Omaha Poker by Bob Ciaffone review

I'm almost 1/2 way through this book and I'm not overly impressed. I will say for the beginner who has no idea how to play Omaha this might be an ok book. I know its an old version thats been slightly updated but still a lot of it seems out dated so far. Maybe because its dealing with both Limit and Pot Limit games. Also its dealing with full table games where most online games are short handed and more aggressive. Having watched a lot of Omaha videos on Card Runners and reading the forums I've got a much better grasp on the game. I'll update this when I get farther into the book and give more info on it.

OK I just finished this book. If you've never played Omaha before then its probably a good starting point to get a feel for the game and some basic understanding of how its played. If you've read anything/watched videos you'll be bored with this book as it doesn't have much to offer. I skipped some sections of it and its a short book. The internet section at the end really shows how dated the book is. I really enjoyed Lee Jones "Winning Low Limit Hold Em" when I got started in LHE. It was a great book to learn the rules, to learn hands, and to learn basic strategy. I understand Omaha is a much more difficult game. But the basic hand strategy was just using 4 connecting cards. The hand examples were generic and even sometimes using hands submitted from his students had the same card listed in the players hand and on the flop. Which to me makes me think there wasn't a lot of editing or reviewing done on the hands listed.

The student examples I thought were bad too. A player would have a short stack in a lot of the hands listed for internet play instead of a full buy in. He even advocates a player calling off 10% of his stack preflop with a marginal holding which I thought was pretty bad. I really expected to read this book and get something I didn't know from it. I wasn't expecting anything ground breaking but I did expect to walk away knowing more about the game than before I read it and I really felt disappointed.

The other book I bought was Pot-Limit Omaha Poker The Big Play Strategy by Jeff Hwang. He writes for Cardplayer and usually has a column from one of his books every other week. He also has 2 more books on the way out I've heard. One of them deals with short handed internet play as well. If I like this book I'll most certainly get his next 2 books as well.