PLO way harder, but NLH competition tougher

Very true.
When I was first playing PLO I potted everything. There are definitely board textures and spots where it makes sense but there are tons of spots where it's stupid and just let's your opponent play perfectly and as you said gets you in trouble.

Yes, but you also must recognize places where not betting the pot also lets your opponent play correctly. And then there's the need to balance ...

Have been playing lot of PLO AND NL recently...

PLO is a game of prayer, discipline and game selection - it's actually pretty easy once you understand how it works and then you need to pray to run good + find great games.

Reg battling and winning lots at PLO are two very different stories and reg battling is always very hard to do. Need to be one with the game and have the love of battle in you to successfully do that but the programs make it so much easier than it used to be to improve on your end. I can't believe I had to learn poker without the training programs and solvers.

NL is a game of playing very tight and then crushing fish who blunder + repetition. Finding the games consistently is the biggest challenge.

Reg battling and winning lots at NL are also very different - if you want to beat the best regs then it is very hard to do and I think harder than it would be at PLO unless you are playing PLO very deep stack regularly. The best NL players are very good at getting you to parts of the game tree where you will make big mistakes.

omfg were LOSING papi to the dark side. DO NO GO GENTLY INTO THE DARK, RAGE RAGE AGAINST THE CADILAC

Voting NLH considerably harder. Some of this question is about personality and natural strengths, surely. You have to be able to play nothing (or close to nothing) well and aggressively in hold'em. PLO not so much. So natural aggression is more critical. With the hands you get in PLO, that really isn't a problem. If you aren't froggy to ship with all those 10 to 20 outers to the nuts ... you can't play it. Small ball hold'em is better suited for you then.

NL is harder at the moment, that's why people play PLO.....because people play plo so badly

Wow there's a lot of people who completely misunderstand PLO in this thread. FWIW, I used to think the same thing, that PLO was just "flipping coins for stacks" until I quit my job in 2019 to play for a living and started vlogging it last year.

Look, it CAN be coin-flipping for stacks in some lineups. I've sat in games where nitwits are turning a 1/2/5 into a 1/2/5/10/20/40/80/160/320 where the skill edge post-flop doesn't matter because you're playing for stacks pre or creating such a low SPR post-flop that you hit any piece you're going with it.

So yes, you CAN play the game like a chucklehead with no skill and take your 55/45 spots all day. Ideally though, if you can control the pot preflop so it doesn't get out of control, you can see flops with reasonable stack depth and play actual poker. You'll get people in spots where you're 70, 80, 90% equity favorite for stacks, or sometimes they're outright drawing dead.

As to which game is harder, I think NL Hold Em requires stronger reading skills and positional aggression/bluffing. While PLO requires you to be more adept at board textures and calculating outs and being disciplined in hand selection.

They can both be hard, just in different ways, requiring different skillsets to succeed.

Hold em you do need to be a knuckle dragger who jumps up and claps for themselves loudly when you win a $30 pot though. While in PLO when you lose thousands to a 1-outer as a 97.5% equity favorite you just reach into your wallet and reload.

I don't understand this argument that NL has more skillful bluffing. Something tells me a lot of people in this thread haven't put too much thought into PLO with all of the blockers and reverse blockers.

I could be wrong, but I don't understand why PLO would be less nuanced when it comes to bluffing with air. In NL, there are spots on turn and river where you bluff with hands that unblock suits, or unblock floats and folds. I don't understand the argument why PLO would be inferior computationally.

One thing that I would see as simpler about PLO is many 3bet and 4bet pots often have a low enough SPR where the decision is kind of obvious compared to NL.

Because generally in PLO you prefer to be playing in pots where you are value-betting opponents who are stacking off with top and bottom pair, idiot ends of the straight, 8-high flushes and underfulls.

If I need to utilize a lot of bluffing in my PLO game then it's against opponents capable of finding folds, which means they're generally players thinking more than the fish I really want at the table who are stacking off light.

So yeah, I'll run naked ace bluffs or blocker bluffs against VERY specific opponents, but generally I don't want a table made up of those type of opponents, I want it made up of loose calling stations I can take to value-town

your argument applies to the status of the games. early NLHE metagame played similar a couple of decades ago where you never needed to bluff and guys were making a ton of money nut peddling. obv these days even fish understand some basic NLHE concepts as the game is much more explored


this pertains to any form of poker, not the complexity of the games

100% this. I'm 99.9% PLO only now.

Why spend time trying to grind a game the fish have gotten so much better at?

I for one never said for there is little bluffing or skill in PLO. I did say that there are WAY fewer times in PLO that you are involved in a hand with nothing much and/or simply betting that they have nothing. I expected a piling on of the wrong point, and got it. So many of the little games are just shove fests/short stacks where this is little intricate play involved. Deep stack way different, of course. I'll say a weaker player has a better fighting chance in PLO than when he's outclassed at hold'em, even over a decent stretch of hands.

This question is badly formed and thus people are talking about completely different things. If the question is about which game is the hardest to make a meaningful profit from in online games today, then the answer is, I don't know, probably NLHE. If the question is about the complexity of the game itself, or in other words: in which game would you lose the most to a GTO solution, then the answer is not even close. Even PLO specialists would probably end up losing threefold more to a table full of perfect PLO players than if they were to try Hold'em.

Doesn't the PLO GTO solution have less mixes though? Like the combos are mixing more like 75/25, 50/50, etc. where in NL you have all of these like 60/40, 55/45, etc. Curious. I've seen a couple of PLO solvers but the mixing seemed to look like that but I haven't looked at much.

Mixing with your specific hand is irrelevant in PLO, and that is precisely why playing against a GTO bot would be 3-5x more punishing. You don't get punished for mixing errors vs a GTO solution, only pure mistakes.

Good to know. Black and white postflop answers are more appealing to me anyway even if there's a ton more combos to deal with. RNGing postflop in NLHE gave me a headache.

PLO ftw

Case closed

Nonsense. If you mix 100/0 in a 1/99 raise/call spot you obviously get punished (lose EV) vs GTO. And even though that was an extreme example to make a point, the same applies to all other "wrong" mixes.

This is not accurate, because the solver responds according to the assumption that you use the correct 1/99 frequency, it doesn't make exploitative adjustments.

Yeah, as usual PG has the most concise and perfect answer.

So solver expects you to raise 1% of the time in a hypothetical 1/99 spot and calls down accordingly. If you start raising 100% of the time you wont lose EV?

That is correct.