In Omaha, unlike hold'em, most of the deck gets into play. Especially because the game of Omaha is so ace-dependent, and so many players play any hand with ace-baby or ace-suited, you have to keep track of where the aces are. Find out who plays only when they have an ace. If you can identify where the aces are, you can play more marginal hands.

Let's say everybody folds to you on the button and you have 2-3-4-6. That's a monster hand when aces are coming on the flop, and it's pretty likely they are coming. Everybody folded so it's unlikely many aces came up. Ten-handed, that means twenty-eight cards have already been removed from play, plus your four, with no playable aces. The aces must be in the big or small blinds, or they're coming.

If you get this same hand in early position, don't even consider playing it. You've got seven or eight people playing after you and all the aces are out there. Even early in a tournament, you shouldn't play that hand. It is exactly the kind of hand you could lose a lot of bets with.

You can occasionally find the opposite situation: all the low cards are out of the deck because several players put in two or more bets to see the flop. If you are in late position, you definitely don't want to play a low hand. A-2 without good high prospects should be mucked. In fact, this might be the time, even late in the tournament, to play a hand like Q-J-T-9.

Pot odds reflect the sum of money you must call compared to the sum of money in the pot. If the pot has $400 in it and your lone opponent bets $40, you are forced to call $40 for a chance to win $440 (the original $400 and his $40 bet). In this event, you are getting pot odds of 11 to 1. If your chance of improving to a winning hand is 11-1 or better, then you should call. If it less than 11-1 you should fold.

Pre-flop stats.
  One question people often ask when first playing Omaha is what percentage of hands they should play. From player's experience, big winners in the low and mid-stakes games usually play 20% to 30% of their hands; below 20% is too tight and above 30% is too loose. Of course, these numbers aren't exact science and should be used as guidelines to give you an idea of what the norm is. Your style might be different.

As a general rule, when first playing a game, it is better to stick to tight pre-flop guidelines (~20% for Omaha) so you won't get into many marginal and tricky situations. Additionally, by playing too many hands (~30%+), you will often get into pots with dominated draws that you think have good equity when in reality, your equity is almost always bad. This is assuming you are relatively new to Omaha. If you have some experience and are comfortable with marginal situations, play more hands.

Players who enjoy playing with single-suited hands such as 9-6-5-3 or Q-Q-4-5 and double-suited hands such as J-J-7-5 or Q-T-6-5 in early positions - or calling pre-flop raises with them - will find themselves playing more than 30% of hands. This isn't recommended if you are new to the game, especially when you are out of position.

One of the most important factors in your poker tournament success will be your ability to choose the best tournaments for both your skill level and your bankroll. Some tournaments are overwhelmingly luck-fests, and if you enter these tournaments you might as well regard your buy-in as a lottery ticket. Other tournaments provide more of a chance for skilled players to consistently earn money commensurate with their skill.

We'll start by defining every tournament as fast, medium, or slow. A single-table satellite, designed to come up with a winner in an hour or so of play, is the quintessential fast tournament. That's because the players start out with small chip stacks and the blinds escalate quickly. The WSOP main event, which takes the better part of a week to determine a winner, is the ultimate slow tournament. That's because the blinds start small relative to the players' starting chips and go up slowly, so that players can be very selective in the hands they play and how they deploy their chips to their advantage.

Fact: The faster a tournament is, the more likely it is that the winner will be determined by luck, as opposed to skill.

What makes a tournament fast or slow?
The blind structure in relation to the number of chips each player starts with are the primary considerations, but a few other factors can also affect a tournament's speed. The number of players in a tournament will have an impact on a tournament's speed, and can even cause a slow tournament to become fast as the tournament progresses. Rebuy formats that allow players to purchase more chips in the early stages of a tournament, also affect the speed. But the small buy-in tournaments are generally fast from the very start.

Poker tournament is a game in which all players pay a fixed amount of money before the game starts and begin play with the exact same number of chips. Players are eliminated one by one as they run out of chips until one player has accumulated all the chips that were initially doled out.

