If you want to become the best pot limit Omaha poker player you can be, I’ve got four words for you: play heads-up games. I actually strongly recommend that anybody wanting to improve their six-max, full ring or tournament PLO game set aside a couple of weeks and do their level best to put in 5,000 to 10,000 hands of heads-up Pot Limit Omaha. While it can seem weird to address what amounts to the final table of a tournament first, it’s actually a way to get players enjoying the purest form of the game there is.
When you play in big games, you’re playing tighter. That’s just how it is; the more players that are involved, the less likely you are to take an action at any given time. It’s also much easier for you to read other people’s possible hands because, like you, they’ve got a much narrower range of plays that can be made. It’s likely that playing in ring games has stunted your development as a poker player and you don’t even realize it. It’s just so easy to play robotically instead of engaging the human factor that makes poker the game it is.
Heads-up poker, on the other hand, forces you to play far more hands because you’re being dealt more frequently and you’ll have a much, much broader variety of hands to play with. This helps you adopt your pot limit strategy to how the opponent you’re facing is playing. The act of playing more hands, paying more attention to a single opponents’ actions and being given the breathing space to make more rooms is going to improve your general poker strategy to the point where you’ll likely be a much better player when you sit down in regular ring games.
The skills you’ll pick up in just a week if heads-up play is going to be directly transferable to the full-format version of the game, simply because it acts as an intensive boot camp for players like yourself. In addition to that, heads-up pot limit Omaha poker can be very, very profitable. The fantastic thing about playing heads-up poker is that when somebody awful sits down you can get all their money, whereas if you’re sitting with a fish at a six-man table you have to share those profits with the other 4 regulars who are pillaging his chipstack as well.
If you’re sitting in heads-up PLO rooms and you’ve not faced someone who’s made a significant mistake in the first thirty to fifty hands, I’d honestly recommend moving to another table if the stakes are at a point where you’re not making any money.