What are the best Big O poker starting hands?

If your immediate response is, “Aces,” then you are mistaken, because in a five hole-card game AA shifts from being a viable hand category in itself to a feature within a hand, albeit a significant one.

This article will introduce you to some of the subtleties of evaluating preflop hand value in Big O poker, and should serve to save you a buy-in or two the next time that you dive into this curious game. There will be a focus on establishing core concepts, supported with the statistics and verbal logic that my long-time readers have become familiar with here at Cardquant. If you are new then welcome, and if you are returning then sorry for the long writing hiatus! Once more unto the breach.

The essential challenge of playing games with 5-or-more holecards is that the value of any given hand feature is contingent upon other features within the hand. We will begin with a splendid demonstration of this challenge as we evaluate the quality of some hands preflop, all of which contain Aces.

Even when we are evaluating Aces preflop, we should not use pattern-recognition heuristics as simplistic as, “trips bad,” or, “double-suited good”. I have constructed the table of Big O poker starting hands to the left to serve as an aid to feature-based evaluation.

The top hand of the table shows the strongest starting hand in Big O poker, which contains the features {AA, two pure nut suits, supported nut low draw, blocker to split}. Our next hand example, directly below, gives an example of a very strong AAA hand- because the trips serve to block your opponents from splitting your low, and the two nut suits and big pair give you a good chance to scoop the pot.

The third hand shows that even AAAA can be valuable in Big O poker, since all those blockers accompanied by a 2/3 give us a lock nut low draw. The value of quads deteriorates rapidly once we raise the rank of the low draw, so be careful! The fourth hand is a more run-of-the-mill AAA where the nut suit and nut low draw are valuable, but do not dominate a tight range. The final hand in the table appears beautiful, with the features {AA,low draw, two nut suits}. The problems with the hand are that the 9 does almost nothing to help us scoop the pot, and that the strong high potential of the nut suits is tempered by the weakness of the low draw when we face a strong range.

A key claim of my Fundamentals of 6 card PLO article was that “flop equity is less strongly coupled to preflop equity in 6c PLO than in the other two Omaha game variants.” One step in the analysis that led to this claim was a graph showing the preflop equity distribution for every starting hand against a linearly constructed top 25% range for each of the three Omaha high variants. I have produced a similar graph below, comparing Big O poker with 5cPLO and 4cPLO.

Again, the region of greatest divergence between the three lines is found in the top 10% of starting hands, and again, the optimal 3bet width out of position is much tighter in Big O poker than in most other Omaha variants. Yet the Big O equity advantage is even shallower in this region than in 6cPLO, which has very real consequences for optimal preflop strategy. Only 1.95% of all starting hands have a 54% equity advantage over a top 10% range in Big O, which compares unfavourably with the 2.99% of starting hands that have that same advantage in 6cPLO. This means that an opening range that is anything other than extremely tight cannot present a significant 4bet threat. If you attempt to open with a lot of hands from any position other than the button or cutoff then you can expect to face a lot of 3bets from players in position, for whom the worst case scenario is to take a minor equity disadvantage to a flop whilst they play in position in a mid-low SPR situation.

Whilst it’s not exactly radical to recommend that one play tight from the early positions in a 6-handed poker game, this lack of 4-bet threat has far-reaching ramifications, not least of which is that it becomes highly profitable to squeeze for value in position when one or more players is playing too many hands. The value we extract from the loose player(s) joining a 3bet pot is not offset by a single tight player occasionally 4-betting. The table below shows the 3-handed preflop equity advantage for a number of squeezing hands that the reader may not currently consider. It is important to notice how much equity the loose player is surrendering preflop, a disadvantage which is compounded strategically by him playing out of position postflop.

A player who utilizes a strategy that splashes around preflop because he heard some poker influencer keep reciting, “equities run so close together in this game,” can expect to lose a lot of money since his guru disguises a truism as valuable strategic insight. For those readers who have been seduced by such characters, your plight is akin to purchasing gardening strategy material from a gardening influencer who emphasizes that “cucumbers are green”. Mainstream poker training is filled with such vapid platitudes because, as I established in the article, Poker strategy as a knowledge frontier, efficient learning is bad for an information-drip business model.

