This is supposed to be a weird sort of variant, so there is no sense in criticizing the format, I'm just looking for a strategy to improve my chances:

The game is Hold'em with 4 hole cards (we call it Drunk Omaha).
Any, none or all of the cards may be used, making the best 5 of 9 cards.
The game has a low buy-in, with unlimited re-buys through level 8 (2 hours) and an add-on before level 9. It is designed to be more fun than serious, but with that kind of cash flying around, I'd like a shot at winning.

Starting chips are 10K, and each re-buy (when below 5K) is 10K and the add-on is 10K too.

Blinds start at 100/200 and level 8 is 2000/4000 and 9 is 2500/5000.

The game will probably end at level 16, 10k/20k blinds.


I guess I'm looking for advise on strategy going into the game, to prevent re-buying and hopefully winning I predict most will be playing loose & aggressive.

Tell the host you want to play with wild cards and then fold everything except 5 of a kind.

I suppose that draws should be played very aggressively, but you're in a crazy rebuy situation anyway. Tight and aggressive would seem to be the way to go. It works pretty well for all forms

I'm assuming that the game is no limit (not limit) and that you are playing with a full table of 9 or 10 players.

Kind of a silly game, but should still be able to make it profitable. Still - it will be very hard to determine what the nuts are compared to Omaha, so I think you need to overall play cautious - tight/aggressive. I think you'll need at least a high straight to put any appreciable chips in the pot.

You'll have to mix it up in the re-buy period and be ready to shove with good flushes and full houses. However, try to have very high flushes and watch out for better full houses - you are likely to run into several of those. Obviously, always be aware of which cards are shared and which are in your hand when determining how good your hand is. The more that are in your hand the better.

After the re-buy period you may have to tighten up and play less hands and be much more aware of your position.

Not sure if this is 100% correct, but it's how I'd approach it with a bunch of drunks playing.

- Spike

I sort of doubt it, unless you're playing with 5 people or no one at the full table rebuys or adds on.... and they're as LAG as you say.

If I read this correctly, once you drop below 5k, you can buy back up to almost 15k. How many players and how many rebuys/addons do you estimate?

Plan on 2 buy-ups and 1 add-on. Whether you go more depends on the other stacks, but I doubt the 10-14k will be worth it after two buy-ups.

I wouldn't play for anything but a big full house or better here. Any board pair, flush is no goot and your full house isn't going to let you stand too many raises.

Starting hands: Big pair with two straight flush connectors, big and little pairs, 4 connected double-suited cards (pretty much straight flush draws only), big trips with straight flush kicker. You might passively play two smaller pair if one combines for a SFD.

Be aggressive with your OESFD and big house draws, wait for the turn for anything else.

If you can use ANY of the four cards in your hand, then paired boards don't mean a thing - sounds like a complete crapshoot to me. If you don't have at least a good straight with a nut flush draw on the flop, then you should be folding. Remember with this format, you have 4 hearts, one heart on flop = flush.
Alternatively, play 3 rounds at your local casino playing the entire hand blind (especially if UTG or button).

I predict 14-16 players, 500K in total chips, so the 10k/20k level is probably when it will end, maybe a level sooner.

Thanks for the advise. Keep it coming, the game is next Friday Feb 1st.
I just hope none of the other players read this

One thing to keep in mind is that unlike in hold em, it will be very unusual to hold the nuts, the only time you can know you have the nuts is if you have a straight flush involving the highest card on the board.

Full houses will be more common and I would expect to see one the vast majority of the time you get a paired board. To get one without a paired board somebody would need to be dealt trips or two pair, so they won't be too terribly common without a paired board, but you will run into some and they'll be very well disguised. Unless people get weeded out pf or early in a hand so that you get to the later streets heads up or short handed, most boards with two of a suit (i.e. every board) are likely to make somebody a flush.

Everybody will always have a ton of draws, so bluffing is likely to be a fools game. Many hands that have to fold in Omaha can now stay in. Bet early and often for value and recognize that anything under a large flush is a pretty marginal hand.

Pre-Flop A-x-x suited is big (A-x-x-x suited obviously even more so), two pair hands and trip hands are huge, and I'm not sure about connectors, but possibly hands where you are three or four connected or semi-connected and suited are good.

