Hi all,

I'm a fairly new poker player and I've been working so far on improving my NLHE game. My endgoal with poker would be to sugarcoat my current salary while having some fun.

However, as we all know, poker is a pretty challenging game nowadays even at the lower limits (at least for newer players like me), and I kinda wish I had started online poker 10 years ago when I was first exposed to it.

So here are my questions : Is PLO more profitable than NLHE these days (at micro/small limits) ? Is learning PLO a better investment than learning NLHE ? Should I focus on playing PLO rather than NLHE?

Indeed it seems that the bar in PLO is lower and there may not be as many solid players as the game is not as well understood as NLHE...maybe?

either you play a game that's been analysed to death, or play a game which hasn't but you get killed by rake, pick your poison

Rake isn't so bad if you play on Microgaming compared to more popular sites..

Like sixfour said, PLO rake at the micros is pretty brutal but like you've already figured out the games are a lot softer than NLHE.

Keep in mind if you have NLHE experience that PLO is a very different game that you'll need to learn.

planing your pot sizes is much harder at pot limit and more important. as it becomes a tougher game to play it well. but you win less than at no limit against worse players.

What do you mean by "win less against worse players" ? If the games are softer, shouldn't the skill edge increase your winrate? Or maybe you're alluding to rake and increased variance?

I would be playing on French rooms mostly, haven't checked out the rake for PLO though...but the games are possibly even softer there so it might be worth it.

Though PLO seems indeed like a different beast with much fewer litterature to rely upon...

Would I be wasting my time trying to get good at either NLHE or PLO ?

I maybe wrong, but I feel like there's a newfound interest in poker in France, with lots of fish to fry. And assuming the US will clear up on the legislation, I feel there could be another poker boom coming up. Maybe not as profitable as 10 years back, but still...any thoughts?

He just means that since the game is pot limit you might not be able to get your opponents' entire stack into the pot.

PLO should be the 2nd game. The main reason is that nlh is far more popular, including tourneys and live games. The 2nd (close to main still at this time) reason is the rake, both online and live.

Analysed to death? That was my worry, but I rather take my chances with nlh. I still play an occasional good plo game on one of my regular sites, but that's about it, it not being that popular anymore.

Tourneys are not analysed to death, but not sure if there is enough money to make it worth it (my score has so far been about 0.1 buy-ins per tourney entered).

The plo rake if 5%, eats all profits even in rather good games. Playable for profits with rakeback. But no such problems in those same nlh games.

You always bring this up but if you're only going to play non-expert players (99.99% of us) why does it matter?
(not sure if I've brought this up before)

OP there doesn't seem to be a consensus that one is more profitable than the other. Play whichever you enjoy more.

If you're only going to play the micros, you're probably right to some extent, but you can't disagree that the amount of work that's been done on NLHE in the last fifteen years has made the game much tougher to the point where we back when I played, questions about GTO are what colour it would be when you'd printed enough money to buy one, now questions about GTO are posted here every five minutes because people think it's applicable.

edit - you can also consider the amount of higher stakes games online decreasing, and the ability to counteract being unable to beat higher games by beating lots of smaller games at the same time decreasing because Stars seems to finally be getting that mass tabling isn't good for the game (even if they're implementing changes awfully)

I haven't seen anyone mention how much worse the swings are in PLO so I'll mention it. Play 100,000 hands of NLHE and then 100,000 hands of PLO. You'll realize that what you THOUGHT were huge swings in NLHE were drops in the bucket compared to PLO.

PLO is, IMHO, far more FUN than NLHE AINEC.

I don't like blanket statements that say one form is clearly more profitable than another. Profitability depends on one's skill level relative to the rest of the table, not on what game you're playing.

I have much more experience playing NLHE, but have played PLO as well a fair amount. I think that PLO games may be easier to beat, but from what I have seen there are far fewer PLO games, and as others have mentioned the rake is pretty terrible.

I would recommend "Perfecting" one game as much as possible, rather than being average at both. However, I do personally like mixing it up a bit, and playing some PLO just for a change and to have some fun.

Learning to play PLO with or without an NLH background can be financially embarrassing for a while. There are also a lot less tables offered online and live than NLH. I would learn NLH as well as I could first and then occasionally sit down to a PLO game. See how your game devvelopes. Personally I also really have a lot of fun with PLO , more than NLH, but I don't want to deal with the swings day in and day out.

PLO has been the game of the future since the 1980s. The way I put it is it is a game with all the bankroll crushing ability of no-limit hold 'em with the inability to protect against a draw of limit hold 'em. Combined with almost no hands are worse than a 60/40 underdog pf, volatility is going to be extremely high.

Plus it just isn't anywhere near the popularity of NLHE. If you just look at Dynasty's last poker survey in LV, out of 109 tables on the strip, 11 tables are limit hold 'em and only 4 were PLO. Off strip, there were another 81 games, none of which were PLO. There are actually more limit HE games off strip than NL games (27 to 22), so if there was a second choice among regulars, it is going to be limit. Omaha 8 or better was in third place off strip with 11 games.

Build your bankroll up in nlhe, then switch to plo when you have the room. You will learn fundamentals without loosing as much as you would while learning poker fundamentals playing plo.

Also so when you're bobby busto from playing plo, you can build your roll back up in nlhe