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This is one of the most fundamental mistakes you see bad Omaha players make over and over again. They look down at aces, make a big re-raise pre flop, then lose a massive pot on a scary board to someone else's flopped monster.

As you will quickly realise when you first start playing Omaha, learning how to play big pairs is critical if you don't want to go broke very quickly.

The key thing to understand about Omaha is that no hand is actually very strong pre flop. Unlike in hold'em where you have a limited number of possible hands, all with a reasonably straight forward percentage chance against each other, in Omaha you have vastly more hand combinations, and it is rare for you to ever have more than a 60% edge pre flop.

As a result of this, Omaha is a game built much more around the flop, turn and river, and around the big, five card hands of poker like straights, flushes and full houses.

Because of this, one pair is not usually a very good hand in Omaha, and getting your whole stack in post flop with just an over pair is often a recipe for disaster. Mostly in Omaha you are looking to try and hit sets with big pairs, or to try and make nut flushes with your aces.

This brings up the next key point about playing aces in Omaha, which is that not all aces are equal. A hand like AcAsJc10s is hugely more powerful than a hand like AcAs7hJd. In Omaha you always want the whole of your hand working together, with as many possible hands to be made as you can, and as a result your aces have to be considered in the context of the other cards, not just on the fact that you have a pair.

Omaha is a much less black and white game than hold'em, and as a result aces lose a lot of their power, yet still seem to hold the same mystique to players. The reality is that if you treat aces in Omaha like you do in hold'em you will go broke over and over again against even half decent players. Look to have your whole hand working together, try and disguise it well pre flop and hit big hands to put in those big bets.