I'm having a ton of fun, it may be the novelty factor but I cannot remember the last time I had chosen an evening of online poker over League of Legends.

Grunching: Michael, comparing players that signup on a site that they know they can never withdraw from to rec players on Pokerstars (that presumably still has a withdraw button) makes the comparison flawed.

Stud tends to have the fewest split pots of all games. Maybe you should start grinding that?

The reason 08 is less lucrative isn't because the rake is higher than in PLO - which if it is, it isn't by that much. The reason it's not lucrative is because there are basically no games running ever and when they do for stakes that matter it's 1 fish and 5 regs.

Quantify what you think the rake difference is between split hold em and regular hold em. Is it even as big as the difference between hold em and PLO? I suspect it isn't.

Sure if it was 95% of pots being raked it would be unbeatable. It's nothing close to that though unless people are repeatedly making huge mistakes. The biggest game right now is 2/5NL and looking through the past 100ish or so hands, only 8 were split pot and in two of those someone got quartered.

Lol. This is just nonsense. And is completely irrelevant.

Firstly, just to get it out the way that I've played and still play hundreds of thousands of hands of O8 and every Stud game, for years. (In regards to your silly suggestion. More than you. I do know what I'm talking about.)

Secondly, that's still just wrong. It doesn't matter, you can either have a very soft table with 5 spots, or a table with just 1 spot, but either way in a split-pot game you are still making less money as a winning player, because of many of the pots being split. Your ability to win money is reduced, just logically.
Especially if you want to factor in things like far more flops are seen in O8 than in NLHE. If every one of those flops are raked then the overall rake is just going to be higher and more difficult to beat.
This was evidently seen in something like how grinding O8 cash used to be great for rake races, rakeback and VIP points achievements, because you pay so much more in rake.
There are some places that do acknowledge this, and actually have a lower rake for O8 than LHE for example.

How often games run is a function of infinite other, mostly unrelated things. PLO is just a more popular game. That's separate.
Though the way that it does relate is that with the rake being as high it is, fewer cash games run online than they would otherwise, because people know that it's tougher/sometimes impossible to beat (unless the field is very soft, but that's why regs are rarely going to battle).

Obviously my saying 95% of pots split was an exaggeration. It was just an example to try and logically demonstrate to you how more pots being split means lower winrate capabilities.

The only thing you've made a case for is that split pot games tend to have higher rake - but the rake schedule is a very small component of the winrate ceiling in games. Hence why PLO for many years and probably still has a significantly higher winrate ceiling than nlhe.

The complexity of the game and the experience level of the player pool (both for recs and pros) are far more significant factors.

You were exaggerating with 95% but the proportions is the entire point and you're punting the issue when you use that kind of hyperbole.

To suggest that 08 is less lucrative than PLO because of split pots is as ridiculous as saying that razz is less lucrative than hold em because there're more streets of action and therefor more rake.

Correct me if I’m wrong but plo has higher win rate then nlh Bc has higher variance, also the gap between good and bad players is wider

LOL Razz is a 1 player wins a pot game just like hold em and plo. Comparing rake for razz to a split game just seems like you need an education on poker games. Rake is gonna be a ***** in any hi/lo format unless it's high stakes. Get your numbers right.....

I don't know about this bit:
But this does not seem to always be true:
That is, PLO might or might not have higher variance and/or win rates than NLH (I don't know) but the two issues - win rate and variance - are not going to be caused by each other.

For example, you can easily prove this by having two games with same win rate, but different variance:
GAME A: Alice loses $1 to Bob on literally every hand.
GAME B: Half the time Alice loses $100 to Bob, and half the time Bob wins $98

Both of these hypothetical games show the same win rate ($1 per hand) but very different levels of variance (0 in Game A).

But that is only true if your five opponents come from the same pool of players.

Your win rate would be significantly higher if you played split Hold'em with 5 kindergarten kids compared to NLHE with 5 pros.

So if split Hold'em would attract a higher percentage of very weak players than your average regular Hold'em game, your win rate might not be affected by higher rake.

If there is a player as bad as you say and loses 1$ per hand at nlh, if that same player played plo, he would most likely lose 2 to 3$ per hand, I think most ppl who have played both know bad plo players are far worse then bad nlh players as the game is more complex, then they would potentially deposit 2 to 3 times faster and the winners would win more and faster

I find PLO less complex because ranges are more obvious, making the math simpler. This statement may not be true against very good opponents.

