Today, most poker rooms will have about 80-90% of their cash games as No Limit Texas Hold’em. In one sense, NLHE has advantages that make it a marketable game to masses of players. The game has rather simple rules in that each player gets two hole cards, there are five community cards, and players make their best 5-card hand of the seven total. Also, it follows the three rules that tend to secure a good gambling game: 1) The game must be easy to learn. 2) There are complex strategies that ensure better players win over the long run, and 3) a long-term losing player is able to sometimes win (this reinforces the idea that they can win, which encourages more play. Think how effectively this works for casinos with slots, blackjack, craps, etc.) Now, the question for any hold ’em player is, since hold’em is so common and has mass interest, is it worth it to broaden your poker horizons to learn about the other games?
PLO as the “Gateway Game”?
The first variant players learn after hold’em is almost always Pot Limit Omaha. The reason for this is that PLO is functionally similar to Hold’em: PLO is a flop game that has a big bet format rather than fixed limit. Additionally, PLO is currently the second-most popular game, which means that most large card rooms often have PLO available.
The changes from hold’em to PLO are also relatively manageable for new players, so they can be picked up on readily. The first wrinkle in PLO is that players receive four hole cards rather than two. Let’s call those cards A, B, C, and D. The ways they can be arranged are AB, AC, AD, BC, BD, or CD. This means that on every PLO deal, a player will consider six possible combinations of hold’em starting hands, allowing more flexibility, creativity, and fun.
Next, the maximum bet is the size of the pot rather than the overbetting permitted in NLHE. This makes a player more aware of pot limitations and what pot size raises would look like.
Finally, in PLO a player must use two cards from their hand and three from the board to make a 5-card hand. This can occasionally confuse newer players in scenarios that seem familiar, such as when four to a flush appear. In this specific scenario, they may have a naked Ace of that suit, and think they have a nut flush but don’t because they still must use two from their hand.
The net effect is the game is more interesting because it allows more combinations, more action, and new opportunities (in the example above, when a player has a naked ace with a flush on board, PLO presents this as an awesome bluffing opportunity to scare off other hands). Moreover, by learning a different game, a player’s baseline knowledge of their original game will also increase by being presented new perspectives all around.
What Other Poker Games Are There?
Once a poker player has added an additional new game to their repertoire, they can build other variants on top of that which won’t seem so intimidating. For instance, once you understand PLO, how about we add an extra hole card where instead of ABCD, we now are dealt ABCDE? This would increase our total two card combinations dealt from six to 10. We could even add options that split the game into two pots. Maybe we play half the pot for the best high hand, and half the pot for the worst low hand (this 5-card Omaha variant is known as Big O).
Maybe, we split the pot between the best hand on the board, and the biggest starting hand in our hole cards. To make it particularly spicy, we can add a draw post flop where a player has a chance to improve their holding both for their hole cards and the board (this is the variant Drawmaha). Perhaps, instead of playing for high in the hole, we split the pot with the best traditional Omaha hand and the best 2-7 low in the hole (this is Drawmaha 2-7). As we can see, the possibilities of games we can think up are truly endless, and they all present fun, unique differences that help keep action fresh and ensure peak focus while at the table.
But WHY Expand Beyond Hold’em?
If you’re a hold’em player and still on the fence about learning non-hold’em games — and you’ve gotten this far in the article — you must be asking yourself “Why?! It’s so much easier to just stick to what I already know!”
Well, if you just stick to hold’em, you’ll never get to expand on two starting cards with five shared cards that come out. If you begin learning other games, so many exciting variants become possible!
Now also consider, a recreational player may have a lot of fun playing all these different games with big pots and exciting action, whereas hold’em has a tendency to dull over time (it is occasionally referred to as “hours of boredom with moments of sheer terror”). If one ever goes to a poker room with a mixed game or PLO game going, compare the amount of chatter and noise coming from the players at the table versus at the hold’em tables. It will almost always be the loudest game in the room encouraging action and big pots. That alone makes different games worth learning, since they tend to stimulate action.
Other poker variants with differing rules add more combos, more handplay, and unfamiliar scenarios that make for a more exciting game than endless “auto rinse and repeat” with two hole cards every hand. It becomes a game of on-the-spot poker reasoning rather than repetition and familiarity. Lastly, if a player only plays hold’em, they will miss out and be unable to play when the juiciest game in the room is double board PLO, stud hi-lo, or whatever mix is going that day.
By learning more poker variants, we deepen our knowledge of known games, get exposure to new concepts, and allow access to games that could be the best in town on a given night. One thing I’d also like to add in closing, amongst players who do try other variants, they often only play hold’em again when nothing else is going. The other games are just too much fun once you try ’em!