In contrast to that approach, I have here established a very specific, concise preflop heuristic based on the equity structure of the game concerned, Big O poker, that can be applied to other games with similar equity structures. The next two sections in this article will seek to establish further specific heuristics around the value of low draws and high-only hands.

Contribution to equity advantage

Only those low draw components which contain an Ace confer any equity advantage at all against a random starting hand. The next table in our analysis shows the contribution, if any, of the low draw to an equity advantage against a couple of constrained ranges, and one unconstrained range.

The table demonstrates that a strong low draw component does confer an equity advantage against very wide ranges, and yet there is little difference in that advantage between the members of the group {A2,A3,A4,A5}. As soon as we expect to face a solid range (the 25% range shown in the table), we must consider the high potential of the hand as well. Thus, to enter the pot from early position in a 6-handed game, or to 3-bet at all, a strong low draw component is a necessary but not sufficient qualifying condition. I have also included the {A32} component in the table, to show that, whilst the additional low potential does not damage an {A2} hand, it does not improve it either.

Now that we understand the limitations of the low draw component in determining preflop hand value in Big O poker, we will turn our attention to those hands bereft of any low potential whatsoever. High-only hands appear beautiful to any player new to a split-pot game, and our final analysis for today will investigate whether that beauty is any more than skin-deep.

I will start the analysis with a few statistics to temper the reader’s enthusiasm for high-only hands. 33% of Big O Poker boards do not contain any qualifying low hands by the river. However, only 5.5% of all flops contain only cards ranked [K-9], and so guarantee that there will be no qualifying low hands at showdown. Another 28% of flops offer only backdoor low potential where, of course, the turn Ace is the most threatening card since it will often present an opponent playing a high-only hand on the flop with the risk of being scooped.

These board frequencies mean that even very attractive high-only hands have dismal preflop equities. I have included a selection in the table below:

The problem with playing high-only hands is that, even when they hit their dream flop, they are still often vulnerable to draws, especially when the hand goes multiway. The more experienced reader may be thinking about protecting his range on high boards, but a cursory analysis reveals that it is only a subset of high boards that a scoop-focused range is concerned about. Yet this concern is ill-founded, as my analysis will explain.

Paired boards, such as K♣K♥9♥ or J♣9♥9♠, will often connect reasonably well with a scoop-focused range, since it is so easy to make trips with a free high card in a game with five hole cards. Straight boards, such as K♣J♥T♥ or A♣Q♥T♠, are somewhat more threatening, but flush draws, especially nut flush draws, are ever present in any range, and the nuts on such flops is also vulnerable to the board pairing. Moreover, as discussed above, good starting hands generally contain 2-3 high cards anyway, so that it is not uncommon for an opponent to hold {two pair + straight draw}, {two pair + flush draw} or even the nut straight!

And it gets worse…

The majority of flops which connect with high-only hands will contain one low card. The board will bring low potential by the river 29% of the time if we have no card-removal considerations. However high-only hands, unlike their mixed counterparts, make the backdoor low draw more likely to come in since they unblock the low cards! When we hold a hand containing five high cards on such a board, a backdoor low draw will complete 35% of the time. Keep this in mind when you try to understand the reasons for the equities for the hand-board matchups that I have selected below:

It’s hard to make the case for high-only hands which don’t contain an Ace.

I covered a lot of ground in this introductory article, but there are three key takeaways that you can apply immediately at the tables:

1. The lack of 4-bet threat due to the equity structure means that it is highly profitable to squeeze for value in position when one or more players is playing too many hands.
2. To enter the pot from early position in a 6-handed game, or to 3-bet at all, a strong low draw component is a necessary but not sufficient qualifying condition.
3. It’s hard to make the case for high-only hands which don’t contain an Ace.

There is a lot more to learn about this fascinating, complex game, and an elite cadre of high stakes players are currently training every day using my Restricted access strategy and Software. I especially extend a welcome to driven, successful businessmen who want to be a force at the tables as well as in the boardroom.

Good luck at the tables.