David ‘Raptor’ Benefield explains why he’s giving Hold’em a rest in favour of the more exploitable and profitable pot-limit Omaha games
Texas Hold’em is a great game, but don’t expect to see me spending a whole lot of time playing it. Here’s the problem: thanks to sites like CardRunners you guys have gotten too good. It’s become increasingly difficult to find attractive games with bad players and significant equity. So I’ve pretty much moved on to the greener pastures of pot-limit Omaha.
Ironically, I’m better at no-limit Hold’em than I am at PLO, but I make more money at the four-card game. While most Hold’em players have repaired their leaks, the same cannot be said for those at the Omaha tables. Put simply, most people playing Omaha make more mistakes than I do. Their shortcomings create my opportunities.
Costly mistakes
As I know all too well, making the transition from Hold’em to Omaha can be disorienting and costly. For example, if you have 6?-8? in Hold’em, and flop middle pair as well as a flush draw, you’re not in bad shape. In PLO, it can be a disaster. So many times, with that kind of hand, you’ll be up against a guy who’s got you crushed.
Fortunately for me, this reality of the game takes a while to process. So people keep approaching Omaha as if they’re still playing Hold’em. They press too many marginal hands and continuation-bet with gutshots. Then they get check-raised and don’t know what to do. In Hold’em it’s almost always correct to push. Not so in pot-limit Omaha. If you don’t have the nut flush draw with two pair, or something along those lines, you should probably avoid going all-in.
But people keep doing it, and that helps to make the game incredibly volatile. Every month or so, a new name pops up who’s recently won a million or two. Usually it’s a person that no one has heard of – it doesn’t surprise me. After all, it’s not so difficult to run up 30 or 40 buy-ins by playing aggressively and getting a little lucky. The trick, of course, is to do it consistently.
You coin-flip a lot in PLO and that helps to give the game its high variance – three to four times that of no-limit Hold’em. It’s such a bigger game, and so much more of a gambling game, that the ‘live’ guys love it – and, thanks to them, so do I.
Orange juice
I just got back from Miami Beach where I met up with the other partners from CardRunners. We had a blast, went out on the town in South Beach, ate good meals and hit a few of the clubs. One of the days we had a beach volleyball match. Since we’re all poker players and have a bit of gamble in us, everybody in the match put up $ 200 – just enough to make the game interesting.
As you probably know, everything is more fun when you bet on it. I try not to get too crazy with the prop bets, but I like to goof around for a few bucks, making over/under bets on dinner tabs and wagering on how long it’ll take to get to [seafood restaurant] Naked Fish from the Rio during WSOP dinner breaks.
Sometimes, though, the amounts get up there. I got involved in a wager with my friend Tom Dwan that had him taking on an international master at chess. He lost and I won $ 50,000. More recently, my buddy Joe Commisso and I were arguing about a scene from the movie Grifters. It’s the scene in which Cher talks about beating a guy with a bag of oranges. The gist of it is that you can hit him with the oranges, cause internal damages, but leave no visible marks on the skin. Joe, who won his first bracelet at the 2008 Series, didn’t believe it. So we discussed making a $ 10,000 bet in which I’d have 10 shots to hit Joe with an orange stuffed inside a sock. If I left a mark, he’d win $ 10,000.
It almost would have been worth it for the opportunity to hit my friend ten times with an orange, but in the end we decided against it. Nobody, not even a semi-sick gambler, should want to risk breaking a rib or blackening an eye for $ 10,000.
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