Pot-Limit Omaha is often called a game of draws, and often this is true, especially compared to other poker games such as Hold’em. So, it’s quite important to know your pot-equity whenever you picked up a nice drawing hand (or what at least looks like one).

Calculating your equity is harder than in Hold’em. This is because your opponents can have blockers against your hand or re-draws. Blockers are cards that your opponent might be holding that you need to complete your hand. For example, if your drawing to the nut-flush but your opponent is holding two cards of that suit too, that’ll cost you two outs. Re-draws on the other hand mean that although you might hit your hand, your opponent still has a chance to improve and beat your made hand. For example, if your opponent flopped top-set, you made the nut-flush on the turn, he can still make a full-house on the river. Such a re-draw to a full house cuts your equity by 20%.

On the other hand, your hand can sometimes be stronger than you might expect at first, this is because back-door outs. On a rainbow flop, for example Ah Kd 3s, a hand like Jh Th 9d 8d has two back-door flush draws. A back-door flush draw usually improves your hand by 5%, and like in the case of this example your hand even improves by 10%.

This all might sound complicated, but actually there is an easy and quick way to calculate your equity when holding a drawing hand. You take your total number of outs and multiply them by 4 on the flop and 2 on the turn. However, we’ve just seen that because of re-draws and blocking cards that number can signigicantly drop. Because of this a nut-flush draw can drop from 45% to 25%. But, if you have some backdoor-outs that number can again increase to 30%.

So, determining your equity in PLO isn’t all that easy. It’s important to consider what your opponent might be holding and how that affects your outs and chance of winning the pot.

Because of the close hand ranks and the important role of drawing hands in PLO, the game becomes a high variance poker game (much more then NLHE for example). Because of this high variance factor bankroll management is very VERY important if you want to become a winning Pot Limit Omaha player.

Here are some basic guidelines you should follow if you don’t want to go busted (by simply being unlucky):

In a Pot-Limit Omaha game swing can be very big. That’s why you need a buffer that’ll prevent you going broke by simply catching a bad run of cards. I would suggest bringing only 3% or 4% of your total bankroll at a table. And whenever your stack represents more then 10% of your total bankroll, you should quit, to avoid losing your profit with a single bad beat.

In a Fixed Limit Omaha game you should simply follow the ‘300 Big Bets’ rule: make sure you always have 300 Big Bets of the limit you are playing in your bankroll, and everything should be fine in the long run.

I hope these simple and basic, BUT very effective, guidelines can help you build a healthy Omaha bankroll online.