Bomb pots in poker: how they work and how to play them

1. Every player puts in the bomb, an amount the table sets in big blinds.
2. The cards are dealt as usual: two each in Hold'em, four or more in Omaha.
3. There is no betting before the flop. Nobody folds, calls or raises there, and the flop is dealt at once.
4. From the flop on the hand plays as normal. The first player still in to the left of the button acts first, and the turn, the river and the showdown follow.

A table that runs bomb pots plays its other hands as normal, with the blinds and a round of betting before the flop. The table decides how big the bomb is and how often one comes round.

Most of WePlay's no-limit Hold'em cash tables are bomb pot tables, with the name in the lobby, such as Munich Bomb Pot (3BB) #2. The table information gives the rule as Bomb pot ante 3BB, so on a bomb pot hand each player puts in three big blinds. The tables seat eight and run from $0.01/$0.02 to $1/$2, with buy-ins of 30 to 100 big blinds, and the other hands carry a small ante beside the blinds: $0.01 at $0.02/$0.04, $0.05 at $0.10/$0.20, $0.12 at $0.25/$0.50 and $0.48 at $1/$2.

We watched the $0.02/$0.04 table for about twenty minutes. Four of the 20 hands we saw were bomb pots, about one in five: the pot held three big blinds from every player the moment the cards were dealt, $0.96 with eight players, and the flop came a second later. The other hands were played as normal, with the blinds and betting before the flop. The table information gives the size of the bomb, not how often it comes.

WePlay also runs Omaha bomb pot tables: PLO from $0.01/$0.02 to $0.50/$1 and PLO5 at $0.01/$0.02, with buy-ins of 80 to 200 big blinds. When we looked at the lobby, the $0.25/$0.50 Hold'em bomb pot table averaged pots of $30.42 and the $0.10/$0.20 table $15.73, with every seat taken or one short.

The bomb changes how deep the money is against the pot. Take a full table of eight at $0.10/$0.20, each player with $20, the most the table allows. A bomb of three big blinds is $0.60 from each player, so the flop comes with $4.80 in the pot and $19.40 behind each player. That is a stack-to-pot ratio of about 4: a pot-size bet on the flop and another on the turn put in all but 20 cents of a stack. A player who bought in for the $6 minimum has $5.40 behind, a ratio of about 1, and one pot-size bet leaves 60 cents.

In a normal hand the flop usually comes with fewer players and a smaller pot, so the ratio is far higher. At a ratio of 4 or less, top pair and strong draws are hands to play for the whole stack, and folding a good hand to one bet gives up a large pot for little.

• Expect someone to have hit the flop. With seven other players in the hand, at least one of them holds a pocket pair or a card that pairs the flop about 97 times in 100; we counted it over 300,000 dealt flops.
• Bet your strong hands. The pot is big from the start and the stacks are short against it, so a good hand should build the pot rather than wait.
• Bluff less. A bluff has to get past every player behind you, and in an eight-way pot somebody often has enough to call.
• Play draws to the best hand. In a big pot with many players, the second-best flush or straight is the hand that loses the most.
• Use position. The button acts last on the flop, the turn and the river, and in a bomb pot that seat sees what all seven others do first.
• Keep more buy-ins. Every bomb pot hand puts more money in play, so the swings at these tables are bigger than at a normal table of the same stake.

In Omaha bomb pots every player holds four or five cards, so the winning hand is stronger again: Omaha rules has a table of how strong it gets with each extra card.