PLO is easy to learn is has to be a joke surely or you haven't studied it much

It is wayyy tougher to learn and master than NLH which is a snooze fest and all just ppl memorizing charts
Good luck trying that in PLO

Do you guys not play any PLO games deep enough to have river bets? That is not flipping.

IMO, NLHE. Equities run closer in PLO, and additionally, betting pot is often the best play.

To the ppl pointing to more complexity due to more starting hands: What game is harder, 5-card or 4-card PLO? What about 10-card PLO?

They clearly haven't studied, watched or played alot of PLO or they play with complete donkeys
It's pretty laughable that ppl think NLHE is harder or that PLO is bingo lol. That just shows you don't know anything about how to play

Nl may actually be harder. For starters you have to manage to play NL without killing yourself.
But the people who think PLO is bingo are clueless about plo.

can confirm that the hardest part of NLHE is not falling asleep out of boredom of watching paint dry.

I think the people calling PLO bingo are reacting to the fact that starting equities run much closer as long as you avoid playing truly stupid starting PLO hands. If two players pre-flop avoiding the really bad hands choose to make it bingo by getting it in pre-flop they are less foolish than two NLHE players doing the same. That two players that want to gamble it all pre-flop are less likely to be punished for removing much of the skill.

NLHE only gives you one starting hand,

PLO gives you six starting hands,.....

so ,

PLO is easier, or, it is harder, ...... I forget which.

(Actually, PLO is MUCH easier, simply because it is more fun and entertaining ......

except for getting quartered with the nuts, which really sucks.)

I'm not agreeing with the Bsum guy, clearly its not a total bingo game, but I think it is much more so than a lot around here would like to admit. 6500 of live plo, what is that like, 150k hands or something? Not trying to come after you or whatever but that doesn't really seem like **** for understanding what the variance animal can really be like with PLO, esp live where there are (I assume) many more multiway pots.

NLHE tables under 5/10 arent that bad either "fun" wise. 5/10+ tho I generally agree.

I agree with natural math and I suppose I'll grant logical reasoning. But in regards to NLHE I'd say you left out generally speaking they have a lot more "creatively" gifted poker minds.

Calling NLHE players "less gifted" is pretty lol. The game is much more popular and has been around longer in a serious way. Being a winning mid to high stakes player at NLHE is much harder than PLO I'd think, or at least that's what my inferior "logical reasoning" skills seem to tell me .

PLO: too many ****ing cards

I'd estimate in the 200k range since maybe 1/3rd of those hours are short handed.

Paying 3 dollars a half hour in reduced time charge with 3 super passive bad plo players in a 4 handed game is an awesome experience.

NL players will also never be able to play that many hands live either so there will also be a sample size issue for them.


I agree plo variance is super high.So are win rates.


The high variance in plo makes even regs/decent players play unbelievably atrociously at times in ways I never saw from similar nl players. And It sends bad players straight off the deep end.

5/10 nl+ is a special kind of torture from an entertainment standpoint but most lower stakes games look utterly miserable as well.


I'm not saying there aren't times a game doesn't devolve to bingo -but most plo games aren't like that.

I feel like the bingo comment should apply more to any 100bb game, so typically online* and especially in 3 bet pots. But the truth is that if your are constantly running sims on propokertools and are familiar with equities in common situations, then you will find yourself on the right side of a lot 4-3 and 2-1 spots. When you consider how much more often you get all your money in a game of plo this is just printing money. You then throw in the situations where you are a 38%+ favorite in 3 way pots and its extremely profitable. Yes, high variance, but very profitable.

You would be surprised just how big a favorite that a nut flush combo draw can be over lesser draws.

*Most good live games allow you to buy in deeper.

The main difference I think is in PLO post-flop you are always evaluating your hand strength relative to the nuts, so hand bucketing is a bit more basic in most spots. It's not simple to find the right frequencies of check/bet/raise across the different buckets, but in Holdem there is a wider variety of hand strengths that are in play in most spots, so that makes it more difficult to my mind.

In the end they're both very difficult games. It's not chess vs. checkers, but more like chess vs. go.

lol AT IT EVER BEING HEADS UP OR 3 WAY

PLO = action
action feeds a junkies need
junkies do not care if they win or lose only that they feed the need

This why I love PLO6. It feeds me!

I thought the action junkies/lack of patience clowns all played HU because it allows them to play 80% of hands rather than fold 80% of hands

How much PLO do you play online?
Clearly not enough as I get 3 way and heads up alot at zoom and regular tables and that's not even at mid or high stakes lol
So many bad takes on a game most of you probably don't even study

PLO is far more complex

Yea I was gonna say online is mostly 2-3 way 3 bet pots.
Live is a totally different game.

Oh how I miss 7 handed covid plexiglass poker with 1 or 2 people away from the table.

I was still playing holdem at the time but yeah it was hella fun when the tables would randomly go five handed. Everyone just complained and made no attempt to adapt. The only downside was parx strict enforcement of 3rd man walking rule. If you had to go the bathroom and two people had just gone to go smoke weed in the parking lot or whatever, you were **** out of luck.

It's harder to become decent at PLO, but it's harder to become elite at NL.

Learning strong thought-processes, handreading, obviously preflop ranges, etc. are more complex and nuanced in PLO, but you can effectively play PLO at an elite level without any randomizing/rolling. Playing NL at an elite level requires studying and executing proper freqs for various mixed strategies on all streets, and is therefore less logic-based and way harder to execute near-perfectly, plus there are infinitely more nodes in NL due to infinitely more betsize options.

It seems that those that are mad that plo goes 4 or 5 ways to the flop are the same kind that are mad when they get called pre flop by 3 shitty hands in holdem. Yea in PLO those hands might have more equity, but if you're any good you should be able to crush it when they make a hand worse than urs. just get better

I just remembered playing at parx and on the NL table behind me they were 5 handed with 2 people walking and some poker prodigy was giving his dissertation on why 5 handed sucks "when you finally pick up the pocket aces and raise nobody else has anything".

PLO doesn't make sense to NLHE specialists because they have to go against some of the heuristics that work well in hold em. For example, always raising with aces preflop is mostly correct (but 100% correct) in NL, but can get you into trouble if you follow it in PLO. I know a decent NL player who admitted that he stayed away from PLO because he doesn't like to fold sets.

Some players also seem incapable of learning that there are bet sizes other than "pot" in PLO, so they end up putting themselves in bad spots by unnecessarily bloating the pot, magnifying the cost of their mistakes.