I'd love to try this game in a micro-stakes NL cash version.

Edit: in a cash game, you could do very well simply playing a bit tighter than your opponents (and this game is designed to make your opponents play loose as Rosie O'Donnell's britches on a one legged stick bug), and only playing near nut flushes/draws or better. In a tourney you'd expect so many suck outs in this game, that the tourney ending bust-outs could make this a variance nightmare.

2nd Edit: See DarkMangus's post for his point on flushes below. On your A-x-x hands, its going to help a lot if one of your x's is a very high card.

wow this sounds like a lot of fun. in omaha most hands run close in value preflop. my guess is that this sort of holdemizes omaha and makes some hands pretty big favorites preflop.

if you're deep the play is pretty obvious. you need the absolute nuts. if you have the ace flush in a four handed pot on a board like 6789x all one suit consider not putting too much action in.

however when you get down to that territory where you are shoving or folding preflop this can get interesting.

I did a few rough calculations. These might be off slightly since I didn't take into account certain situations, but I think they're close enough given that you'll be the only one even thinking about these numbers

On the river, if the board is not paired, there's roughly a 5% chance that a random hand can make a full house or quads. If it's 10 handed I think you can expect that at least one will have a boat somewhere in the vicinity of 40% or so. (You can't just multipy the 5% by 10 because the hands are not independent and this overcounts). I would guess that an A high flush on an unpaired board has around the same value as a medium two pair in hold'em.

Also, remember that an A high flush is not the nut flush. You might have AK on a 963QK board, but someone with Axx has you beat.

If the board contains one pair by the river, there is roughly a 17% chance that one random hand can make a boat or quads. At a 10 handed table, I think you can assume that a straight or flush is going to be almost worthless here, and that low boats are basically bluff-catchers.

This game is going to basically be a contest of who can make the biggest boat, with flushes or straights occaisionally catching bluffs. I would stick almost entirely to high cards and big pairs, with suited aces being a bonus. Any time you get trips preflop should obviously be played pretty strong, but you're going to have to throw them away a lot if you don't hit quads and a bunch of high cards come. 4 to a straight flush would be pretty nice, as you have two outs to complete that, but 3 to a straight flush is probably only playable if they are high cards and thus also have some potential to make a good boat. Any hand with a bunch of low cards is probably one you shouldn't play unless you can get in cheap to see if you can flop a straight, boat, or draw to a good boat. Even then you may frequently lose, or have to fold if the board turns bad, so I'd probably just toss these hands away anyway.

This probably wouldn't apply in the kind of game you're playing with a bunch of drunks, but against people playing reasonably, you can definitely do a bit of bluffing. They'll be just as scared of you having the nuts as you of them. I find that a lot of sane players tend to tighten up way too much when they play a game like this, and manage to convince themselves that someone has quads or top boat every hand.

Now THAT was what I needed to hear! Thanks for the advise, it makes a bunch of sense and I never thought of it that way. That will certainly help.

BTW, probably only 2 or 3 of the players drink, and none of them in excess. I'd not be concerned about playing vs. drunks, but more against players that are loose and looking to have a great time.

This tourney is tomorrow night, and it looks like we'll have a decent turnout. I brushed up on your advice. I'm sure it will be wild, I'll fill you in on anything noteworthy. Any last minute advise?

T-minus 20 minutes

Well, the night was truly a WILD time! Tournament Stats. I went out on the bubble

It went as predicted. Lots of Full Houses beating Flushes. When one-pair took down a pot it was made out to be a big deal. The Heads-Up match lasted about an hour and a half! One guy re-bought 7 or 8 times... then was first out after the re-buys ended. A lot of players were raving about how much fun it was and that we need to have another one soon. There was 430,000 in chips in play. 15 buy-ins, 25 re-buys, and 3 add-ons. The cash NLTH that followed was BIG. It lasted until 3 a.m. and had two full tables of 8.

Thanks for the advice. It helped, even though I failed to cash...



Congrats to Jeff for winning. He was LONG overdue... and had a horseshoe in his a$$ too!

Oh, I forgot to mention, the first bust out happened 2 minutes into the game, first hand, at my table, Ace high flush lost to Full house. They both made thier hand on the river, with NO pairs on the board