The Poker Mag

As poker players, we all get curious as to what would have happened on the flop after ourselves, or an opponent has folded. Checking through the cards to find out, is known as ‘rabbit hunting’ and isn’t something you could do in a professional tournament really. In our local game however, it does happen sometimes, and on this particular evening, myself and my opponent decided to look and see what would have happened. From fairly late position, I had (K,K) in the hole, and put in a raise.

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The small blind reraised, the big blind folded, and after some consideration I pushed all in. First of all, I felt if he did indeed have a hand, he might call, which I wouldn’t mind too much, but I was wary of the fact that any hand he could call with would probably contain an ace. With that in mind I felt I would be happy to pick up the pot right there, but if he wanted to play the hand, I was going to make sure it would cost him everything to do so. After sitting and thinking for some time and saying he thought he might be in front, my opponent laid the hand down. It is important to remember that I have a table image of being capable of anything here, and as that of a player who likes to bluff. So I wasn’t too surprised when my opponent turned over (A,9).

Then of course, we checked the flop that would have fallen….(A,A,4). Needless to say, my friend and opponent wasn’t too pleased, but that soon changed as we checked what the turn and river would have been. Had he called, I would have needed one of two kings left in the deck, and incredibly, I would have hit both of them with a King on the turn, and another King on the river. My opponent missed out on the chance of a great bad beat story of course, but somehow… I don’t think he will mind too much.

As everyone who plays online poker will have noticed, Omaha and Stud tournaments, as well as ring games, are sparsely populated compared to Holdem. I can understand this with the surge in popularity of Holdem recently, but you would think that players would take an interest in the other games once they tire of playing Holdem constantly.

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It is my feeling that online sites should do more to promote these games by offering special tournaments or bonuses attached to the games. It would be a shame if all the new poker rooms didn’t offer anything except Holdem because nobody ever played the other games.

Even in live events you always find people playing Holdem tournaments, but how often do you see Omaha games being held? For this reason I am trying to drum up some interest in this game from the regular Holdem players as I feel it offers an exciting alternative to the normal Holdem game. Offering these side games as a smaller buy in tournament helps attract interest of course, as people are never keen to risk money on a game they aren’t too familiar with.

In terms of online poker rooms it would be quite simple to get players into Omaha or Stud rooms, you would just have to offer double the player points in these games. Although players developing likes and dislikes for games is not something we can change entirely, I think as players, we should take the time to play different games so that the old favourites are not lost.