The amount of money you pay to get a seat at a tournament - called the buy-in - does not necessarily have any relation to the amount of chips that you start the game with. A typical buy-in scenario, for instance, might require that you pay $50 (which goes to the prize pool) plus $5 (the fee that the house charges for facilitating the game.) For that $55 investment, you are given 1,000 chips with which to gamble. These are dollar-denomination chips - $5, $10, $100, and so on - but for the purposes of the tournament, they are only units. These are tournament chips, and they do not function as cash currency as do the chips in a cash game.

Rebuy Tournaments.
 In some live tournaments, a player is given the option of buying more chips - after the initial buy-in - during a specific period of time. Usually this is a fixed amount of chips, and this option is available only during the first few hours of play.This is much less common in online tournaments. If a tournament allows rebuying, this can significantly impact your strategy for the game. 

Position. Because Omaha hands are similar in value, position takes on greater importance. Compared with hold 'em, you actually want to play tighter in early position. There is no hand in Omaha like A-A in hold 'em, where you can be a big favorite over anything else. Every Omaha hand is a drawing hand. Even if you are playing premium hands that can stand a reraise, you are paying a high price to, essentially, hit a draw. Therefore, if you are in late position and no one has entered the pot, you can open up your hand selection.

For example, in a game without antes, you play 11 percent of your hands under the gun (in a ten-handed game) and 45 percent on the button (if no one has entered the pot). In Omaha, you should play even tighter up front and open up a little more on the button. Many Omaha players will be surprised by this.

The best possible starting hand is A-A-K-K double-suited (like A-A-K-K). This hand can flop three aces (trip aces) or three kings, two different ace-high flushes, a straight, or some combination of those. The next-best possible starting hand is A-A-J-10 double-suited. In fact, no less a player than T.J. Cloutier considers it the best Omaha starting hand. He feels the possible extra straights it allows are worth giving up the extra trips (three of a kind) and extra full-house possibilities.

But we wouldn't get caught up in trying to decide which of these starting hands is the best. You're going to play all of them about the same before the flop, and after the flop you'll know whether you have something you can push or not.

Unfortunately, there is no quick and easy way to describe how best to play Omaha. It's full of nuances. Having said that, we will nonetheless attempt to lay out a basic strategy for Omaha.

As for starting hands, we recommend that you play only three of the possible pairs before the flop: aces, kings, and queens. This way, when you flop a set (make three of a kind) on the flop, you'll usually have the highest set. Sometimes, you'll catch someone with a lower three of a kind and win all his chips. You should also otherwise stick to the best starting hands. High and medium "wraps" (four cards in a row) work extremely well in Omaha. So be very selective with your starting hands.

Make pot-sized bets in Omaha when you do have a strong flop. To bet less than the size of the pot is a mistake, unless you have a hand that can't be outdrawn, and there aren't many of those! Charge your opponents the maximum if they want to try to outdraw you in a big pot.

Here is the rank of Omaha hands in order from strongest to weakest:

Royal flush  - the ten through the ace, all of the same suit.

Straight flush  five cards in a row (straight), all in the same suit. A royal flush is simply an ace-high straight flush. 

    
Four of a kind (quads) - having all four of a card like four sixes or our eights qualifies as four of a kind.

To play Omaha, you need the following:

• At least five players: Somewhere between seven and ten is ideal, but you can cope with fewer than seven.
• One standard deck of 52 cards: No jokers are needed.
• A table and some chips or counters: Ideally, you should use chips of at least two different denominations (different colors or sizes) to make the accounting easier. Money is a perfectly acceptable alternative to chips, and most of the time the chips represent a money denomination. In fact, the game is almost always played for money. If you play at a small betting limit table, such as $2/$4, you need to have at least $100 in chips.

Omaha is similar in many ways to Texas Hold 'em, a popular game played live in home games and casinos, on the Internet, or on television. The two games have many points in common, but Omaha boasts some important differences:

• To make your hand at Omaha, you're dealt four cards face-down (your holecards or downcards) rather than two as in Hold 'em.
• The dealer places five subsequent cards face-up (on the board), but, as in Hold'em, not all at once. First comes the flop of three community cards, and then a fourth card (the turn), and then the fifth and final card (the river).

The flexibility in the number of cards you can use from the community upcards and your downcards is more restricted than in Hold 'em. You must use two and only two of your four hole cards plus three and only three of the five community cards to make up your best five-card hand.