I have a question I’d like to throw out to a few groups of people, so I can get a wide range of answers:

The money in any cash game comes from the bad players. If we accept that as true, then what cash game do you think will be more profitable in ’08 – NL hold’em or pot limit Omaha?

In my opinion, the fishyness of the bad NL hold’em players has markedly declined. This is due to two reasons - mostly due to the resources serious players have with which to improve their game (books, videos, forums, Cardrunners/Stox) but also due to the fact that bad players just go broke playing no limit poker against good players.

PLO players don’t have the resources to improve like hold’em players do. That means players like me, hold’em players moving to PLO, don’t have the resources to fall back on, either. Also, the total pool of PLO players is just a fraction of the total pool of hold’em players.

So now to the crux of the matter - Dan Harrington is coming out with two volumes on NL hold’em cash games. While I eagerly await these in hopes that they will help hone my NL hold’em game, I know that the other regulars at Poker Stars et. al. will be reading them and polishing their game as well.

Many people say that for every player who studies Action Dan’s books and improves their game with them, there will be five players who just flip through them, misapply the concepts and continue to donate.

So my fellow Anglers & Angle Shooters, where will the fish be in ’08? Or perhaps a better question is where will the good players have the gibbers advantage over the bad players - NL hold’em or pot limit Omaha?

The reason for the decline in profitability in NLHE is more to do with the closing of the USA. It's now very hard for the recreational donk to deposit money and so NLHE games have a much higher % of winning players than they did in 2006. PLO has the "potential" of being more profitable but the way it is played at present, the variance is just enormous. 30-50BI downswings are commonplace. Most NLHE guys would find these vomitastic.

In general, I would say that the very biggest games of any type, limit or big bet, will remain having soft spots. Everything below it will be a grind of one kind or another.

gl

bdd

Big Dave, another reason that NLHE games have become tougher is that the standard of playing is so far ahead of where it was a few years ago. This factor is overlooked by alot of ppl but it is most definitely the case.

lol nice

it will be a glorious fishy day when the US finally makes some sort of carveout for online poker or repeals the bill completely.

Just play PLO -- you get 4 cards not 2 so its more fun.

I think Omaha is, and will be, moreprofitable simply because the the hand to hand edge in terms of % is smaller so bad players feel like they always have a chance.

For an extreme example... lotteries. It's incredibly negative EV but people buy it anyway for teh high variance "to get lucky."

Hold'em doesn't offer people as many chances to get "lucky"

That said, NLHE is definitely slowly crawling toward the point where even an average player on the table knows at least what good poker looks like. They are no longer as clueless as they used to be.

Its already there imo

I disagree. I think it's just that they good to average players are no longer diluted by the merely bad to the immense donks. It feels the same but the underlying reason is different. Having mildy murdered the Crypto games for up to 10-20 in 2006, I barely played a hand there in 2007. All the US bookmaker fish had gone, leaving just the ugly Euro regulars.

gl

bdd