Secret to Ohmaha? 6789s?

[Crimson]

I'm mostly a hold'em player, but sometimes for fun I play a little dealers choice, and a common choice is ohmaha hi/lo. I get 6789s UTG (no one raises anyway...) and fold, asking my amigo if he would have played that hand. He says yes, and he has seen some of the better players raise it. He goes on to say he is suprised to see that I haven't figured something out yet, but wont tell me what.

Can someone explain why this might be a raising hand, and/or what it is I haven't figured out?

If you want a typical wise-a55 answer - go all-in, everytime you get 6789s, and you'll never lose. it dominates AA23ds

If you want a serious answer - that's a garbage hand in hi-low, as you have neither high or low card, only medium, so you will have to get really luck to win with it.

[Crimson]

I should have clarified, but we were playing 4/8 limit. Thanks thought.

Well, it's a raising hand if you're in early position, but highly muckable elsewhere. Let's see why. By raising UTG with this hand, you're going to limit the field to other players who will mainly hold "standard" premium hands. Let's look at a couple of these matchups in 2dimes:

Omaha Hi/Low 8-or-better: 500000 sampled boards
cards scoop HIwin HIlos HItie LOwin LOlos LOtie EV
9s 8s 7c 6h 143131 311674 18s326 0 15965 194605 0 0.562
4s Ac 2d 3h 118697 188326 311679 0 249088 3524 0 0.438

and (against the mother of all omaha hands):

Omaha Hi/Low 8-or-better: 500000 sampled boards
cards scoop HIwin HIlos HItie LOwin LOlos LOtie EV
9s 8s 7c 6h 205895 237342 262658 0 48984 159138 73 0.509
Ac 2d Ah 3h 122635 262658 237342 0 213828 5809 73 0.491

I know, it's shocking to see hand matchup results like this, but this is the O8 secret that all the true champions know that the rest of us would sell our right testicle to find out.

Now, we've seen that this 6789s hand is actually a modest *favorite* over your opponents' most likely holdings. However, the true strength of your hand is that your opponent will never suspect you hold this hand! When the flop comes 78T, giving you the nut straight, he'll have no idea that his hand is only good for a draw at half the pot--his aces are dead to runner runner full! If you smugly check-raise him on the flop and then lead the turn blind, not only will you stand a good chance of being raised blind, which will allow you to then reraise in the dark as well, which *occasionally* will lead to an in-the-dark cap and subsequent in-the-dark-of-the-dark river blind-lead by you, I promise you this seemingly marginal holding will reap a significant win over time.

And I haven't even touched the invaluable effect this sort of play will have on your table image.

QED

I almost always throw this away. I definitely wouldn't have given a testicle to have obtained this information.

Hope old lefty's working out well for you.

If you could take down back-to-back pots with 6789, you'd probably manage to get an entire table on tilt.

Hes probably going to say something like "Since everyone will be calling with high cards and low cards, the deck should be rich in middle cards"

Thankfully, there is no Omaha middle, and your friend is a moron.

Edit: Interesting point Ballz.

[gergery]

Check the batteries on that twodimes engine, chief.

-g

[Buzz]

Game
Board
Dead Cards
Hands (1 per line)
[ QUOTE ]
Omaha Hi/Low 8-or-better: 500000 sampled boards
cards scoop HIwin HIlos HItie LOwin LOlos LOtie EV
9s 8s 7c 6h 205895 237342 262658 0 48984 159138 73 0.509
Ac 2d Ah 3h 122635 262658 237342 0 213828 5809 73 0.491

[/ QUOTE ]

Fatnutz - Really? I re ran the simulation on twodimes.net. I copied the hands from your post directly into twodimes.net. Below are the results.

Result

Too many samples required, using 500,000 sample simulation.
http://twodimes.net/h/?z=1381850
pokenum -mc 500000 -o8 9s 8s 7c 6h - ac 2d ah 3h
Omaha Hi/Low 8-or-better: 500000 sampled boards
cards scoop HIwin HIlos HItie LOwin LOlos LOtie EV
9s 8s 7c 6h 105895 237342 262658 0 48984 159138 73 0.383
Ac 2d Ah 3h 222635 262658 237342 0 213828 5809 73 0.617

These are quite different from what you post.

Buzz

That is because I made my results up. As a joke.

Jesus.