Blockers on a flush draw

Pot Limit Omaha / Marcus Bateman / 26 April 2010 / Leave a Comment

One of the most important concepts to get your head around when learning Omaha is the importance of your hand working in multiple directions. In other words, you want your hand to have the maximum possible number of ways to win the pot, and one of the key areas of this is in thinking about small suited cards.

In Omaha these cards can provide an odd mix of possibilities that can make playing hands much easier. As small flushes are rarely good hands to put in large amounts of money with, many beginning players tend to just avoid thinking about how these cards affect your hand, but they make a crucial difference in many situations in Omaha - one you ignore at your peril.

Say you raise a hand like KsKc5h4h and get one caller to a flop of Kh Ah 9s. You bet and get raised. Here you have a classic situation where the small cards in your hand should make a big difference in your decision making. In this situation the presence of these cards makes your life much easier, as they both probably either give you possibilities, or take away your opponent's outs.

If your opponent has top set, then your small flush draw gives you a large number of outs to the flush. If your opponent has the other likely raising hand - the nut flush draw and/or straight wrap - then your small hearts give you 'blockers' against their flush draw. The term 'blockers' simply refers to the fact that you know you can discount those hearts from the deck already, thus reducing your opponent's number of outs if they are drawing to those cards, and in this situation making a marked difference in your equity if your opponent is drawing.

In this example, the presence of small suited cards makes a huge difference in deciding how to react to your opponent's bet, and makes both your life - and the chances of winning the hand - much easier. Omaha is a game where small changes in equity very quickly add up, and identifying and reacting to situations such as the one outlined here is crucial to long term success.

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