[DeathDonkey]

Thank you all for the advice. I find something very interesting when I post hands in this forum, which is I think there is a huge gap in skill/style of play between the straight omaha games many of the forum regulars here would play in and the random mix games I play in where omaha/8 might be included. The result is you guys advise me on how to play against players that you expect to play in a certain way, and I feel don't exist in the games I am in.

A good example of this comes from Buzz's excellent post, where he expects the initial flop raise from UTG to represent an extremely strong high holding that might put bottom set in a really tough spot. The reality is UTG's raising range here includes many weak high hands (possibly a pair of aces with a weakish low draw) to straight low draws, all two pairs, and probably broadway + big pair draws (high only type hands he opened with). I feel the way the game was playing and the ranges I know these guys are capable of having that folding bottom set to the flop action would be a big mistake. Perhaps I don't fully appreciate the likelihood that I wind up having to dodge many draw outs for half the pot with an utter lack of low possibility.

I guess what I conclude is that if you guys played in this game (just the omaha/8 portions of it) you would think we are all terrible, but because everyone plays in the way that they do, my mediocre / terrible play is actually not that terrible because it makes correct assumptions about how my opponents are playing. In that sense we have our own little omaha/8 economy that only exists in random mix games with non-o/8 experts where the best players can be judged by how they beat the worse players in this game, not how well they play omaha/8 by arbitrary standards.

A side effect of this is that my posts here are probably difficult to analyze in a way that is fair to the way the game was playing, which I wasn't able to convey that well. I do appreciate all the advice but I will probably always exist in this gray area where a good omaha/8 player would think I'm a fish but I only play omaha/8 in games where I am a shark (or maybe I'm fooling myself - a distinct possibility).

Anyway in this hand I 4 bet the turn, SB capped it, UTG called two more and I called. River was 2[img]/images/graemlins/club.gif[/img] checked to me, I bet, they both called. SB had couterfeitted 23 low, UTG had top 3 pair and I got 3/4 and SB got 1/4.

-DeathDonkey