So I was watching an interview that was headed to the argentinian team pokerstars pro Nacho Barbero, he is a really good player, pretty solid in MTT.

In the Middle of the interview the interviewer asked him what does he play in pokerstars, if he played cash or mtt. But the answer shocked me he answered:

"I don't play NL Holdem online, it's too hard. I prefer playing Omaha, 8 game ,etc. "

So i am here to ask you if anyone feels the same and if this is normal in team pokerstars players?

Any recommendation in which poker game should i dig into?

Thanks in Advance.

I prefer mixed games like horse or 7/8 game. Lots of high stakes live games are mixed games. I personally love plo8, stud8 and razz a lot.

I can't understand why NLHE would be hard as it's pretty close to "solved" already

Yes exactly, that's what i was thinking of. But i think he's talking about the level of the players in NL Holdem. Maybe people playing mixed games or other types of poker aren't in general as good as in Nl Hold'em.

I think it's because in Ohama for example you are usually not worse than 40/60 in terms of equity... and rarely 30/70. Whilst in NLHE your reading skills because significantly more important as you could be easily 20/80 underdog or even drawing dead.

Oh... Ohama is softer aswell I think

All versions of chinese poker are far closer to being "solved" than NLHE and the game is still wildly popular and juicy.

It's hard to even accurately talk about the state of NLHE online right now because at the moment literally millions of players are shut out from being able to play online. The impact of Black Friday is in my opinion massively more influential on the state of online games than the general increase in skill of online players over the past few years.

6max online is also gaining momentum rapidly in popularity, and for good reason. I wouldn't say 9max has gotten harder, but it's definitely gotten massively nittier and reg infested. There's a reason people call it nit ring.

6max and shorter handed cash games however are still very far from solved, and I don't think you can even really approach those games with a purely mathematical mindset at all. I'd say over 60% of my big decisions in 6max come from a psychological perspective, not a mathematical perspective. And I'm a winning player in $2/$4 and $5/$10 6max this year, my first year playing those stakes online.

Also there is no point in talking about tournament NLHE being "solved" other than to say that the average tournament players are extraordinarily terrible compared to the average cash game players and that the average tournament player would probably not last 3 orbits if they took their buyin to a cash game table instead.

Nacho does have a point though that right now you can find the biggest skill gaps between players at the same table in the other games, the majority of people who are playing NLHE today have at least some idea behind basic strategy and even today you can still find Omaha players who are ready to gamble at the game as much as they do at NLHE and who do not know that you can't make a hand using only 1 card from your hole cards.

However at the moment(and there is likely an exception for the very high-stakes games) I believe that the popularity of NLHE outweighs the impact of the higher average level of skill for the best players at the game.