Betfair Official Blog

Staying afloat.

On of the most profitable poker games I played in when I first started playing seriously was a £5/£10 limit Omaha hi/lo game run by a bookmaker I knew.

This game would usually run at weekends, and basically be full all the way from Friday afternoon, through until late Saturday night. I tried to enter the game midday on Saturday to take advantage of the people still chasing their losses from Friday night, and through employing a tight aggressive, only playing low hands, scoop orientated approach to the game, I would nearly always grind out a win.

My winning streak would nearly always come to an end as the game became short handed late on Saturday night. Suddenly the players who had been spewing money by playing far too many weak high hands, suddenly started to be making a profit; while I would be getting blinded away waiting for the hands that I thought it 'correct' to play. After a few weeks of this I started to realise that playing hi/lo games shorthanded requires a player to loosen up their hand standards considerably - there is no point constantly thinking about scooping when your opponents are picking up the blinds so easily.

In regular short handed hold'em or Omaha, you simply need to loosen up the range of hands you are raising with, but in hi/lo games you need to reappraise the concept with which your starting hands have been decided by. Where as in a full ring game, where you should nearly always be aiming to get involved with suited low cards/low cards with a big pair, playing short handed opens up the possibility of playing lots of completely high hands hard and fast - it is simply necessary to keep your head above the water as the blinds and antes are coming around so quickly.

Although you should always be looking for those spots to scoop (and the spots where you can fold to avoid being scooped), shorthanded play requires you to pick up those half pots on a much more regular basis than in full ring play - you will have to in order to survive. This means often getting involved with marginal high hands to try and take down as many pots as possible. Loosen up, start raising some marginal hands and get ready for the whirlwind that is short handed Omaha hi/lo.

• Poker
• Marcus Bateman