Some people hate Royal, while some folks love it. Some will never play Omaha and others play only Omaha. For some it’s Texas Hold’em or nothing. I’m interested in hearing the reasons.
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I like Texas Hold’em the best because it was the first game I learned how to play when I first discovered poker.
It’s a fun game to play and it’s easy to learn and understand. I play Omaha and Royal from time to time but Texas Hold’em is my favorite poker game to play.
-Marc
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I lean towards Royal but play Omaha also. With both they are very challenging and what you think you have you usually don’t. You never know if you have the winning hand in both till the cards are seen.
Dan
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I love playing Omaha. I find it quite challenging. Like lil D said, you almost never know if you have a winning hand until the end. The high hand might be a nut, but the low hand can split many ways, so even though you might win, you end up losing chips. It has taught me to think more, before betting or calling, because there’s so many possibilities .
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I honestly think Omaha is a better game than Hold’em. IMO it requires more skill & is a lil more interesting. I wish I had the patience to learn & play it reasonably well. Thats the problem though & the only reason I don’t play it. I know I could improve my Hold’em skill, strategy, ability but realistically it requires time, study & hard work. Im happy enough with my poker skill/ability/strategy in Hold’em Vs the average majority of bad players on RP. I just dont really know what im doing in Omaha & have very little understanding of the strategy etc of the game.
Royal is OK but really just watered down, simplified more gamble poker IMO.
Also additionally many pros have been playing short deck poker & loving it for some time now. Its more gamble or higher variance poker. Another game I’d have no interest in bc its more gamble, higher variance poker. There is enough bad luck in Hold’em IMO.
So yeah its Hold’em for me simply bc of the reasons against the other games.
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Of the four, I learned and like NL Hold’em the best…
I will play all of them but not fond of Royal. Of the 2 Omaha variants
I prefer Omaha HiLo, then PLO, finally reg Omaha…
PLO and PLO HiLo are really the only PL games I like to play…
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I love everything except Royal, which must be goofy because I suck at it.
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You could add a root canal with now anesthetic to the list and my fifthe choce would still be Royal. 
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I like Omaha and Omaha hi/lo for the challenge. When I was at University in the 70s and 7-card stud was my game, I played a few times with a group of Greek students who played a weird poker game they called ‘Manilla’ - a 32 card deck, 2 hole cards, 5 on the board, but you MUST use both your hole cards plus any 3 from the board. Big mistake playing a new game with people who know it backwards. Also not wise to take up backgammon against them, a game they learned in the cradle.
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I played it twice. I suck at it too. Because I don’t want to play it ever again! If you do a little research on poker history I think you will find that it is related to the game played around New Orleans a few hundred years ago. French game called poque (sp?). Played just with the ‘perty ones’. Playing with less than half of our modern deck the possibilities are severely limited. Duh?! I’ll spare everyone my real opinion of the game. That being said, I really liked HORSE/6 GAME/8 GAME stuff at pokerstars. Royal wasn’t one of the games. Imagine that. See my reply to a player below on game-variant stuff. A game called “Two-card Low.” Now that’s gambling!
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I would love to see HORSE tournies here. I think they said they are gonna add 7 stud, not sure about the h/l version. I’m not that fond of Razz, mostly on principal, but I can play it OK. If they don’t add Razz, maybe we could play HOSE?
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Poker variants. In the very early 1980s I worked on a regular maintenance crew leased out to Mobil Oil out of Grand Chenier, Louisiana. My compadres were four black dudes from the same little town in Delaware. With them, I played a game called “Tonk”. To this day I cannot recall how it goes. We loaded this 100 ft. 'crew-boat in the mornings (6-7 days per week. Minimum 12 hrs per day) and on any given day we might have just a few or some days many people to drop off at certain wells or rigs so during the ‘cruising’ time out in the Gulf of Mexico we had ample opportunity some days to play poker.
