Double-board bomb pots in PLO4 and PLO5: play them like a hi/lo game

A double-board bomb pot skips preflop betting, deals two boards, and gives half the pot to each. Anyone who has played Omaha hi/lo will recognise the shape: you can scoop, you can split, and you can get quartered. We read what coaches, training sites and players say about the PLO4 and PLO5 versions, counted one spot exactly with our calculator's hand evaluator, and set out where the hi/lo comparison holds and where it breaks.

What a double-board bomb pot is

• Everyone antes, and nobody acts preflop. The ante replaces the blinds. Lee Jones at PokerCoaching.com puts it at "generally 3-5 big blinds"; PLO Mastermind says "typically 3 to 10 big blinds". Every player who antes sees the flop.
• Two flops, two turns, two rivers. At showdown the best hand on each board wins that board's half. Win both and you scoop. Each board is read on its own, and in Omaha you use exactly two hole cards and three board cards on each board, whether you hold four cards or five.
• Ties split a half. If two players share the best hand on one board, they split that half, so someone can end up with a quarter of the pot. PLO Mastermind says a three-quarters and one-quarter split "presents a frequent outcome for double board games."
• The boards share one deck. As PLO Genius puts it, "cards on one board are 'dead' on the other." A heart on board 1 is a heart you can't catch on board 2.
• House rules vary. PLO.com says "Rules vary by room, so verify the local format before applying any default." Some rooms even deal a hi/lo version, which the Asian Poker Tour's rules call "Ultimate Hi-Lo".

PLO4 and PLO5: what changes with a fifth card

The structure is the same. The difference is how often everyone else already has something. PLO Spot says: "The extra hole card in five-card Omaha makes strong hands even more common, so double board bomb pots in PLO5 run bigger and nuttier still." It adds that "a fifth card that adds a second nut-flush suit or fills a rundown is worth a lot, while a dangling brick adds nothing." PLO Mastermind's note on five- and six-card versions: "With each additional hole card, it becomes more important to look at re-draws and playability on later streets."

One way to see the gap: on a flop with three cards of one suit, a single random PLO4 hand already holds two or more of that suit 18.0% of the time. A random PLO5 hand does 26.7% of the time. That counts the 49 cards you can't see when you know only the flop, so it is before you look at your own hand. In a bomb pot nobody folds before the flop, so every seat at the table gets that chance.

PLO5 isn't a rare variant, either. One Two Plus Two poster said of a home game: "Most bomb pots are double board PLO5."

What coaches and players say

Don't chase half the pot. This is the point almost everyone makes first. Lee Jones's second PokerCoaching.com article calls it "the single most important message in this article". He says to continue only if "You have robust equity on both boards, and/or" "You have a hammer-lock on one board, ensuring yourself at least half the pot." PLO.com says the format punishes "paying full price for hands that usually win half." Upswing Poker's summary of Dylan Weisman's tips goes further: "You are better off having the nuts on one board and nothing on the other board than mediocre hands on each." PLO Genius, on the other hand, ranks "strong equity on both boards" as the next best thing after locking one board.

Only the real nuts count. Lee Jones's first article says "If you don't have the nuts, you have nothing," and "The more opponents that continue on the flop, the more totally nutted your hand must be." He calls a flopped nut straight with no redraw and nothing on the other board "whiffing". Cardquant agrees about straights: "Made straights go down in value, due to the risk of shared cards being compounded by the split-pot structure." The reason, as PLO Genius explains, is that a straight is often shared, and a shared board pays a quarter of the pot at most.

Push or pull: the sources disagree. Say you have locked one board and have nothing on the other. Upswing's summary of Weisman says "you want people to fold because that is likely the only way you can win the full pot," and recommends bigger bets when the two boards have nothing in common. PLO Genius says to bet big heads-up but play more passively multiway, because you want "to make that half as large as possible." Lee Jones says it depends on whether someone else will chop the other board with you: if so, "it's to your advantage to pull other players into the pot." Cardquant quotes advice worded the same as Upswing's tip, without naming its source, and argues the opposite: "One-way nut hands are pull hands on the flop." Our worked spot below puts numbers on this.

Position, and small bets multiway. Upswing's summary of Weisman says "you should never bet the flop from any position other than the Cutoff or Button," and to check-raise instead. A later Upswing article, drawn from Lewis Spencer's webinar, says most betting on 6- to 8-way flops should use small sizes, about a quarter to a third of the pot, and that "Range Advantage Does Not Exist" because everyone starts with every possible hand. PLO Mastermind's rules include "Position is King" and "The static board drives the action".

Blockers and dead cards. Lee Jones: "Blockers are much more important in four-card than two-card games." PLO Spot's advice: "Value nut blockers." PLO Genius gives a dead-card example: if the two boards hold three aces between them and you hold the fourth, nobody else can make trip aces.

Calls cost more than they look. PLO Genius says that facing a pot-sized bet in regular PLO you need about a third of the equity to break even, but "if you can realistically win only one board, you need about" two-thirds. That makes calling down to catch a bluff for half the pot a much worse deal.

The preflop edge is gone. On Two Plus Two, a player asking whether a bomb-pot-only table was worth playing wrote: "My biggest edge in plo has always been preflop." Others in the thread replied that the edge moves to the flop, where weaker players make bigger mistakes. On X, one player put it bluntly: "The biggest skill is folding the nuts on one board."

A worked spot

Here is one spot, counted exactly over every way the two boards can finish.

