Daveopie, know exactly what you mean. I’ve played two way hands against several opponents thinking I’m dead only to see them turn over absolute garbage and I scoop. That’s a nice feeling.

BigBadBabar, no need to be gentle I’m no thinskinned yokel, just jam it out there. By the way what is Carpal/Tunnel ?

Redhot, I thought playing high hands as drawing hands was pretty well covered in Mastering Omaha/8 Poker. There is quite a bit about raising with high hands that have redraws as opposed to the nuts on the flop with no redraws.

AKQJT, please excuse my ignorance but would you explain A3BB and A3W to me.

Flamdrag, very impressive chart but I don’t have a clue what it is supposed to mean.

All the best.

carpal tunnel is post too much, so much that caused / typo

basically means u have a ton of posts. like me.

Quoted from the About the Forums forum frequently asked questions:Buzz

Well, it's the old format they used to use here:

http://propokertools.com/simulations/generic_syntax

but now they've changed it. B = Broadway card, anything ten through ace (or maybe king). W = wheel card, ace (or maybe deuce) through five.

I also just started playing O8, coming from a mid-stakes LHE background.

I also find preflop a little odd and confusing. Some of my thoughts in addition to the excellent ones posted here.

Raising preflop with a one way hand (all wheel cards or all broadways) seems really poor as far as I can tell. With an all wheel hand, it seems you want to encourage a multiway pot where you can get value from other poor lows. You're basically giving up on the high, but in a 5+ way pot it's probably OK. With an all broadway hand, hitting a board where there is no low is unlikely, but when you do your hand will generally be pretty strong (on say an all broadway-ish board).

Raising to isolate can make sense with marginal hands when the limper or first raiser has a weak and wide range. Some hands seem like they're going to play better HU (weak low with a big pair, I'm thinking something like A4QQ) as they have decent high potential against only one player and decent low potential against one player. But if you can expect the pot to be multiway, these weak high and low portions are unlikely to give you any of the pot.

I've played like one hour of O8 in the last 2 years and probably like less than 400 hands lifetime, so take these thoughts with a grain of salt.

You're not giving up on the high at all, but you're playing a speculative hand that requires other wheel cards and a little more luck to win high. You need a little more luck because you probably need to dodge bigger straights, [bigger] flushes, full houses, etc. But you don't always need the nuts to win in O8, even multiway, and a wheel always has at least mild scooping potential.

This is a little tricky, because a multiway pot makes it more likely your wheel will only take half or a quarter, but it also makes for a much bigger pot those times that your small low straights and flushes hold up. That's why wheel cards are still more of a "volume" hand that prefers action.

The rest of your post is accurate and shows that you already understand a great deal about this game.

Sorry, you're right, you're not completely giving up on the high with a wheel hand (well, with an unsuited wheel hand you're basically either making a reasonably strong wheel or a really poor high such as two pair that you're not expecting to take the high), but the highs that you do make are either going to be fairly strong (nut flushes or wheels) or poor enough that it doesn't make sense to try to iso-raise another player HU or 3-way.

Thanks. Another thing I learned recently is that suited Aces vastly strengthen your hand compared to their unsuited version. Unsuited two way hands (say A35J) don't have too many ways to make strong highs, but if the Ace is suited, you have way more "very strong high" hand potential. Coming from a LHE background where AKo and AKs are nearly interchangeable, this was a surprise to me.

I gave up on that book when I found some things stated as facts that I knew were wrong. I guess I will revisit it again.

capt, where do you play?

I think we play at the same places, but at different times.

Been playing the O8 game that's been running in the South Bay recently.