Rules and Pot-Limit Math

Exactly two from your hand. Always.

Omaha deals you 4 cards, and that is the only generous thing about it. To make a hand you must use exactly 2 of your four cards plus exactly 3 of the 5 board cards. Not one. Not three. Two.

Rule of the game: every showdown hand = 2 hole cards + 3 board cards. There is no exception and no situation where "playing the board" is allowed.

This is the definition of Omaha, not a heuristic. Our evaluator enforces it: it scores all 6 two-card pairs from your hand against all 10 three-card triples from the board — 60 combinations per hand — and takes the best one (our own Omaha equity engine).

Why this is the very first thing you learn: the misread it causes costs money on day one. Board K♠9♠4♠2♠8♥ shows 4 spades.

• You hold A♠K♦7♣2♥ — 1 spade in hand. The engine scores this as two pair. You do not have a flush. You do not have any part of a flush.
• You hold A♠5♠7♣2♥ — 2 spades in hand. Now the engine scores a flush, and it is the nut flush.

Same board, same ace of spades, one card different, and the difference between a stack and a fold. Read your own hand before you read anything else.

How a pot bet is actually sized

Every example in this camp uses the same table: six-max cash, blinds 1/2, 100 big blinds deep (200 chips). All amounts below are raise-to totals — how much you have in this street when the action is done, not how much extra you push forward.

It folds to you in the cutoff. The pot is 3 (the two blinds) and it costs you 2 to call. Work it in three steps:

• Put your call in first. Pot after your call = 3 + 2 = 5.
• Pot-limit caps your raise increment at that number. So the most you can raise on top is 5.
• Add them up. You put in 2 + 5 = 7. Your maximum legal raise is to 7 — that is 3.5 big blinds, the biggest opening raise this game allows.

Maximum raise-to = (what you already have in this street) + (pot) + 2 × (what you owe). The minimum here is to 4: a first raise must be at least one big blind bigger than the current bet.

Formula and both worked examples verified against three independent public rule pages before a line of code was written; the derivation and the quotes are in docs/M2-SOURCES.md section T20. The calculator itself is js/core/plo-pot.js, and every number on this page is its output — not arithmetic done by hand.

In no-limit hold'em the size of your raise is a strategic choice. In pot-limit Omaha it is first an arithmetic one: you cannot invent a size, you can only pick one inside a band the rules hand you.

The shortcut, and where it lies to you

Someone opens to 7. Two players now face the same raise, and the answer is not the same for both.

On the button (nothing invested yet): pot is 10, you owe 7, you have 0 in. Maximum raise-to is 24, minimum is 12.

Shortcut: triple the last bet, then add the pot that was there before it. 3 × 7 + 3 = 24. Same answer as the engine, in one line.

Only when you have put 0 into this street. That is true on the button, the cutoff, under the gun — anywhere you have not posted a blind and have not raised yet.

In the big blind it is wrong. Facing that same open to 7: the pot is 10, but you owe only 5 because your blind of 2 is already out there. Pot after your call is 15, so the real maximum is to 22 — the shortcut said 24. The other popular formula, "pot plus three times the call", gives 10 + 3×5 = 25, which is wrong in the other direction. The minimum is to 12 either way. When you are in a blind, do the three steps; do not trust the shortcut.

And the stack can cut the answer short. Same big-blind spot but you only have 15 behind: all in is 17, so the largest legal raise is to 17 even though a full pot raise would have been 22. Pot-limit gives you a ceiling; your stack can give you a lower one.

What to take away

Follow one hand all the way up. You open to 7. The button three-bets the full pot to 24. Back to you: the pot is 34, you owe 17, so your minimum four-bet is to 41 and the full pot four-bet is to 75. Make it and you have 125 chips behind — 62.5 big blinds of a 100 big blind stack, still sitting there for three streets of poker.

That last number is the one to keep. Pot-limit cannot get all the money in preflop from a normal stack, which is why the stack-to-pot ratio (SPR) is a preflop decision even though it is a postflop word. C5 picks it up from here.

• Exactly two hole cards, exactly three board cards. Read your own hand first.
• Three steps for a pot bet: add the call to the pot, raise by that much, add what you already had in.
• The triple-the-bet shortcut only works with nothing invested. In a blind, or after you have raised, it overshoots.
• Your stack is a second, lower ceiling. Check it before you say "pot".