Omaha vs Holdem Winrates
Hello,
Is Holdem or Omaha is more profitable? I heard JNandez say Omaha players have two times the winrate than Holdem.
Is there any way of finding reliable statistical information, like poker player tracking websites?
If you are equally skilled within the two formats and are at a casino with two equally good games what format will provide the highest ROI?
There is less live Omaha games than Holdem here in Las Vegas. Could this likely mean your yearly highest profit would be from Holdem even though Omaha may be more profitable when there is a game?
Thoughts?
4 Replies
This question isn't really answerable in the abstract. Poker is a zero sum game (minus the rake), so the combined win rate of all players at any game is simply going to be the rake. Are you comparing the win rate of the best 1% of Omaha players to the best 1% of Holdem players? Or the best 5%? That said, Omaha is a far less common game and is typically associated with lots of action, so I would expect that a player who was equally skilled in both Omaha and Holdem would have a higher win rate at Omaha because the bad players are going to lose much bigger. Even casual Holdem players have some idea of proper ranges (whether they follow them or not is a different story), but you'll still see bad Omaha players opening J843 suited to the 8 UTG, because It'S SuITed ANd CoNNecTEd!
I'm afraid this question is meaningless. But any question where the options are PLO or NLHE, the answer is almost always going to be PLO
Why though? I can easily see NLHE being softer. Then again, I live in the land of PLO.
I agree that the original question is meaningless. Omaha also has twice the variance, so perhaps a NLHE-player can play stakes doubly as high. Just choose a game and improve your skill. Advertisers gona advertise.
Their relative softness will lie in relation to other. If poker is a giant ecosystem, then each game constitutes a subecosystem with inflows and outflows between each other. For me, the flow was essentially in one direction, as i played NLHE for the first year and then went to PLO. given more simple and more popular appeal of NLHE, it's going to be relatively unlikely that the opposite direction is travelled frequently in that first step. after that, some will revert back to NLHE due to variance or just not enjoying it or whatever; some will stay lifelong PLO converts, like me, playing 99.99% of their poker career hands on it afterwards; some will dabble in both, with PLO as their main game; some, relatively few, keep their hand in with PLO and are good enough to beat most games, but seek to stay in their specialist zone with NLHE.
So you've got multiple in and outflows at any one time. Strong NLHE players temporarily abandoning their games to crush lower stakes PLO games that come with higher absolute variance. PLO sickos who need a break from the variance or see a big NLHE fish rock up in the casino.
The equilibrium point is going to be constantly varying, but in general the ratio will hold, on the basis that NLHE is more appealing, and PLO is more technical, with higher variance and higher winrates, meaning the fish go broke faster, which is another conflating factor