Forumites,

It's a widely-held belief that $4/$8 limit hold'em is next to impossible to beat because of the deep gouge the rake takes out your profits. In fact there was a thread where several posters did some math and showed that even at tables where the opposition is so bad that every pot goes off 5 to 7 ways it's STILL hard to even win 1 or 2 big bets an hour.

Does the same apply to FLO8 at low levels like $4/$8? My first intuition is to say it's probably even WORSE because there are so many split pots where nobody wins except the house. But at the same time, the average pot is probably bigger due to people being willing to play more hands.

Thoughts?

It doesn't matter if pots are split. It doesn't matter if nobody "wins" in a single pot. Only the average size of the pot determines the amount of rake paid.

True, but in a high-only game you only sacrifice part of your winnings to the rake when you win the whole pot. Well, there are the occasional chops, sure, but there are a lot more chops in a hi/lo game than in a hi-only game.

Doesn't that mean you're losing part of your "winnings" to the rake more often in hi-lo?

I look at it like this: the house rake plus bonus 'rake' at Santa Fe (Vegas) takes approx $150 out of the game per hour. If players aren't putting at least that much $ into the game, then only the house is winning. I'll play for 2 hours and if there are no rebuys for at least racks, I'm out: impossible to beat the rake without being lucky, which I am not.

No. When you chop, you pay only half of the rake.

4/8 and 6/12 are very difficult to beat at most semi-competent tables that can rake $4 or higher per hand, especially at less than full-ring

Bad passive players make these games much more beatable

Lucky Chances in Colma, California, has a $4/$8 Omaha game with a drop of $4 + $2 (for the bad-beat jackpot and other promotions). Ten or twelve years ago this was a very loose game, with several drunken maniacs raising nearly every hand preflop and sometimes betting every street blind. But those players have moved on (or sobered up); now it's a tight, passive game.

In 2011 Lucky Chances also had a $10/$20 Omaha game that ran once a week for about 6 months, at which point it was replaced by a $6/$12 (with a 2/3 kill) Omaha game that ran once a week for about a year. I was a winning regular in those bigger Omaha games, and I sometimes played in the $4/$8 game for an hour while waiting for a seat in the bigger game. But I was on the fence about doing so. What was I making, $1 an hour? Maybe I'd be better off just reading a magazine while I waited.

I checked my records over a period of several years and found that my win rate in that $4/$8 Omaha game was around $5/hour—which surprised me; I thought it would be closer to breakeven. But my biggest wins often occurred when I played in the wee hours of the morning with players who were stuck multiple racks and tilting hard.

In other words, not all $4/$8 games are created equal. A tight, passive game is nearly impossible to beat, but a loose, aggressive game is definitely beatable.

My current view of the LC $4/$8 game is that no one is beating it consistently; everyone is just playing for the jackpot (especially when it doubles on Tuesdays) and other promotions: rack attacks, $100 for quads, $200 for straight flushes, and $300 for Aces full of Kings (all during specific hours) and $500 for royal flushes (all the time). So I no longer play there regularly, especially since they stopped spreading any LHE bigger than $3/$6.

I don't think a split-pot game is inherently harder to beat than a high-only game. There are sometimes split pots in LHE as well. You don't get as many scoops in Omaha as you might in a comparable LHE game, but you pick up a lot more half pots and quarter pots along the way. But winning "pots" is not the key to winning money at any form of poker. The key is making good decisions and continuing with a hand only when your equity justifies doing so.

That said, the biggest mistakes in low-limit Omaha are
1. Playing too many hands
2. Drawing dead without realizing it (when, for example, you flop bottom two pair and a mediocre flush draw, but you're up against one player with top set and another with the nut flush draw)
3. Drawing to win only half the pot when the size of the pot doesn't justify such a call

You want to avoid mistake #3 in a split-pot game. That means folding top set on the turn when it's a bet and raise to you (or even just a bet and several calls) if the low is already enabled and a straight or flush is possible, unless the pot is unusually large.

If a casino is offering the same high hand promotions for O8 that they do for Hold-em, this seems like a pretty profitable opportunity. $300 for Aces full of Kings?? I feel like someone at the table makes this hand every hour in Omaha.

$4/$8 by itself is tough to beat. Half kill or full kill and now we have a chance. I would never play any Omaha game unless there is a kill involved. ($4/$8 and lower I mean)


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This might be the best way to put it I've ever seen.

I don't really understand why good players would prefer to play with a kill. It just seems like a tax on winning to me.

I don't like kills either, but I think they're meaning that for a small game, anything that increases the size of the pot makes it easier to beat the rake.

Nick, I'm also curious as to why you'd prefer NOT to play with a kill.

Because the way the kill is structured is essentially a penalty on people who play well; i.e. playing hands that are likely to scoop. Whenever you scoop, you are forced to put much of what you won back into the pot. Actually winning money often then depends on being about to win the pots where you post a kill with a random hand.

Additionally, making more people put money in the pot preflop increases the variance in the game for everyone, especially since hands run so close in equity that multiple people are often forced (correctly) put a lot of money into the pot preflop. The preflop pots become very large relative to the post-flop betting, which I believe reduces the skill in the game overall (especially because the large preflop pot itself was essentially forced by pot odds, not by good or bad plays).

There is one case in which having a kill can make the game more profitable, and that is if people play too tight preflop, and are incorrectly folding their kill to a raise (or incorrectly folding their BB in kill pots). If you can consistently isolate field opponents with a lot of dead money in the pot, you can make a decent profit without waiting for premium hands.

Finally, having a kill creates a lot of incentive for angle shooting. Every live O8 game I play in at some point involves an argument over people forgetting to post the kill, moving out of the blinds in kill pots, leaving the game when they win a kill pot to dodge the kill, etc. O8 players are already miserable enough that you don't need to give them additional things bicker over.

The $4/$8 Omaha game at Lucky Chances does have a half kill; I should have mentioned that. Every Omaha cash game I've ever played in Northern California has a kill of some kind. Usually it's half, but for $6/$12 games played with $2 chips, it has to be either 1/3 ($8/$16) or 2/3 ($10/$20).

What I've read is that the kill generates action in a game that would otherwise lack it. This doesn't match my experience of loose, aggressive games, but it does make sense in theory. I guess I just take it for granted that the kill is a feature of this game.

I like big multiway pots. The more players putting in money blind preflop, the better. Yes, I will sometimes scoop a pot that barely qualifies for the kill and end up losing almost as much money on the next hand, playing a starting hand that I would have otherwise folded. That can be frustrating. But I will sometimes make a full house with four random cards that I wouldn't have played otherwise, and scoop another, even bigger pot. So I don't feel the kill penalizes me in any way.

It's a very specific hand; it comes up less often than you think. Someone at the table might make Aces full of something every hour—but that means it's Aces full of Kings once every 12 hours. And the promotion only applies during limited hours.

I guess need to have pocket AA and have the board come AKK? I'm guessing that's much less likely than having AK and a AAK board.

beating split pot game is much harder than a single winner..just my 2 cents but you dont wanna play any raked split pot game.

Explain

do you understand that if 30% of hands are chops, and those chops are still raked the exact same amount, then you are getting crushed by the rake even more in O8?

No, I don't understand. Please elaborate.

When you chop, you pay only half of the rake, like I explained earlier.

The rake should cut a chunk out of your preflop range, hands that are slightly +EV are folds. Everything else is standard, stays the same.

The only exception would be stealing blinds rake free from overfolders online.

So everything exactly the same as in any other poker game?

when you pay max rake in a hu holdem pot you win the pot and win money.
If you pay 1/2 the rake in multiple HU o8 pots you will probably get murdered.