Before I get ahead of myself I’ll just confine my verbosity to a certain game. I only played tonk with my crew and maybe one or two others on days when there wasn’t any interest in our regular $1-2 game of regular poker variants. Which was mostly seven-stud or five-card draw etc. The game of Two-card Low goes like this. Everyone gets dealt two cards, just like holdem. The nut hand is A2. Second-nut A3, then 2-3 etc. We all ante one dollar. Let’s say, six players. Six dollars in the pot. If everyone folds the dealer takes the pot. Thus, there is greater pressure as people fold or buy a card as the action gets close to the dealer. Any pair is obviously horrible. I told SPG to see this post to you but I’m having trouble remembering how it went zactly. LOL! I’m sure that he could ‘reverse-engineer’ what I am trying to remember here as far as the rules etc. Bottom line is I nabbed a certain guy for one of five of the six pots he lost when he chose to play. He lost $1100 in half a dozen hands. I got him for a bit less than $300. I’m having trouble with the rules about “matching the pot” and the ‘you can buy a card for $1’ . Anyway, no worries, the guy that lost $1,100 one day paid off. We all kept ‘books’. I was fortunate to leave this job with only $60 outstanding. A bet on a fight! I cleaned their clocks (small-time) on the first Duran-Sugar Ray Leonard fight!
Backgammon…I have a certain history with that game. Learned it very late but I know how to play a good ‘back-game’ and (thus) heaven-help-you if you don’t double when you should! When SPG deigns to play ohl I always ask him to bring some groceries. Sit himself down and stay awhile! Anyway, I don’t suppose that there is not one here among us that has never played “indian”…B
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Hold’Em, Omaha H/L and Royal in that order. They all require a different strategy. I find all three to be challenging in their own ways. All poker games come with risks and rewards, you just have to study the table, learn from watching and practice patience. Fun, Challenging, Educational and at times very Frustrating.
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i liked Royal when i was first starting out at relatively low stakes because it quickly became obvious that a lot of people playing it did not fully adjust to the differences from holdem. Hands that looked good to a holdem player, but were actually not very good for royal (e.g.,10s full) got overplayed a lot. It was easy to be exploitative and consistently chip up most days.
Omaha is a lot of fun, but it is more complicated and MUCH higher variance than holdem, so i don’t usually play it. I sometimes play hi/lo to practice for a home game where we play it sometimes, but that’s about it.
Otherwise it’s all (texas) holdem now.
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It took a long time for me to get into Omaha, but once started I was addicted. What I found though was that playing Omaha made me a better Holdem player, not that I’m that good. But after playing Omaha, you realize that it is hard to come up with a pair in Holdem sometimes, meaning that even a small pair is enough to win a hand. After Omaha I had a better appreciation for Holdem. And Royal, if I want a change of pace because I get into a rut with the other games on occasion, then Royal is a good way to get me back on track. It’s fun, more like icing on the cake. LOL
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I think Hold-em is the perfectly balanced variant of poker, with a great balance of revealed information vs hidden information (5 card draw: too much hidden information; 7card stud: too much revealed information). There is also a wide range of likely winning hands, and many wildly different styles of play that can be reasonably successful.
Omaha seems like a good game also, especially hi-low, but I don’t like how it almost always seems to take the nuts to win a hand, especially as multi-handed pots are even more common. With holdem, you can have the 4th or 5th hand from the nuts, and feel nearly certain you have the best hand (wider range of hands that are value hands at the river).
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I am a Hold-em fan maybe thanks to the Moneymaker effect and WSOP coverage. Its a simple game to learn but there are so many ways you can play and mix up your play. Perfect tournament game. I like regular Omaha as a change of pace. Playing more hands more changing your play on the fly very dynamic. Omaha Hi/Lo I’m still getting used to and Royal I’ve just played a few times and still learning.
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Welcome to the Replay Poker Forum, southwestmba. Hope to see you here often!