In HE and its variants, you start with two cards. In Omaha and its variants, you start with four cards. Why isn't there anything in between? A game where you started with three cards could be a good intermediate step for players used to HE but interested in branching out to Omaha. Going from 2 to 4 cards is a very steep learning curve.

Also, in the little time I've spent thinking about it, three card poker could have some unique strategy elements to it, making it interesting in its own right.

There are, see pineapple for example. Or 7 card stud.

Lazy Pineapple.

A lot of games are here today due to a mixture of chance and popularity. Maybe such a game like 3-card Omaha was not that interesting to play, or that it was "unlucky" to not make it as a commonly spread game.

I wish they spread 3 card brag somewhere.

We've tried 3-card NL Omaha. It's a fun game.

However, using 3-card as a prep for 4-card is probably insufficient since you're going from 3 combos to 6 combos, which is huge. The few times we played 3-card Omaha I don't think anyone had a wrap or big combo draw hand.

So perhaps the problem with 3-card omaha is that there's no market for it: Action junkies want Omaha, while hold'em people want hold'em.

However, I would like to see NL 3-card Omaha given a chance.

Pineapple and CP would be the best poker games ever, but the discard slows the game down a little bit.

Hey there Mat. The question is a hard one to state clearly, because there is a big difference between starting with 3 cards and starting on 3rd street: in Stud you being with 3/7 of a hand, but in Pineapple and omaha you begin with a selection of two-card holdings, each of which represents 2/7 of a hand. The extra hole-cards don[t increase the street number. Similarly, if you deal multiple flops, or turns, you are still on the flop or turn, so the street number has not increased even though the number of cards in view has. Each street represents just one part of the final hand, regardless of how many extra cards are in view. So the standard,definitions of streets as being either "cards" or "communal upcards" are inaccurate

Unfortunately Doyle unwittingly introduced a conflicting usage which makes "street" almost useless for this type of discussion, but if you count the streets stud-style, then holdem omaha and pineapple are all seven-street games which begin on 2nd Street.

If the question was restated as "why are seven-street games which begin on third street so unpopular compared with those that begin on second-street"" that's a question that's IMO easy to answer: they have too many rounds of play - five in total, compared with four in the flop games - and there is no draw to five cards at the second round, which is unsystematic in a game based on five-card combinations.

That's not a popular view among Stud players BTW, who generally speaking cannot accept, or don't care that the traditional way of dealing Stud condemns it to a tiny market share.