Simultaneous Hold'em-Omaha

It’s like Hold’em and Omaha at the same time, except you have to split your cards

You get six hole cards. You divide them into a two-card Hold’em hand and a four-card Omaha hand. Both play the same single board. Half the pot goes to the best Hold’em hand, half to the best Omaha hand, both high.

Rarity: low. It’s home-game fare. The WSOP 2026 rules have no entry for it, and we found no room or festival event running it. It is in BARGE’s rulebook and on Card Player Lifestyle’s rule list.

30-second cheat sheet

• Six hole cards each. Blinds and button. One shared five-card board.
• Split your six cards into two cards (Hold’em) and four (Omaha). Once made, the split can’t change.
• Hold’em hand: best five from your two cards and the board, any combination.
• Omaha hand: exactly two of your four plus exactly three from the board.
• Half the pot each, both high. You can win both and scoop.
• The two hands share no cards.

Full rules

The deal and the split

Button and blinds, six face-down cards. BARGE has the split after pre-flop betting, at the small bet. Everyone still in splits their cards into a two-card hand and a four-card hand. The split is locked, the two hands stay visibly separated until showdown, and cards can’t be swapped between them.

Betting

BARGE describes a limit game: small bet pre-flop and on the flop, big bet on the turn and river. Betting after the split works as in Hold’em with a flop, turn and river.

Showdown

One shared board. Hold’em hand: zero, one or both of the two cards plus the board. Omaha hand: exactly two and three. The best of each across all remaining players wins its half. Ties split that half. The sources don’t state the odd chip. [INFERENCE] A single player can win both and scoop.

Rooms disagree

• When you split. BARGE: after pre-flop betting. Card Player Lifestyle: before the flop. Haney (Card Player): during the first betting round by anyone contesting the pot. This page follows BARGE as the rulebook source.
• Structure. BARGE says limit. A search snippet for Jim Donahue’s SOHE book says pot-limit, but we couldn’t open that page.

Worked examples

No verified examples. The example evaluator cannot score two hands per player.

How you’ll embarrass yourself

• Treating the Hold’em hand as part of the Omaha hand. They are separate cards.
• Splitting by habit. Keeping aces together isn’t automatic. Haney says broken pairs often play better in a six-card split. He calls marginal hands good in neither half the biggest trap.
• Moving cards after the flop. The split is locked.
• Being slow. Haney warns the game runs slow.

Lore and reputation

Haney (Card Player, 2025) rates it 6/10, depending on the lineup, and calls it home-game fare (“Spice Up Your Home Game”) useful as another flop game in a draw-heavy mix. BARGE includes it and Jim Donahue published a book on it (August 2017 per search listings, not opened). Card Player Lifestyle lists it as “Hold’em-Omaha (a.k.a. SOHE)” with flop games.