More Omaha8 Madness

The streak hit seven. I got in two more low buyin Omaha/8 SnGs before bed on Sunday, and was extremely fortunate to cash in both (2nd and 3rd). One of the players in both was an extreme LAG -- he'd raise with just about any hand, and if he was in, he was raising to the river. In the first SnG, there were two of us on extremely short stacks. The LAG had more than half the chips in play. He got into it with the other decent-sized stack and lost two hands in a row to go on life support. The new big stack then wiped him out, and I strategically folded to 2nd instead of 3rd.

Alas, the run ended there. I got in five more last night, and the cards, especially in the first two, were grim. With Party's crapshootastic structure (800 starting chips), you're in big trouble if the blinds are already at 50/100 before you see your first Ace in the hole. Add in a single flop whiff -- say a J-J-9 flop when you have A-2-3-4 down -- in a raised pot, and you're instantly on the watch list for imminent stack death. I ended up going an ugly 9th-8th-4th-2nd at Party for a small net loss.

I did also give a shot to one SnG at PokerStars. The structure is much better -- 1500 chips to start, 9 players vs. 10 -- although the extra chips also mean that it can take a lot longer to play. I managed a 3rd, briefly being the chip leader when we were down to 4 before losing a single hand to go onto the respirator. When nobody has more than about 4 BBs, things get a little crazy.

I was thinking this morning that I wish I still had some programming skills and a little free time. I would like to write a simulator that will play (thousands of times, a la the twodimes calculator) Omaha/8 hands against random opponents for purposes of getting a better feel for hand ranking and EV. I think if I were going to do this, I would start simply, using the assumption that everyone stays in, and then once I had that working, I'd try to refine it to provide some basic level of intellegence -- say, folding K-9-4-3 rainbow preflop outside the blinds or no pair, no draw post flop. If you eventially got it to a decent level of sophistication, you would certainly have a better understanding of the game. You can't just sit around and hope for AA22 double-suited, after all.

{this just in: I'm still an idiot}.

It looks like twodimes does have a calculator for O/8, so I can at least do some individual hand odds calculations (AdAc6dh is a slight dog to 5c4c3h2h!). CardPlayer also has one, and there are a couple of downloads available.

Since I never bothered to learn C or any other object-oriented programming language, it's pretty unlikely that I'll ever attempt to do anything with this, but I still think it would be a fun and useful project. Maybe I'll just go buy SuperSystem 2 instead.