Harder game is always going to come down to opponents and table selection. So the answer imo is that it depends on player pool more than the variant played.

Lol

I agree I have no desire to play 1/2/5/10 with 200 dollar stacks
That is bingo

But that's not a lot of live plo games

Although in order of what I'd prefer if they were my only 3 options

1)20 blind plo
2)never play poker again
3) 1/2 nl

I mostly play PLO now and have for many years. I have to admit I think NLHE is actually harder. There's a lot more bluffing, and a lot more tricky 'feel' decisions because there's a lot more situations where players don't have much.

You're 200bbs deep and your CO open with AQo gets 3bet by an aggressive player on the button. NLHE is full of tricky situations like this. PLO hands tend to be much more straightforward.

PLO requires a lot more natural math and logical reasoning skills to master it, compared to NLHE. NLHE requires a lot more hard work, learning and determination, compared to NLHE.

So NLHE is harder to master than PLO from a pure amount of time and effort needed to put into it point of view, whereas PLO is harder to master if you judge it
based on the percentage of the population who are capable of mastering it.

Conclusion: PLO is harder because far less people will ever be able to master it. NLHE is easier than PLO because many more people are capable of mastering it.

Put another way: PLO is very suitable for lazy gifted people, NLHE is very suitable for hard working not as gifted people.

All of the above are generalisations, so don't apply to everyone of course.

can't really argue with that.

i think its alot easier for people to be ok at NLHE compared to PLO. the game is just way more nuanced and you cant just play tight and then do whatever you want and have things work out compared to NL imo at least. also theres a huge contingent of pretty goodNL guys that have way too much ego to start from scratch at plo so the nl games remain much harder.

nl is harder because people are better at it

plo is harder because there are more game tree paths to navigate

PLO hands down tougher game.

I dont have a lot of experience with PLO but talking with people who crush the game it seems PLO is easier but the variance in any given session is off the charts. You have to be rolled much much deeper with PLO and be able to mentally handle it better than NLH. So in my probably worthless opinion they are harder in different aspects.

PLO feels more complex because of the multi-way aspect of it, but at the same time, you're kind of supposed to mostly nut-peddle in games where pots are often massively multi-way. For both NL and PLO, I don't think most people get that the correct adjustment preflop is to play way fewer hands.

I think getting to a high level in NL is easier because there's just much more study material out there. PLO has sensitivity to game conditions, so you can't just follow preflop charts. There are hands where I think calling vs raising (or sometimes folding) depends on being able to predict how many players will call if you raise and the probability of another raise coming from someone else.

Anyone who thinks PLO is Bingo, will probably never, ever get, that it simply isn't.

Even in games where players are sitting shallow, or games where players are sitting deep but there are maniacs who make it mega expensive to see a flop, there is still a lot of skill required to decide the correct plays.

The question I get asked most often by NLHE poker playing friends who are now playing some PLO is how they should play against such maniacs.

There *are* absolute correct answers to how, that relate to equities, dead money considerations, stack depths, buy in strategy, protection, and player profiling.

So even when it is "bingo" there is a huge amount of skill, knowhow and experience required in order to make the correct decisions.

For the most part, PLO cash games are not like that, they tend to play 100 to 500 BBs deep, and in these games you also need a wide range of skills and knowhow to master them.

Pre flop decisions are the easiest part of PLO. Not easy, but easiest, compared to post flop.
But I still see many players in PLO make bad pre flop decisions, because they don't fully account for stack depths, which are so important because you need to think ahead to what the SPR will be OTF. Also very important pre flop, even when deep stacked, are dead money and potential protection considerations.

Once you start playing higher and/or against very good players, you do then have to also start thinking about ranges, particularly in big spots on the turn and river, so in that respect PLO can be just as complex regarding bluffing and sniffing out bluffs as NLHE.

You also use blockers/have blockers used against you in PLO, again the higher you play and the better the opponent you play against, the more blockers become an important factor.

PLO is very multi layered and I stick by one of my earlier points, which is that you have to be naturally gifted in math and logic to have a chance of mastering it.

Board coverage of your hand and position are also huge in PLO pre flop. Not going to explain why ITT because it would be tapping the tank hard if I did.

How’s that?

It's hard to say. Both games present their own challenges.

For example, in PLO it's easier to defend against 3 Bets.

But also in PLO it's more difficult to play out of position.

For me it keeps coming down to this, if you only play the best hands in PLO, and get 4 callers, and you're all in pre, at best you're like 25% to win and 75% to lose, it doesnt matter how tight you are, when it's 4 ways, you're always a dog. Even if you wait for the flop and have tons of equity, so does everyone else, and you cant get them off it due to "Well, I'm priced in now, it's $500 more to win $2500" or whatever have to call pot odds they're getting.

