Omaha "High Stakes Poker"

More people are familiar with holdem than omaha, so they'd have to spend some time educating the audience on PLO strategy. It'd be great as far as I'm concerned, but harder than doing NLHE.

I always thought it was kind of insulting that TV thinks the general public couldn't understand Omaha. Yes there are differences, but it's not THAT much different. At least not enough for the audience to be totaly lost, but that's just me.

It is often said that Omaha is a game of "the nuts", i.e. the best possible high or low hand, because it frequently takes "the nuts" to win a showdown. It is also a game where between the cards in his hand and the community cards a player may have drawing possibilities to multiple different types of holdings.

It's not that they couldn't be made to understand it, at least at a basic level. It's that they just don't want to watch it.

Why do you think ESPN refuses to show anything other than NLHE events at the World Series? It's because they've done their research and that's all that people want to see on TV. Everything else has been ratings suicide and they've shown pretty much every game at some point, including plenty of PLO, so they should know.

The mechanics of Omaha are easy enough to explain to a NLHE audience. But the strategies are very different and much harder for the everyman (who, let's face it, seems happy to watch AK get all in preflop against 77 for the hundredth time over) to get his head around.

R u saying u r lost??

Really the complex strategy in Omaha would make it hard to call (explain by commentators) like HE, most HE players would not get it, and also it is not a shove and race game (exciting) like HE can be. Bluffing is less also.

aussie millions cash game showed PLO right? when that guy ran it 4 times to PA and lost each time?

Yeah - the 2009 Aussie Millions cash game episodes rotated between PLO and NLHE. Half of it was just Durrrr and Antonius playing heads up and the other half was a full ring game. It made for some interesting viewing if you're that way inclined and the commentary (by Bart Hanson) was very good but I don't think it rated all that well. The format and I think even the station changed for this year's broadcast, if that tells you anything.

If you want to see some really interesting PLO on TV, try finding episodes 6-9 of the Durrrr Million Dollar Challenge. The first five episodes were just NLHE but the final four have Durrrr playing live HU $500-$1000 PLO against an Italian high stakes player and then against Ziigmund. Isaac Haxton provides commentary on episode 6 (and the NLHE episodes) and Phil Galfond does commentary for the Ziigmund match. Again, no idea how it rated but it's interesting to watch if you really want to see some televised PLO action.

One other thought too: not every production company is set up, in technical terms, to broadcast PLO. It means changes in their on-screen graphics for starters and it might even mean changes for their table cameras so that's another potential barrier to more of it being shown. Plus they've got to find someone capable of providing intelligent commentary on it.

But I'd suggest the biggest barrier, by far, is still the fact nowhere near enough people want to watch it.

BTW - pretty sure it was the other way around with that pot from the Aussie Millions: from memory they ran it four times and it was Antonius who lost all four.