The level of play more than makes up for it, and it's especially not an issue if you're playing at tables where many pots are contested 4-ways+.

Because of the increased volume of situations where pots are contested on the river multiway, it's common that you'll win more getting 3/4 of a pot O8/plo8 than you will winning a pot at similar stakes in another poker variant. And when you only get part of a pot , you only pay part of the rake.

Even players that play a fair amount of O8, tend to underestimate the percentage of pots that end up having one winner.

At low stakes plo8 the rake can definitely be beat, and I've only played fixed limit O8 at 5-10 and higher, but I would expect quite a few bets to go in hopeless by inexperienced and recreational players, and the equity edges in general tend to run quite high and variance is on the lower side.

Thanks for the response Bacon, I figured the games were much softer, but had not considered the part about only paying a percentage of the rake equivalent to the percentage of the pot won. Good to know.

There is a home game that I started playing recently where PLO8, 5card PLO8, 6 card PLO8 and other split pot variants are the games of choice. They generally play with a 80BB cap, With quite a few players in the game at a 100% VPIP, it's not hard to do well simply selecting the correct preflop hands. This is also a friendly, no rake game.

While I would like playing these games online, I find that they are hard to start and generally you end up battling a really competent opponent for a few hours before the game becomes 4+ handed.

I've always loved the idea of NLO8 and hoped it took off but it seems that you're relegated to the micros or WCOOP/SCOOP when they have that one event.

I had the same idea a few months ago. Started by playing .25-.50 PLO8. I ended up going back to PLO & O8. I found (at least at the micros) you end up playing too many pots all in HU & splitting the pot. Which, obviously, you lose money because of the rake. This doesn't seem to be the case in O8 as pots are more often multiway for multi-streets. By the time I went back to PLO & O8 I was a small winner, but rake was the reason I left. I stick to PLO8 in tournament format for now. At least until there's more "pure" recs in the game I didn't find it profitable (or not profitable enough I should say).