Our cards, not a hand anyone played. Every card shown is known; everything else is unseen.

• Board 1 flop: K♠︎8♦︎3♣︎
  Three suits, no flush draw.
• Board 2 flop: J♥︎10♥︎4♠︎
  Two hearts, connected.
• Kings: K♥︎K♣︎6♠︎5♦︎
  Top set on board 1; an overpair and nothing else on board 2.
• Wrap: Q♥︎9♥︎8♣︎7♣︎
  Middle pair on board 1; a wrap plus a queen-high heart draw on board 2.
• Nut flush draw: A♥︎2♥︎J♣︎9♦︎
  Ace high on board 1; top pair and the nut heart draw on board 2.

Heads-up: kings against the wrap. The kings win board 1 91.3% of the time and board 2 28.0%. Over both boards that's 59.7% of the pot. But the kings scoop only 25.7% of the time. In 67.9% of deals they take part of the pot but not all of it, and in 6.4% they lose both boards. The wrap scoops 6.4% of the time. Most deals end with the pot split, which is what every source above warns about.

Three-way: add the nut flush draw. The kings' share of the pot drops to 50.2%, and their scoops drop to 12.1%, because two hands now fight over board 2. The wrap has 24.8% of the pot and the nut flush draw 25.0%.

Why that supports pulling. Suppose every player still in puts the same amount into the pot from here. For every $100 each player puts in, the kings get back about $119 on average heads-up and about $151 three-way. A smaller slice of a bigger pot is worth more. That is Lee Jones's and Cardquant's point in numbers. It ignores folds, so it doesn't settle the argument: the case Upswing and PLO Genius make for betting big rests on the times a bet makes everyone fold.

The hi/lo parallel

Lee Jones says it directly: "DBPLOBPs are just another split-pot game." He names Omaha-8, Stud-8 and Big O, and says players who have played a lot of split-pot poker "have learned and internalized" the rule about not chasing half. Cardquant says scooping and quartering are "features that are more familiar to Big O players than traditional Omaha players." On Two Plus Two, one poster saw "carryover from pot limit Big O experiences" in how players bet. In a Reddit thread, one commenter said to play double-board bomb pots like Omaha or stud hi-lo: the nuts on one board, or a hand that can win both.

What carries over from hi/lo:

• Play to scoop. PokerTips.org's Omaha hi/lo guide says: "The goal in Omaha Hi/Lo is to scoop the entire pot." Swap "high and low" for "board 1 and board 2" and it still holds.
• Fear the quarter. In hi/lo you get quartered when you split the low and someone else takes the high. In a double-board pot it's a split on one board while someone else wins the other. PokerTips' advice fits both: "keep the pot small when you realize that you may be quartered."
• Draw only to the nuts. PokerTips: "Drawing to a low that isn't the nut-low is almost a guaranteed way to lose in Omaha Hi/Lo." Lee Jones's double-board version: "do not draw to a flush, even the nut flush, on a paired board."
• Nuts on the flop aren't nuts on the river. PokerTips shows an ace-deuce nut low "counterfeited" when an ace comes on the turn. In a double-board pot, a one-board nut hand gets overtaken the same way, which is why the sources value redraws and freerolls (PLO Mastermind's term) so highly.
• Push and pull. Lee Jones says the idea "is not unique to split-pot games, it comes up most often there."

Where the comparison breaks:

• Two boards, not two hand types. In hi/lo the high and the low come from the same five board cards. A double-board pot has ten board cards, and what is on one board tells you what can't be on the other.
• Both halves always get paid. In hi/lo there is only a low half if someone makes a qualifying low, which needs three different board cards eight or lower; otherwise the best high hand takes the whole pot. In a double-board pot each board always has a winner, so there's no hoping the other half never comes into play.
• The nuts look different. The best possible low is always a wheel. On each double-board board, the nuts depend on that board's cards: a paired board means full houses (Lee Jones: "Paired board means full houses"), and a straight that ties pays a quarter.
• No preflop decision. PokerTips says that in hi/lo "Starting hand selection is so critical that demonstrating patience is perhaps the single most important skill to have." A bomb pot deals everyone in, so that skill moves to the flop.

What we take from this

• On the flop, ask two questions: is one board locked, and do you have real chances on the other? If both answers are no, the sources agree you should usually fold.
• Count your chances to scoop, not just your share of the pot. In our spot, 59.7% of the pot came with only 25.7% scoops.
• Treat a one-board straight or a non-nut flush draw like a non-nut low in hi/lo: it costs money.
• With one board locked, decide whether you want callers. If someone else will chop the other board, money from third players is profit; if a bet can make everyone fold, betting can win it all. The sources disagree here, so look at who is in the pot.
• In PLO5, assume more of the table has connected, and give redraws more weight.
• Check the house rules first: the ante, any cap on how much one player can put in (Lee Jones recommends rooms set one), and whether the pot is high-only or hi/lo.

How we counted

Our calculator works one board at a time. For the worked spot, we used its hand evaluator to count every way to finish both boards from the same deck: 442,890 ways heads-up and 278,256 three-way. A tie on a board splits that board's half. To check the count, we compared each board's share with the calculator's own exact result for that board, with the other flop entered as dead cards, and they match. You can open those single-board spots below. The suit figures are exact counts over every four-card or five-card hand from 49 unseen cards. Equity ignores betting and folds, and it is not advice about how to play a hand.