I was wondering if anyone could answer a quick question for me?

My friend is very new to live PLO, he hasn’t done any extensive studying. The live PLO games he plays are very soft (1/3 and 3/5 PLO) he has made $60,000 dollars playing about 620 hours.

My question is regarding variance regarding live PLO. If we only see about 15-17 hands per hour playing live PLO, it would take 2000 hours to see about 32,000 hands. How many hands do we need to approximately gauge our true hourly within reason? 100,000 hands? 150,000? Considering the soft games and how close the equities run playing PLO.

I’ve heard many different theories… PLO has 300% more variance than No Limit Hold’em. The edges in PLO are smaller than No Limit which is why the whales and action players gravitate towards PLO. The action players aren’t drawing dead in PLO compared to NL. The majority of situations in PLO are 60/40 run outs hence the massive amount of variance involved.

Thank you!

There's two types of good live games: The one where 3 or 4 ppl see a flop for 30-60 bb pf and then there is the one where everyone limps or calls a single raise and then 1 or 2 ppl refuse to fold post. The second game ends up having many more situations where you are much much better than a 60/40 favorite. They both may end up having the same profitability but the second game will have much lower variance.

https://www.primedope.com/poker-variance-calculator/

Great resource to get an idea of the variance over small sample sizes. A good sample would be 500K+ hands