Gates was a regular at the nightly poker games in his residence hall at Harvard. Allen recounts how he would win or lose hundreds of dollars in a night, and eventually dropped "thousands." But the games taught him how to bluff, which became useful later on.

Omaha is considered, by some, to be the hardest game of Poker to master. Of all of the different games of Poker, Omaha is for many the hardest to learn to play and the hardest to bluff in. It is played most often at fixed limits, like Texas Hold'em and pot limit.