Learning about starting hand selection is key early on, as is realizing you shouldn't be voluntarily playing 60-70 percent of your hands like you might want to, but a lot less - more like 15 percent or so (in full-ring games). In no-limit hold'em, many players - especially beginners - focus a lot on preflop play. The flop is where things 'get specific,' I realized, both with my judgment of my own hand's strength and my efforts to estimate what others were holding. Preflop raises and calls (and limps, which happen a bit more in PLO), though obviously significant for building ideas about what an opponent might be holding, became relatively less important to the overall picture of the hand.

Once I began to appreciate these differences between pot-limit Omaha and no-limit hold'em, I understood what it meant when I'd heard players refer to PLO as a 'postflop game.' More specifically, I began to reorient my thinking to focus especially on the flop when trying to narrow opponents' ranges and measure my hand against theirs. Even with a great starting hand like K ♠ Q ♦ J ♠ 10 ♦ it is usually necessary to see a flop before getting overly excited about pushing your chips in the middle. The extra combinations of hands - six two-card combos in PLO versus just one in NLHE - also means a lot more possibilities around the table. Pot-limit betting often inhibits players' ability to build big pots or get all their chips in before the flop in PLO. But it also took me a while to realize that preflop play had a much different significance in pot-limit Omaha than it did in no-limit hold'em. I played too many hands, of course, as new PLO players often do. When first starting out with PLO, I was like a lot of no-limit hold'em players dazzled by the possibilities of a four-card starting hand. The advice is meant to encourage new NLHE players who wish to improve their games not to fear getting involved in postflop situations, but rather to recognize the need to focus on turn and river play in order to become better players.

Today I want to share a quick lesson about no-limit hold'em I actually didn't come to appreciate fully until after having played a lot of pot-limit Omaha.

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