The great game features 4 cards dealt to each player, together with the 5 community cards you aim at making the best hand in poker following traditional hand rankings. Unlike in holdem, in all Omaha variants you need to use exactly 2 cards from your hand, and 3 from the board. Hence a hand with only one card of each suit could never make a flush.

The betting starts with a small blind, a big blind, and a big blind ante, action starts to the left of the big blind before the flop, and to the left of the button after the flop. There is a betting round at every street, preflop, flop, turn and river, for a total of 4 betting rounds. As the name suggests the betting is limited to the size of the pot. The minimum bet/raise is equal to a big blind, but also the size of the previous bet/raise on the current street. If you’re facing a bet you can always count the pot as following: 3 times the bet you’re facing + everything else already in the pot. In the Mixed Championship all tournaments will use a big blind ante for the PLO games. The ante will not count towards the pot preflop, but will be counted postflop.

• Ask the dealer to know the size of the pot whenever the action is on you, this can be very helpful when planning your strategy!

• Always be careful out of position, as position is so powerful in PLO you tend to play way more passively whenever you’re out of position.
• Blockers are more important in this game than in most others as you have so much information in your hands! Straights and flush blockers are especially useful, for example holding two queens on a KJT board, or the nut flush blocker on J74 all hearts.