5-Card Pot-Limit Omaha

It’s PLO, except you get a fifth hole card

If you’ve got the Omaha rule down, there’s nothing new to learn. Five hole cards instead of four. Blinds, burns, flop, turn, river, and pot-limit betting are exactly as in Pot-Limit Omaha. Your hand must still be exactly two hole cards plus exactly three board cards.

The fifth card only changes how many ways you can pick those two: ten combinations, up from six.

30-second cheat sheet

• Five hole cards, one board of five, four betting rounds, pot-limit.
• Exactly 2 hole cards + exactly 3 board cards. The two-and-three rule hasn’t loosened.
• Ten two-card combos per hand, not six.
• Maximum 8 players at the WSOP. (Why 8 is explained under Full rules.)
• High only here. The hi-lo version is “Big O” at the WSOP: a different game.
• Pot-limit online. Some rooms spread it fixed-limit.

Full rules

The deal

Button, small blind, big blind. Five cards down each. Burn, flop, betting, burn, turn, betting, burn, river, betting, showdown. Pot-limit bet sizing is identical to Pot-Limit Omaha: max bet is the pot, max raise is “call, then raise the new pot”.

Table size

WSOP caps its 5-card Omaha games (Big O, Big Easy, double board) at 8 players. That fits the deck: nine players would hold 45 cards, leaving 7, and you need 8 for three burns plus five board cards. [INFERENCE: that’s my arithmetic, not a quoted rule.]

If it’s a run-it-twice game with 8 players dealt in, the WSOP uses only 2 burn cards when running it twice pre-flop (one per board) because of the deck size.

Showdown

High hand only. Pick exactly two of your five hole cards and exactly three of the five board cards. Ordinary rankings, aces high or low in straights, ties split, odd chip by position clockwise from the button.

With more combinations to choose from, the winning hand tends to be stronger than in four-card PLO. CardPlayer says marginal holdings generate little value. Equities run closer between premium hands (a PLO365 snippet puts it around 55/45 versus 65/35 in four-card PLO, but treat those as vendor estimates).

Rooms disagree

• What “Big O” means. The WSOP uses “The Big O” for five-card Omaha hi-lo (8-or-better). Commerce Casino’s page also describes Big O as five-card Omaha hi-lo. Wikipedia and Pagat use “Big O” or “five-card Omaha” for the high-only game too, saying there are five-card versions of both. This page uses the WSOP naming: PLO5 or 5-card Omaha Hi is high only; Big O is hi-lo. Confirm which one’s being dealt.
• Structure. Pot-limit is the usual online structure. At least one big Southern California room (per a PokerAtlas listing snippet, page itself blocked) spreads a 6/12 limit five-card Omaha high-only game.
• Neighbors. Six-card Omaha, Courchevel, and the 5-card double-board bomb pot are separate games. Some UK rooms (per 2+2 snippets) let the button pick 4, 5, or 6 cards.

Worked examples

Trips in your hand are a pair

Three nines in your hand are only a pair

Board

Alice

• Pair of Nines

Bob

• Two pair, Queens and Fives✓ wins

Bob scoops the whole pot.

Alice holds three nines, which feels like a monster. It isn’t: she can use exactly two of them, so she has a pair of nines at best. Bob’s queen in his hand plus the queen on the board is a pair of queens, which beats nines. Having more cards doesn’t make the rule looser.

The nut flush matters more

Both have a heart flush, but only one has the ace

Board

Alice

• Ace-high flush✓ wins

Bob

• King-high flush

Alice scoops the whole pot.

Three hearts on the board. Alice has the ace and four of hearts, Bob has the king and queen. They both made flushes, and Alice’s ace-high beats his king-high. In a game where everyone has five cards, more people have a suit, so the second-best flush is a real trap.

How you’ll embarrass yourself

• Assuming the two-card rule relaxes. It doesn’t. Every source that covers five-card Omaha restates it.
• Using four-card PLO hand charts unchanged. Nut potential matters more. Two pair, top set, and non-nut flushes are worth less. More pots go multiway.
• Keeping junk because you have an extra card. An extra card that connects to nothing is just dead weight.
• Calling “Big O” for a high-only game. At the WSOP and at Commerce that’s hi-lo.
• Sitting down as the ninth player. It’s an eight-player game.

Lore and reputation

Wikipedia says five-card Omaha (“Big O”) started showing up in Southern California in 2008 and had spread to most of the card rooms in the area by the end of that year. That sentence is marked [citation needed] on Wikipedia, so treat it as a claim. Smaller card rooms in particular liked the extra action. Wikipedia also calls it very popular in the Southeastern United States as a home game, and says some online rooms offer five-card Omaha, six-card Omaha and Courchevel.

It’s a current live staple in some places: PokerAtlas has listed a daily 6/12 limit five-card Omaha game at Hustler Casino Gardena (search snippet only), and the WSOP’s 2026 live-action rules give 5-card PLO its own run-it-twice rule and a 5-card double-board bomb-pot game.