Pot Limit Omaha, or PLO, has become a very popular form of online poker these days. While a lot of players still tend to shy away from it, due to not being familiar enough about the game and therefore feeling a little intimidated, those who have shown the courage to give it a try and stick with it enough to at least develop a good feel for it have been rewarded.
To those who may not be completely familiar with PLO, it is like Holdem on steroids. Holdem evolved and became popular as a community card version of poker. Community cards promote more action, as they promote hands of similar value, as opposed to other 7 card games such as 7 Card Stud.
So once Holdem became popular, people saw that the additional action that you see in community card games both make the game more fun and more potentially profitable. So Holdem rolled over 7 Card Stud and other formerly popular versions of poker and laid them all in the dust.
However, what happened over the years is that the game of Holdem became too popular for its own good you might say. It used to be that most players weren’t very good at it and would play way too loosely, seeing way too many flops and generally not being all that prone to folding that much.
However, in time, the game really tightened up, as players realized that Holdem, and especially No Limit Holdem, was a game of made hands. So if players didn’t have a good hand, they now would fold, and fold a lot. So the game evolved even more into a game of aggression, where players would push around each other.
PLO is the antidote to this, as the four hole cards instead of two is a real game changer. As you might imagine, this makes the game much less about what you have and much more about what you may have when all of the cards are dealt. So this takes the benefits of community cards and greatly magnifies those benefits, at least if you are looking for more action and excitement.
So if you already play PLO, you already know all of this, but there are so many players out there who haven’t been turned on to PLO and really should check it out. In either case though, we have out together some great recommendations for you as far as the best PLO sites out there right now.
This Years Best Sites for Playing Pot Limit Omaha
THE BEST OF THE BEST FOR POT LIMIT OMAHA
Bovada
BetOnline Poker
Carbon Poker
Americas Card Room
5Dimes PokerWhat Makes A Great PLO Site?
The first thing that we want to take into account is the extent and variety of an online poker site’s PLO offerings. There of course has to be plenty of PLO games running in general. Given the growth of PLO lately, this isn’t really as difficult to find as it once was.
Then, we also need a good selection of different types of PLO games. The main staples are cash games of various stakes and table sizes, such as full ring, 6 max, and heads up, as well as both scheduled and sit and go tournaments of various formats. Then there is the varieties of Omaha itself, which includes both fixed and pot limit, as well as both Omaha Hi and Omaha Hi/Lo.
So while the sheer amount of PLO action at a given poker site is important, it’s even more important to have the types of PLO games that you prefer. Otherwise, you end up either having to play a form that you don’t really like, or find another site to play the ones that you do want to play.
Having a good selection of PLO games is just part of it though. You also need to have fairly good traffic at the PLO site that you play at, because it’s one thing for them to have the particular type of tables or tournaments that you desire, but they also need to actually run them, at least a good part of the time.
Traffic isn’t just the only consideration though, and a lot of players tend to overestimate its importance. This isn’t to say that having enough traffic isn’t of importance, it’s of great importance in fact. However how much traffic that consists of is where people can go astray.
There’s More To A Great PLO Site Than Just Good Traffic Though
Imagine that you were given a choice between two PLO sites. The first has 50 tables running at what you want to play, and the second only has two. You are just looking to play one table, so one with the two has enough for that. However, you may be thinking, as a lot of players do, that the site with the 100 tables running at the same time will provide you with greater game selection.
Now it very well may be the case that all of the 100 tables are less desirable than the two tables on the other site. So that’s why traffic alone doesn’t mean a heck of a lot, as it doesn’t tell the whole story.
Even if the bigger site has more looser and therefore more desirable tables, you probably aren’t going to be able to get a seat at them. The competition for seats at these tables will be fierce, and you may have to join a long waiting list, and by the time you get a seat, the fish will probably be gone.
So as a rule, what we want is soft sites generally, who have enough traffic but not necessarily the most traffic. There is also a number of other considerations that we take into account in making our recommendations, such as bonuses and rewards, ease of deposit and withdrawal, the security and reliability of the poker site, and many more.
In the end though nothing is more important than how well you can expect to do at the tables in terms of your results, and that’s why this drives our picks for you more than any other reason. So if you love PLO, or just want to give it a try, and your results are important to you as well, then feel free to take advantage of our top PLO site recommendations.
