The Power of the Ace

I have been playing a lot of Omaha 8 recently. I have played a some 3/6 and 5/10 PLO8 and Limit O8 from 15/30 all the way up to 100/200. I really like this game when played short-handed. At a full ring game it is rather dull to me because it turns into a game of the nuts. Short-handed makes it much more exciting and very fast paced. I purchased the Poker Tracker software for Omaha to help shore up leaks in my game. I thought now was a good time to analyze some things because I have about 3800 hands in the software and I am up $400 (so basically break even). I was down a ton until I made some changes. I feel much better about my game now.

Anyone that knows the game understands that the Ace is the most powerful card in the deck by a mile. What this blog is aiming to do is to quantify how big it really is. The table below summarizes how various cards do in generic terms. The first chart is ranked by BB W/L/hand.

Card_Times Held_VPIP_Won $ (WSF)__Money W/L__Big Blinds W/L per hand

J_____ 1083____ 29%____ 42%______ -$12,071_______ -0.09
K_____ 1072____ 31%____ 42%______ -$8,171________ -0.08
9_____ 1115____ 25%____ 44%______ -$6,002________ -0.06
4_____ 1110____ 40%____ 46%______ -$4,950________ -0.05
6_____ 1104____ 31% ____49%______ -$4,350________ -0.03
T_____ 1079____ 29%____ 45%_______ $55_________ -0.01
8_____ 1041____ 28% ____48%______ $2,633_________ 0
Q_____ 1154____ 31% ____46%______ -$3,171_________ 0.01
5_____ 1058____ 38% ____46%_______ $759__________ 0.01
3_____ 1091____ 44% ____48%_______ $165__________ 0.03
2_____ 1131____ 42%____ 51%_______ $4,718_________ 0.05
7_____ 1070____ 29%____ 49%_______$4,881_________ 0.08
A_____1077____ 80%____ 54%______ $29,432 _________0.33

What's interesting about this is that the top 5 are all used as low cards, and the bottom 3 are all high cards. Furthermore, all 8 possible low cards are the top 8 in Won $ when saw flop %. There are a couple statistical anomalies. I think the 4 should be doing much better. Maybe I am overplaying some hands (most notably A4) and getting second best too often. However, the 7 being my second best category is an obvious anomaly. I'm sure I've won some huge pots along the way that coincidently had 7's in it, but I expect it to fall down to the 6th to 8th place over time.

One thing to consider with all of these, is that many of the hands I do play with say a 6 in it also has an ace. This leads me to the most notable statistic in my opinion:

Hands __Times__ VPIP___ Won $ (WSF)___ Money W/L____ BB W/L per hand

w/ an A _1077___ 80%____ 54%_________ $29,432__________ 0.33
w/o an A_2810__ 19%_____ 39%________ -$28,875__________ -0.11

and even if you only look at the hands I saw flops with

w/ an A_ 858________________________ $32,459__________ 0.45
w/o an A_539________________________ $1,129__________ -0.03

By looking at this data (along with many other studies) I think I have improved my short-handed game, and I expect all of these numbers to improve over time. However, one thing will never change and that is the immense power of the Ace in Omaha 8.