Pre-Flop

You are going to be folding a lot before the flop.  A LOT.  Even with the starting hand suggestions here (which in many ways are not appropriate for a higher limit game) you will be playing very few hands, especially in early position. 

Since you like to play poker this is going to be very difficult.

Next to picking a table where most of the people are worse poker players than you, the most effective thing you can do is play well before the flop.  Most of your opponents will not play well here.  They will see the flop with cards that almost never win (you will see all kinds of crazy garbage in a showdown at one point or another during a game). This pre-flop play is fairly easy to describe, and technically easy to do, but mentally it is very very difficult.  It takes practice and it takes discipline and it takes patience.

Most poker books you read will suggest some rules for playing before the flop, usually with very good advice about starting cards and how to handle position, but then they move forward to whatever the next chapter is and you are already set up to fail because you just flat out won't be following those instructions.

A Way of Thinking About Your Starting Hands

Positionally the general rule is that you want to be as close to the last person to act as possible.  The closer you are to that sweet spot (in Omaha the dealer button) the more information you will gain on every betting round before you have to act.  This information allows you to play your hand more effectively to maximize the amount you can win (or often more importantly minimize the amount you lose).  The free card, for example, hinges upon you being in late position.

So, it may be helpful if your general plan is not to play any hands in early position, basically you are waiting to get within one or two of the dealer button to put your money into the game all the time.  If you make this your mantra then you will find yourself doing what is almost correct because we all know when you get AA23 under the gun you are going to play it regardless of what your general plan was (as you should) but when you get KQJT offsuit you'll easily throw it away because you aren't playing cards until you get close to the dealer button.

Another useful thing is to have something to fill time with between hands. 

Filling Time Between Hands

• Over the course of one session pick a single player and watch them play. You are looking for patterns and habits in the way they play-- what kind of cards do they play.  Do they value powerful high only hands like AKQJ or do they throw them away in favor of low only hands? Do they always seem to have A23 in their hand.  This information is invaluable for later play.

• Count the pot. You can't utilize pot odds if you don't know how much money is in the pot each time you act. A method you may want to try which can help you get a good estimate:

  • Count the pot by the number of small bets.  Ignore the small blind--it isn't going to affect the pot odds much, and if those couple of chips would have made the difference on a particular draw then it's probably not worth making the draw in the first place.

  • Count the number of people in the pot at the end of the betting round and multiply it by the number of small bets per person (on the turn there were 6 callers and the bet was $12 or 4 small bets, so the result for the turn is 24 small bets in the pot)

  • Pot odds are most useful for figuring out if you should continue with a draw in low limit Omaha.  You may want to count up the river bets as well for a rough idea of what the final pot was, but for our purposes what you really want is to get a very close idea of how many small bets are in the pot when it is your turn to act on the flop and on the turn.

• Be friendly to the players at the table. Offer them gum or breath mints if you are having one, and in general be a nice to them. There is a whole topic here, but in general people who like you and are having fun are going to be more likely to play worse against you.

• Read one of the poker magazines that they keep in stock at all the major card rooms. The articles are usually very good and contain useful advice (that you might be able to apply on the next hand that you actually do play)

• Get up and walk around.

Raise It Up!  (If you can get away with it!)

Since you will be playing starting hands that have a much higher win rate than a lot of your opponents you want to get money in the pot before hand if, and this is an important if, you can get that extra money into the pot without causing your opponents to fold.  In most Low Limit Omaha games this is not a problem!  When you get a hand like A233 with a suited Ace you want as much pre-flop action as you can get because you are either going to have a lock on a low or a flush or know right away on the flop if your hand is dead.