While PLO tournaments are not nearly as popular today as no-limit hold’em tournaments are, the increasing popularity of PLO cash games has led to an increase in interest in PLO tourneys. Many major professional poker circuit tour stops are starting to include at least one PLO tournament in their series’ schedules. And, of course, one can always find PLO tournaments running around the clock on all of the major online poker sites like PokerStars, Party Poker, Full Tilt Poker, Bodog, Absolute Poker, and UltimateBet.
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Omaha is a fun, exciting game that often encourages a lot of action. Pot-limit Omaha (high only) tends to invite a lot of gambling as players pursue multiple draws and build large pots. Omaha high-low also often attracts players who like to play lots of hands, although in truth it really isn’t such a good strategy to play too loosely in Omaha high-low.

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As with other split pot games like Seven Card Stud High-Low, the object of a game like Omaha High-Low is to try to win both the high half of the pot and the low half of the pot, or to “scoop” the entire pot, as it is called. This means when you choose your starting hands for Omaha High-Low, you want to be choosing hands that actually have a good chance at winning both halves of the pot.  Hands like Ac-2c-3d-Kd are terrific in Omaha High-Low because of the potential such a hand has to scoop the entire pot.
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While the origins of Omaha, that increasingly popular variation on Texas hold’em, are somewhat vague, most date its debut as occurring somewhere around the early 1980s.Poker player and author Bob Ciaffone was one of the first to write about the game, with the first version of his book Omaha Poker appearing way back in 1984.  In his book, Ciaffone mentions how the game was first played at the Golden Nugget Casino in the spring of 1982.  Indeed, for a time the game was called “Nugget hold’em” as it wasn’t being offered in any other casinos.

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Omaha poker is a variation on Texas hold’em, in which each player is dealt four hole cards instead of two.  Like in hold’em, five community cards are dealt in the same flop (three cards), turn (one card), and river (one card) sequence, and the player who makes the best five-card poker hand using two of his or her hold cards and three community cards wins the pot.  Unlike in hold’em a player <i>must</i> use two hole cards to make the hand.  In other words, one cannot use just one hold card and four community cards, or “play the board” by using no hole cards and all five community cards, as one can do in Texas hold’em.
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