We’ve already mentioned that position is far less important in Omaha than in hold’em, due to the comparative strength of the hands.

This means your ability to calculate pot odds and possible outs (cards that can improve your hand over your opponents’) are deadly weapons in the Omaha player’s arsenal. In fact, your mental arithmetic will need to be top-notch if you want to become a killer Omaha player.

If, like most people, you’re playing Omaha online, you’re also going to be short of tells and useful information, so your maths skills become even more important.

Say, for example, that you start with A♠-K♠-7♥-6♥ and the flop comes J♠, 4♠, 5♦. At the moment, your hand is worthless and a pot raise probably indicates someone holding three Jacks, the current nuts. However, there are lots of ways you can improve, so you need to be able to calculate your outs. Beginning with any spade will give you the nut flush, so that gives you a total of nine outs (there are 13 cards in a suit, two are on the board and you hold two, so there are up to nine remaining in the deck). Then any 3 or any 8 will give you the nut straight. This means another six outs (there are four 3s and four 8s available, but one of each of these will be spades so you can’t double-count them). As a result, on this flop you have 15 outs.

As a rule of thumb, each out equates to about a 4% chance to improve, so you have a 60% chance of improving your hand. Good odds, you might think and well worth calling – but don’t forget that your opponent, who is probably sitting on trip Jacks, will have outs to improve as well. He can hit any pair to make a full house (that’s six outs or a Jack to make quads, another out). As such, you need to subtract his seven outs from your 15 and you have the right odds for playing a pot and winning it uncontested.

Suddenly you only have a one in four chance of winning this pot with the best hand. Whether you call will depend on the size of the bet you have to call and what’s in the pot that you can win.

You also need to work through the same exercise on the turn. If the turn draws a relative blank – 10♦, say – then you need to re-calculate. You would now have another three outs (any Queen except Q♠ ) to make the nut straight. Look again at the total board: J♠ , 4♠ , 5♦, 10♦. If your opponent’s hand is J♣-J♦-9♦-Q♣, then this turn card will have greatly improved their hand. Any diamond will give them a flush, and the 8 you needed for your straight will now give them a better straight – proving Omaha really is a game of redraws!

This may seem laborious and complex, but the ability to calculate these kind of odds on the fly separates winning Omaha players from mediocre ones. If you can master the ability to assess how your hand connects with the flop and how you can improve, it becomes very hard to lose money at Omaha in the long run.