You can say, "but I got it in with the most equity" well BFD, you're still a huge dog to win pretty much every time due to the fact no one folds.
Thus, it's bingo! If you only played AA in NLHE and everytime you did, you were all in pre against 4 others, you're still gonna go broke. That's just a mathematical fact. If you're always a dog to win, you cant win long term. This fact is literally how Vegas was built.

All your "board coverage" and "position" and "stack depths" "spr" etc. it doesnt mean squat when you're staring at 3 people all in and you have the best hand pre, you're still a massive dog to win the pot over the other three. And that's the majority of the hands.

Now, maybe that's just because Chicago PLO is just a bunch of idiots, I can see that. Maybe at the higher stakes there is real play, but can we at least agree, that at the lower limit local room PLO games, it's just an idiot-palooza shovefest? Where to see your edge show up you'd have to play a few years to get there?

So I'm willing to extend the olive branch this way, in low limit PLO games, you're playing bingo, at the higher far more serious stakes, it's very different. That's the best I can do.

And to you PLO crushers, congrats! I'm happy for you.

You're right that you can easily be an equity dog multiway AIP with the best hand and the same if the SPR on the flop is low so all players are pot committed, but you do want to take these spots, bankroll permitting.

That's really the issue in such games that you need a lot of buyins so that you can take these small edges over and over and handle some inevitable variance.

I have played in games like these live, but it was always either a $0.50/1 or a $1/$1 game where as you say, most players bought in 40 to 120 BBs and just wanted to get it in.

At $1/$2 (and above) I've found that stacks when the game starts are usually something like (7 handed) $100, $100, $150, $200, $350, $350, $500 and that usually the shorter stacks are the ones that are playing the tightest. Once the game has been going a few hours, there are often stacks between $750 and $2.5K at the table, with the blinds still at $1/$2.

So I think your outlook on PLO has been skewed by you seeing the lower stakes, short stacked games where players do just get it in a lot and even if you play your hands optimally your edge is really small and maybe zero after rake.

That type of game is terrible and you should avoid it, or if you play it, buy in for the absolute minimum so that your risk v reward is decent.

More starting hand combos, tho maybe it's simpler in other ways and i'm talking out of my ass

This is how I look at it. PLO is about hand construction, NLHE is range construction. If you're good with ranges then you can overbet/downbet to maximize EV. If you cant hand read for **** but understand how to construct good draws then you can really maximize EV in PLO. In NLHE sometimes you just have to pay off the fish with TPTK when he rivers some random 2 pair. In PLO you pretty much know if the river helped or hurt you so you can still rope in fish who think their flop set is still the nuts.

As a fulltime NLHE grinder who failed an attempt to convert to PLO cash I'd have to agree with you. The sheer size of combo's in a PLO range overwhelmed me and ultimately was the reason why I switched back to NLHE. I was always guessing the correct play, as opposed to NLHE where in my experience you can narrow someone's river range down to a couple of dozen combo's and deviations can quickly be identified.

I don’t know about these shovefest games, since most games I play start out something like 150-200bb deep and often end up with multiple players 500-1000bb deep and you basically never get preflop allins at that depth.

I find live NLHE to be a much simpler and nittier game, especially when deep-stacked. Also NLHE attracts much more misregs and mute grinders, which takes the fun out of it (although they are often easy to play against).

In my experience what happens is a couple of bigstacks collide with a couple of shorter stacks who decide they might as well just punt and try to gamble for a quadruple up. Now the big stacks are playing for a 300BB pot on the flop which means if either of you connect well you're also just getting it allin for a side pot.

wdym? are you suggesting that the appropriate way to bumhunt involves some softplay?

I think the vast majority of people who say things like this aren't actually winning or haven't been winning players for a long time. Being a winning player even at low stakes does not boil down to a simple cookie-cutter strategy. It just defies logic to think that's possible when less than 10% of players are actually winning. I'm not saying you have to be a super pro to beat 1/2, but you definitely have to be much better than the average player who plays a basic face-up strategy.

As for the topic at hand, I suspect PLO becomes a much more profitable game at higher stakes relative to NLHE. Since stacks go in much more often and you have less fold equity preflop, rake plays a much larger role. I know that's not exactly an answer to the question but it's one of the things that makes me less interested in considering a switch to PLO.

I think he means you should take their money while giving them a good time and making them feel like they only lost because of bad luck.

As opposed to all the twats who sit at the table and talk strategy and show off how much they know about poker and make the fish feel like fools who should go blow their money somewhere else

Interestingly enough, I switched from NL to PLO 13 years ago, still playing nl when it's all that's available and with the shift happening gradually over 5-7 years of mixing, and I feel the exact opposite.