! That's what I was trying to say!" I think that Jeff's series (as I certainly hope there are more to come) may be to PLO what Harrington's series are to tournament and cash game Texas Hold Em. A wonderful and desperately needed addition to the poker player's literary cache.

Ciaffone's Omaha Poker is a very thin book, but in the content that is there, it is very useful. It is low on examples, or at least in-depth examples. Sklansky's stuff repeats a lot of the standard theory of poker, which is good if you haven't read all of his other books.

This book takes the info from both styles, and combines them, so you get the theory of pot odds and the like, mixed with strategy, and then example hands with discussions.

I found the most useful strategy part the limit omaha hi/lo section, as I had read the least on that prior to this book.

As many reviews mention, there are errors in the examples in the book, but you would have to be a moron not to realize they are errors. They have offered corrections for these for free online, and usually you can look at them and know what they intended regardless of the error.

Having been a relatively experienced semi-pro Hold'em player, I decided I needed to branch out and learn some other forms of poker; one of my good friends and mentors told me Omaha was the best form of poker for making money right now, so I decided to give it a shot. With that in mind, the comments on this text come from a relative newcomer to the game of PLO (I started playing it around 2 months ago).

Simply put, the strategy outlined in this book is easy to understand and will have you getting the best of it at low stakes (1-2 and 2-5) PLO games within a short time. Broad concepts are broken down understandably, and the synthesis of starting hand requirements to their structural components (full rundown, rundown with gap at bottom, rundown with gap in middle, etc.), with the flop opportunities available for each structure, make the large amount of information easy to process. A lot of the information presented (such as the weaknesses of having a gap at the top of your rundown) would probably take a long time of playing experience to figure out on your own.

If there are any downsides to the text (and I didn't personally see it as a downside), its that you will most likely end up playing tighter than anyone else at the tables you are at; at least, I have since finishing it. That isn't to say that you will play passively; once involved in a hand, Hwang generally advocates for very aggressive play. It's simply that the text will make you realize how many playable looking hands are truly trash that will only leave you vulnerable if you connect, and you will end up throwing away a lot of hands that other players would happily play.

Overall, a great text for this novice and one I would recommend to anyone looking to enter the world of Omaha poker.