5 Sep 2010

Last year I published some magic decks for Texas Hold’em Poker, today I had a crack at finding similar decks for Omaha Poker (read the Hold’em page first to get an overview of what this is all about).

For those who don’t know what Omaha Poker is, it’s very similar to Texas Hold’em except players are dealt four cards, and must use exactly 2 of their own cards with exactly 3 of the table cards to make their hand.

The results were quite successful, here is a deck for which no matter how it is cut, the dealer will always win in a four player game:

A spades. J hearts. 6 spades. J spades. 7 spades. 2 hearts. 9 clubs. 6 clubs. 2 diamonds. J diamonds. 5 diamonds. 8 clubs. 4 hearts. T diamonds. 3 diamonds. A hearts. 5 clubs. 8 hearts. 2 clubs. K spades. 7 diamonds. Q hearts. Q spades. 8 diamonds. 4 diamonds. K diamonds. 6 hearts. T clubs. 2 spades. Q diamonds. 5 spades. J clubs. 3 clubs. T hearts. 7 clubs. 6 diamonds. 5 hearts. A clubs. 4 clubs. 9 hearts. A diamonds. 7 hearts. 8 spades. K clubs. 4 spades. 9 diamonds. 3 hearts. K hearts. 3 spades. T spades. 9 spades. Q clubs.

A deck has now been found for any position up to 6 players.

A common remark from viewers of the hold’em decks has been that they will be even more useful/interesting if other players are dealt very strong hands in most cuts, that’s even more relevant to Omaha. In Hold’em it’s not too uncommon for a player to go all in with just two pair, in Omaha you’ll almost never see that happen without either a huge draw or the top few nuts. For now the algorithm is too sluggish to bother with this goal (it’s basically just a hack on top of the old one).

You can see all the decks found by clicking on the table cells below, the vertical axis is the number of players while the horizontal axis is the player to win.