Hello All

I notice there's been a fair bit of discussion lately from new and old players alike about the relative merits of starting hands in omaha games, and some of the points systems given for differentiating and rating these hands, based on their constituent features. The Hutchison point scoring system is one of the more well known of these.

Now, I think there's definitely some merit to these systems for new players, and even people like me who've been playing for a while, in terms of deciphering relative merits of some of the features in your omaha hand. However, I'm concerned that the Hutchison system in particular is badly flawed, even to the extent of teaching and reiterating blatantly INCORRECT information. Not just my opinion, ask any expert on the game who has a much greater knowledge than I (Michael Cappelatti, Stewart Reuben, Bob Ciaffone etc) and they'd tell you that some of the ratings that exist in this sytem are quite perplexing.

OK, so here's a quick summary (as I understand it) of the Hutchison scoring system:

Features in your hand are given points, count them up to give you 4-card hand a total score. Perfectly decent idea. The recommendation is that any hand over 15 points is good enough to play, anything over 20 should be raised (for a start, this is insanely tight for anyone other than a total omaha neophyte; following these rules you'll maybe be playing one hand in every 8-10, outside of the blinds). There's no weightings given to position (which is surely an essential element of the game that's just "glossed over"; relatively poor scoring hands can be played in late position for a limp, with some ease). The lack of raising is also pretty hopeless. You want to at least be raising SOME hands in this game, waiting for AA double-suited with straight features is not really going to cut it.

Most importantly, the system totally disregards the fact that some features just play "better" together, or in union. It considers your hand as separate features, rather than a 4-card unit, which is hopelessly wrong for this game. Two strong features may be great, but if they don't "play together" in some way, the hand isn't that fantastic. ESPECIALLY the drawing hands in omaha require hitting a BIG draw to be able to "drive" the betting; this gives you deception, extra folding equity and often the chance to make the weak aspects of your draw into potential winners by driving out otherwise weak opponents who have similar draws counterfeiting your own. These sort of hands, that can flop BIG drawing scenarios, are way more than just a sum of their parts. A hand that can easily flop 20 drawing outs, is WAY MORE POWERFUL than a hand that can flop 10 drawing outs. With a large number of ways to win a hand, it becomes powerful, by several orders of magnitude. The Hutchison system doesn't recognise this and doesn't "weight" features like double-suiting as being powerful elements of a wrap hand etc.

An example of the above - say you have 789T rainbow, and flop a straight draw with 11 nut outs and a pair. Pretty good. However, if someone bets into you, he might just have a set, and you're treading on dodgy ground to fire back. Now, make the hand double suited. As well as the above flop, you've hit a flush draw and a backdoor flush draw on the other card. Now your draw is so powerful you can drive the betting, even against players who may hold 2 pair or trips, and you have much more control and flexibility over how you play the hand. By raising you can remove higher flush draws (except on fishy tables!) and get it heads up or 3-handed against a couple of "made" hands, where you're significant favourite. With the unsuited version, you can just follow along, try to draw out, and hope no open pairs or flush cards hit. You also lose any fold equity you might've had with the double-suited version (i.e. you can fold better/similar draws, and perhaps even made hands like 2 pair, that reduce your win %, and perhaps gain position; the advantages of being able to drive the betting in this game are great!). The difference is fairly large, with the right kind of flop.

The Hutchison system is based on the % winrate in an all-in situation on a ten handed table. This is grossly simplistic as omaha is not played this way.

Also, omaha is a flop game, not a preflop game. You can't win JUST by being tighter than everyone else preflop, like you can in many holdem games. You have to understand the strength of your hand, and its features on, on the flop. If you can't play a hand optimally, it loses value. So why assign the same points to a hand whether it's played by Cloutier or Joe Normal, against a table of rocks or a table of crazy draw-a-holics? This particularly becomes an incorrect way of doing things when you realise some of the hand feature scoring is very bizarre. You need to understand the hands in this game, and be thinking about their strengths (what hands/flops can they make, how will this play against the field?) and consider implied odds, which is a huge element of your preflop decision making. Hands that score 10 points or less can be raised, in the right situation. I think giving analysis by rote, rather than situation by situation, is leading new players into bad habits that'll be hard to shake off, and, in the long run, is counter-productive. People looking for a quick fix shouldn't be playing poker, it's always going to be a learning process, and a hand ranking system that gives WRONG rankings to hands is worse than no help at all, in some cases.

OK, so here's how it works....

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FLUSH FEATURES:

If the highest card is an ACE award 4 points
If the highest card is a KING award 3 points
If the highest card is a QUEEN award 2.5 points
If the highest card is a JACK award 2 points
If the highest card is a TEN or NINE award 1.5 points For any other combination of two suited cards award 1 point.

If your hand contains four cards of the same suit, deduct 2 points.

PAIR FEATURES:

If you have a pair of ACES award 9 points
If you have a pair of KINGS award 8 points
If you have a pair of QUEENS award 7 points
If you have a pair of JACKS or TENS award 6 points
If you have a pair of NINES award 5 points
If you have any other pair award 4 points

Award no points to any hand that contains three of the same rank.

STRAIGHT/WRAP FEATURES:

An ACE with a King, Queen, Jack, or Ten earns 2 points
An ACE with a Two, Three, Four, or Five earns 1 point

Any two cards from TWO through SIX receive 2 points Any two cards from SIX through KING receive 4 points

Any three cards SIX and above earn 7 points

Any four cards SIX and above earn 12 points

From the above totals, deduct 1 point if a one or two card gap occurs and deduct 2 points if a three card gap exists.
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Hands scoring 15 points and over are "playable" for even beginners. Hands 10 and over might be considered. Hands over 20 are raisers.

