Does a player have to understand No Limit Holdem strategy (and at least be a descent NLH player) before attempting to learn Pot Limit Omaha? Or does one not really have much to do with the other?

There’s at least one coach, on one of the training sites (can't remember who it was, now) who said that given two students, a complete noob, who’d never played any poker at all, and someone else who’d played a ton of NLHE, it’s the first one who would have the best chance of getting good at PLO. In other words, to become good at PLO there’s a certain amount of ‘unlearning’ the NLHE game.

PLO is a different game. If you see it as some weird variant of NLHE, you’re heading for a world of hurt.

Of course, there’s a bunch of concepts you'll be familiar with from NLHE, which have PLO equivalents (ranges, opponent tendencies, hand reading, value betting, floating blah blah blah) so if you’ve played NLHE you’re going to know what the concepts mean, but their application in PLO is so fundamentally different that you could just as easily start from scratch and learn them in a PLO context.

The most important thing to understand is that the variance in PLO (the bad beats and the swings) is totally brutal, which means you need a bomb proof mental game and a bankroll somewhat bigger than for NLHE.

Arguably there’s some advantage, mental game wise, to getting some feel for the variance in NLHE (which is bad enough for most people) and only when you can cope with that, stepping into the chamber of horrors which is PLO.

Good Luck.

Thanks a lot for your response....I really appreciate your view on this. And you already answered my next question, which was about the variance. I figured it was worse than NLHE but I didn't realize how much worse it really is. Makes sense though, I mean how many times is my straight or flush NOT going to be good enough? Probably a lot!!!

Yeah, the swings/beats can play with your head, thats for sure.

Check out the PLO forum for some very nasty graphs.

BTW if you're looking for PLO reading material, you could do a lot worse than checking out PLO From Scratch.

Good Luck.

Personally, if I could go back I would have started with PLO. But that is probably because I don't play NL anymore except in some home games.

DiamondDog of course with the awesome posts. It's NOT a variant of NL which is how most people see it. And the variance is soul crushing if you aren't prepared for it.

So it sounds like you guys are saying if I think the variance is pretty crushing with NLHE....PLO would send me over the edge? @JEP714...can I ask you why you like the game so much? Is it more fun than NLHE? More lucrative? More challenging?

If you're looking for an alternative to NLHE because you hate variance, then PLO is definitely not the game you're looking for.

PLO variance is worse than anything you will ever experience with Holdem.

I think I like the game so much more because there is so much more to think about. I don't know. I like how the nuts change on every street, I like that top set can't just shove when there are flush/straight draws out there. I like that you have to pay attention to every street and can't just wait on premiums preflop. You have to play poker.

The game is more intricate imo, and that's why I switched over. It never feels like a grind.

where most go broke is not learning quick enough the difference in hand values between the two games.

no limit should prepare you for pot limit.