I've been concentrating on pot limit omaha hi recently. I have noticed that raising preflop has very little value. First, there is really no such thing as a dominating preflop hand in omaha. Also, raising preflop can give away info about your hand.

The upside to raising preflop, of course is to limit the field and build a pot.

I'd love to hear others' thoughts.

Philly

I'm not really much of an omaha player, so take this 'advice' sparingly.

I've recently been playing a bit of PLO SNG's and feel that raising when the blinds are low in proportion to stacks, it is absolutely essential to raise preflop if you play a hand, especially short-handed. You MUST be able to make a raise on the flop that will scare someone. I know the technically it shouldn't matter because of pot odds, but someone is much more likely to call a 1 dollar raise with horrible odds than 50 dollar raise with adequate pot odds. It's just the way it is. Also, knocking a couple people out of the pot ain't bad either.

This is one of the few scenerios where min-raising preflop in early position might be acceptable, because you aren't really trying to narrow down the field (though you just might ), you're trying to make the pot large enough so that you can narrow the field POST-Flop. As you know, omaha is more of a post-flop game, so setting yourself up for after the flop is ALWAYS a good thing!

Again, I'm not sure how this would translate to a full ring game, but it definetely works for short-handed games, where you need to steal pots to make much of a profit. The major difference I find in 6-max No limit hold'em, and 6-max PLO is that in hold'em, you steal pots before the flop a lot; in PLO, you steal after.

Just my 2 cents, but remember I'm not much of an omaha player. 8)

In PLO raising preflop is indeed a major advantage in a "proper" game where the stacks are deep (several hundred BBs) simply because if you have a hand that may become a winner, you will build the largest possible pot. In a no max buyin game with a preflop raise, the final pot is liable to be 2-3 times larger as a result of even a relatively small preflop raise.

In the max buyin games online, there is less of a reason to be doing so. You should raise the very premium holdings and limp with most everything else that's playable at Party, where the tiny max buyins are LUDICROUS and turn the game into a total crapshoot. Note that in these games (and a lesser extent in games with 100BBs as max buyin), hands that can make big flops (rather than come good on later streets) are increased in value, so raising with hands that have good "top heavy" potential (such as high picture pairs with wrap or flush cards on the side) is a fair idea. However, raising with low wraps etc (and other hands that are fair but require big implied odds to play profitably) is not advisable and limping is likely to be a better idea. In a "proper" non-max-buyin game, it's sometimes nice to put in raises with hands like 3567 suited in late position, simply to confuse the issue and make your game harder to read. This serves basically no purpose online.

However, that's not to say you shouldn't ever raise. Your point about dominating holdings was valid, but also kind of misses the point about raising in omaha. The reasons for doing so are a) to build a larger pot if your hand (which figures to be slightly stronger than average) catches a big flop and b) to remove limpers with marginal/poor hands thus increasing your chances of winning the pot outright and "promoting" the strength of the weaker features of your hand. Say you hold JT98ds in LP, and it's limped to you in 5 spots. Well, ignoring first of all the fact that you have a premium omaha "group one" hand, you should raise here because your wrap (which is the best wrap in omaha high) is a strong feature but ALSO because your flush features are NOT so strong; if you can remove weak hands with suited Qs, suited Ks etc preflop, and get to the flop 2 or 3 handed with the best position, your flush draws stand a much better chance of taking down the pot, if you catch them, especially via the back door as an "extra" to your (potential) big wrap draw.

Raising in omaha high is probably of less value than in most other flop games, but thats not to say you shouldn't do it.

Hope this helps

Monk
xxxxx

I was going to respond till I read Monk's post and realized that he said it all...

Great response Monk.