OK, so going through in order. First of all, the scoring for flush features is dreadfully low, compared to the straights. Yes, implied odds of catching a flush are not great (hard to be paid) but then having a flush as back-up or blocker in a straight drawing hand is very valuable. A suited ace is given the same value as a hand containing 67o. This is ridiculous. Two-card straight features (connectors) are woth little in this game, suited aces are nice. Also, suited K's and Q's etc are nice to have, but no way is a suited King worth 3/4 as much as a suited ace. It MAY win 75% as much as the suited ace, but again you can't drive any betting with it, you can't call along on the assumption that it's good. Drawing to K and Q high flushes and making the assumption that they WILL be good is a recipe for disaster. Also, when you hit them it's hard to bet out much because the only hand likely to play against you is the HIGHER FLUSH! Also, double-suited hands are worth MORE than twice as much as single suited ones, again due to ability to drive betting, hit backdoors to low flushes etc. A hand with twice as many potential ways to make drawing outs is worth more than twice as much.

Pairs are rated about right, I guess, although aces again have more "driving the betting" value than any other hand feature, and are also strong heads up in comparison to the other pairs, and thus should be rated a bit further ahead of KK and QQ (although value in a multi-way pot is not greatly different). Again, it's only considering the value on a 10-handed table. The low pairs pick up 4 points a piece, tho again I think there has to be a diference between 22 and 88 (consider the difference between a flop of 662 when holding 22, and a flop of 866 when holding 88).

Straight features are rated highly, but some of the thinking seems a little bizarre. Big wraps (4 cards) alone are strong hands and worth calling; with a 4-card wrap your only other shot is getting some flush features, so you can never score that highly.

89TJds scores a princely 15.5 points. Just about enough for a call. This is utter BULL. This hand is a HUGE holding preflop, and plays well in just about every situation you can think of. It should be raised from pretty much anywhere on the table, and with a stack of any size it can always cope with a re-raise. Against two players jamming away with AAxx, this hand is +ve EV to get ALL IN! Yet according to this system, the middle double-suited wrap hands, are barely worth a call. 789T single suited should be PASSED by a tight player according to this scoring. This is nonsense. The double-suiting of these hands makes them powerful.

Also, a hand like AKQJ is rated as highly as JT98. I'd disagree as AKQJ is severely restricted in the number of straights it can make. It's still a strong hand, but I would suggest that most omaha players would prefer the JT98 hand. Both hands will probably be good if they flop top two in a short pot, so the strength of the higher cards is not that great. The strength of being able to make about 50% more straights IS great, however. Suit the AKQJ and it's looking much stronger due to the high flush features. The system doesn't take into account the number (and nuttiness) of straights a hand can make. QJT9 is a fair bit better than 6789 as any two-pair or trippy flops hit harder on the higher cards (less chance of someone backing into a higher two-pair, more chance of it being top two etc), but they're rated the same. Not much thinking seems to have gone in here.

Also, the bit about knocking off points for single, double, and triple gaps is confusing. I ASSUME they mean triple-gappers rather than three card gappers, though that's not made clear. A two card gap (67TJ etc) doesn't make as many good straights or nice draws as a double-gapper (68TJ) with the gap near the bottom. Hands with 3 gaps in are not that strong and should really lose more than 2 points. Where the gaps in your hand are is also important; you're MUCH better off (in nut making terms) of having gaps or hangers at the bottom of your straight-making hands than at the top. I guess that's more complicated to score, but if they don't make such facts clear, why bother with a system at all?

And why 56o is worth half what 67o is, is beyond me.

I realise some assumptions have to be made in scoring systems, but they really need to be more flexible than this to be of much help. In some ways, it's great to have some indication as to the relative strengths of holdings (it's nice to know an approximate score for, say, a pair of aces compared to a 3-card run, etc) but I think a player who's not sure of omaha starting requirements is better served by reading and thinking about the game, than getting caught into a system like this which perpetuates some slightly misleading ideas.

Any thoughts?

Monk
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WHHHHHHHHHHAT!! You list omaha experts, and FAIL TO MENTION ATE!!

Should have been first on the list, my friend.


Anyway, we certainly can agree that this Huchinson (or whatever the hell his name was) system, is a completly inaccurate JOKE system.

Using it, would be like going to war with a 5.56mm rifle, and carrying only 7.62mm ammunition: . . . . . . . . .YOU DIE!!


ATE does not mind someone attempting to become famous, but NOT if they can't get their information correct!!

This "Hutch" individual, is like the WILLIAM HUNG of Omaha!!


P.S. I'm starting to think that Monk IS Reuben Stewart!, or some other famous name player. Certainly, he writes as though he is.



Adam the pathetic mental case


And noooooooo! Adam's PERFECT system, will only be available if I ever write a book, which I cannot possibly do.


YOu see, having an accurate system, is not that easy. The ATE system, is based on the fact that certain "packets" go up or down in value, depending on the "Idiocy factor"
of the game.

Yeah, y'all have been VERY GOOD lately, with participating in ATE'S lessons, but I'm sorry, this information is just too good to give for free.

Good point about different features being worth more or less on weaker tables, that's something these point count systems just can't seem to comprehend, that a suited ace etc is worth a lot more on fishy tables because weaker flushes will pay you off for your stack when you hit. Certainly as far as I've seen all these systems are pretty badly flawed, though the Cappelletti one is not too bad for playing high only hands in O8. There's certainly a niche in the market for a good system, Adam, so hopefully you'll find a way to publicise yours.

Monk
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