But I think bad plo players generally play way more hands then a bad nlhe player just on the pure fact they get 4 cards so each hand to them seems playable, also they will have a tougher time bluffing in plo Bc ppl make the nuts far more often and won’t be folding esp to a bad player

Maybe seems to you to be less complex but most ppl who studied both know that isn’t true

To be clear, these days I am mainly a live cash game player who plays over 1000 hours/year of PLO with a live VPIP of maybe 20%. When I played online, I was more of a full-ring PLO nut peddler. Split hold em seems like it should be profitable in full ring with a few spots at the table who get quartered too often. I wouldn't want to play it at a short-handed table where most pots are heads-up to the flop. The best players will probably be the ones who are the most skilled at building the pot in a way that keeps at least one other player in to get chopped up by the winners of each board.

When you have a game where most pots are contested very multi-way, the players I choose to exploit are the ones who are too aggressive with marginal hands that they should be aggressive with in a headsup pot and players who act in a way that their hands are very face up to an astute player.

If I were to play against truly wretched players, I think I might prefer to play them in PLO8 rather than PLO if I had a choice. The gap between good players and bad players is wider in split-pot games than it is one-way games. The gap between good players and OK players is wider in the one-way games. Split hold em may be a problem for players who are fixated on isoing an opponent and stacking him in regular NLHE if they don't adjust.

Split hold em doesn't seem like it is much more than a novelty. It could make sense as part of a mixed game big bet lineup. Is there a mechanism for having players decided to rotation of games in an online mixed cash game?

This just proves you have no idea what you are talking about and have no intension of having the facts straight.
There has been threads here for years with petitions to stars to decrease rake for micro/small stakes especially for ZOOM PLO because basically no one was beating the rake. If you search here 2+2 you will easily find it.

The things you are talking about were true years ago when basically everyone was bad at PLO.
Say you play PLO ZOOM 6max and the rake is like 14bb/100 per player. Fish due to it lose style will pay closer to 20bb/100. So thats like 90bb/100 taken by Stars in rake from this table.
You need sick whales and 1. probably won't be enough or just be increadibly good to overcome such a sick rake.

The things you are taking about were true maybe 2013 (2014 maybe?) and before.

And those are the types of tables where the hands where every pot is chopped - games with people making fundamental mistakes, seeing too many flops, going to showdown way too often, etc.

Even if you were only interested in grabbing the low hanging fruit i think this has more opportunity than regular hold em. The only way it looks bad is if you have zero capacity to conceptualize the game on your own and plan on waiting 2 years for a training site to release course modules to hold your hand. At current activity levels let's be realistic it's not going to be anyones golden goose but the long bet here is that it picks up in popularity and you're one of the only guys able to hang in the larger games that start popping up and/or pick apart pros from other games who have yet to 'pay their dues'.

Again you state thinks as facts yet you don't understand what you are talking about . This game is just a version of Holdem and 2 boards being dealt makes some difference but less than you think. This game is just holdem variant so the skill celling isn't as high as you claim it is.

There are adjustments etc but it is a lot closer to Standard Holdem than say PLO.

Maybe it's not crushable any more. Maybe it's settled down to being comparable to NL at some stakes, and a rake trap in the micros like limit hold em (which is raked a lot less for the same blind levels). I wasn't making a bold claim about the profitability of omaha in 2018 - just that there was obviously a long period of time where despite the rake being far higher the game was still more profitable.

Rake is part of the equation. It defines the limits of how proficient 'the field' can be before the game is unbeatable. It's not even close to limiting factor wrt the profitability of split hold em at this point. It's success or failure rests entirely on how many recreational players it attracts.

If you're outraged by it you should have similar feelings about PLO.

Or like evaluating smoking and failing to consider it positive features like its relaxing properties and its delicious flavour.

The rake is the reason why I don't like the split games, although plo8 seems playable.

But the tournaments have no rake. Could be interesting there, also reducing variance and so the skill might set in more.

Other split ideas could be there also, like playing two tourneys at the same time and the combined score is the only score. So, winning the other tourney is meaningless in itself, as one usually makes no money even then. But it is possible to win the combined tourney by just getting in money in both tourneys. After dropping out too early in the other tourney, one can effortlessly give up the other one, as one won't get in money even if one wins it.

This would be scary to be part of. Or fun ?

Maybe it would be more interesting if no one won the pot if the pot was split?
Trying to scoop one gigantic pot might appeal to all the gamblers

when will the applicable piosolver update be released?

In case this is of any interest to anybody, I just ran a series of simulations to estimate how often Split Holdem will result in a split pot based upon the number of players.

In these simulations, all players go to showdown on every deal. Each simulation set consists of 1 million random deals.

Number of Players	Split Pot Pct
2	49.4%
3	66.0%
4	74.4%
5	79.3%

Thanks, whosnext, your simulations are always interesting.

This game sounds kinda fun. Are there play money tables for US players to try it out on?