Mini-raising Preflop with AAxx in Omaha
The play described in this article is quite advanced and a play that people playing internet poker rarely thinks about. The essence of it is to mini-raise with AAxx preflop if a shortstack has raised the pot preflop (instead of the common play which is to raise pot) in order to trap other players in-between.
When playing online poker, there are often people buying in short. Let us assume that a player has 40 euro in front of him on a table with blinds of 1/2. One player limps, the shortstack raises pot to 9 and a player behind calls. We look down at a really nice starting hand - AAT9 single suited. What is our course of action?
The natural instinct is to start thinking about all the money coming our way, pulling the slider to the far right and raising pot. It is correct to get as much money in preflop, preferably the whole stack, with AAxx in Omaha, and this is a perfect situation to get it all-in against the shortstack with some dead money in the pot. Right?
No.
The best play is instead to mini-raise to 16 total. At first, it might sound bizarre and irrational, but it is an extremely effective weapon. What we are now hoping for is for the first player to call our mini-raise and for the shortstack to push, so we can re-raise it again and play it heads-up against the shortstack with lots of dead money in the pot, or, force the first caller to play for his entire stack holding the worst hand. Of course, the most favorable scenario is if the player that called the initial shortstack raise calls the all-in from the shortstack, which almost guarantees us to get our entire stack in the middle.
Mini-raising entices the players behind to call. If they do, and the shortstack pushes, we have gotten more dead money in the pot and gotten the same result as if we would have potted it - a heads-up pot against the shortstack, or, even better, forced another player with a big stack to put it all-in with the worse of it.
But what happens if the shortstack just cold-calls our mini-raise? Well, then we have a big pot to play for on the flop, which increases our chances of winning huge should we flop a good hand.
If we instead just pot it preflop after the shortstack has raised and the other player has called the raise, our raise till be to 58 (2+9+9+9+29), an big enough chunk of our opponents' stacks for them not to call our raise and as a result, we get less dead money in the pot.
This is also something to think of when being on the other end of this situation. Let us assume we called preflop with a hand like 9887 and a shortstack raises pot. A player in-between calls and another player mini-raises. It is very tempting to call in this situation to try to win a big pot. Don't. As explained above, the shortstack will likely push, and the mini-raiser will re-raise pot again, forcing us to fold or to make a mistake by calling for almost our entire stack as substantial underdogs.
Written by Andris Kangeris for 24hPoker.com
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