Playing a Set in Heads Up Omaha

One of the most often misplayed hands in HU Omaha are sets. Frequently a player will over bet the pot probably due to the fear of losing the hand to a draw, but nonetheless they scare away any chance of winning more chips. Slow playing your hands is very important in heads up play and is one of the significant differences you will find between ring games.

In a ring game Omaha provides fast action hands with multi-way pots that require you to over bet and make your opponents pay to draw. You want to stop them in their tracks before their hand improves to become better than yours. Thus you will need to take down pots early. In heads up there are less cards that will kill your hand, so trying to scare your opponent off the pot is the wrong call. You should be able to bet your hand slowly without fearing your opponents draw.

In a situation of flopping a set your best decision will be to make small bets generally pot size on both flop and turn allowing your opponent to play into you and think your hand is weak in comparison to his. If your opponent bets into you the only decision you have if the board does not appear to be dangerous is a flat call. Allow him to play your hand for you and continue to bluff on later streets.

Obviously everything here will always be conditional to many factors like your opponent and the read you have on them along with the board, but in most cases playing your sets hard will force them out and lose value for you when it’s not necessary.

Here is an example in one of the worst case scenarios where your opponent could be running an open ended straight draw, although the odds of this are unlikely. If you have Q-Q-6-4 and your opponent has J-9-3-A, you flop Q-T-5 your hand is still 76% favourite to win. Understandably he needs any 10 or K to beat you, but look at his odds of completing his hands. He needs one of 8 cards, this is all he has. You on the other hand have a total of a possible 10 outs (1xQ, 3xT, 3×5, ?x3 with ? representing the turn card) that can make your hand even stronger than it is already. If he checks to you a pot sized bet should be enough to keep him in the hand, add value to yours without the fear of losing too much if he completes. In a situation like this your opposition will and should be value betting. If he does this let him. You will know when you’ve been outdrawn and if this happens you can back down.