Neighborhood Omadraw

We had game 1 in the neighborhood holiday series last week. To break the monotony of NL hold’em we tried an Omaha tournament. 10 brave souls came out for our first attempt and it went pretty well. The biggest change we will need to make in future games is to increase the length of the blind levels. We had them way too short to allow 10 players ample time to bullshit and catch up while playing a game with 4 hole cards. In what I guess to be a traditional Omaha style home game, we had very few preflop raises and it wasn’t uncommon to see at least 6 to the flop. Every now and then Andrew would min raise from the small blind when there were already 6 people in the pot. Hilarious.

I would say Surflexus and David are the most seasoned Omaha players among us. The rest of us at least know how to play and that helped to keep the game from coming to a grinding halt when we were sorting out the winning hand. That part will get interesting when we hit Hi-lo in a few weeks.

I think I played a pretty good game and don’t remember making any big mistakes. I made a good call for most of my stack on the river when Andrew pushed. I had 3 queens and put him on nothing but his pocket Aces. This gave me a nice chip stack to nurse so I folded for a while. I might have finally broken the suckout curse that Lee has had over me for the past year and made it to the final three after a good lay down against Matt. I had pocket Aces double suited and raised from the small blind enough to pretty much put Andy all in. Andy did call the raise and bet the rest of his chips. Matt, the chip leader, called my raise and the rest of Andy’s raise. I completed and we went to the flop. The flop came out King high and Matt bet out at it. After this bet, I really felt Matt had pocket Kings in his hand because Matt had called a preflop raise and slight reraise and wasn’t scared of the board at all. Since I didn’t connect with the flop at all, I laid down my pair and was waiting for him to knock out Andy. Unfortunately for both of us, Andy makes a straight and triples up. A few hands later, I again have pocket aces double suited. I raise and Andy pushes all in again. I make the call and he catches a flush on the river. Boooooooo. Now Andy’s the chip leader and I’m the short stack. Within a few hands, I catch a huge break when Andy knocks out Matt with a higher straight. Weeeeeee, I finally cash for more than my buyin. Heads up didn’t last too long but I was happy to win enough to almost break even for the week after failing at Kajagugu’s earlier.