Bomb pot calculator

A bomb pot is a hand with no preflop betting: every player posts an ante, everyone is dealt in, and the action starts on the flop. Most rooms run them double board, dealing two full five-card boards and paying half the pot to the winner of each. They are a once-an-orbit ritual in live PLO games and club apps, and the format got big enough that the 2024 WSOP ran a $15,000 NLH/PLO double board bomb pot event. Because six or more players routinely see the flop, hand values shift toward holdings that flop nutted, and equities run much closer than in a normal raised pot.

Each board is worth half the pot. The best hand on the top board takes that half, the best hand on the bottom board takes the other, and if two or more players tie on a board they split that board's half between them. Win both and you take everything. The calculator reports this as total pot share: a hand that always wins the top board but never the bottom shows 50%. The per-board, both-boards and scoop numbers are broken out in the table below the equity bar.

Yes, and scoops are where most of the money in bomb pots comes from. The Scoops column shows how often a hand is the sole winner of both boards in the same runout. Scooping is rarer than the per-board numbers suggest: the boards share one deck, so the cards that make you strong on top are no longer available to hit the bottom. Hands with two independent ways to make the nuts, like double-suited rundowns in PLO, scoop far more often than one-dimensional hands with the same total share.

Because the boards compete for the same cards. Hold four hearts in PLO and only nine hearts remain in the deck; every heart that lands on the top board is one that can never appear on the bottom. Flushing both boards is therefore rarer than squaring your single-board flush odds would suggest: your suit outs are shared, so the two flushes are anti-correlated. A calculator that deals each board from its own fresh deck misses this and overstates double-flush and scoop probabilities. This one deals both boards from a single deck in every enumerated or simulated runout, which is how the cards actually come off the deck in a live bomb pot.

The format is the same, but PLO bomb pots play much bigger. With four hole cards every player holds six two-card combinations per board, so multiway equities compress and the nuts win a far larger share of showdowns. In NLHE a strong top pair can still take a board six ways; in PLO it almost never does. That is why bomb pots are mostly a PLO ritual and why this page defaults to PLO4. Switch games in the selector, or press 2, 4, 5 or 6 to compare the same spot across games.

The calculator counts the joint runout space for every state (pick the top board's missing cards, then the bottom's from what remains) and enumerates all of it when the count is small enough, marked "exact" next to each hand. Full and near-full boards always qualify, and multiway both-flop spots often do because the hands thin the deck: eight PLO4 hands with both flops down leave exactly C(14,2) x C(12,2) = 6,006 combinations. Big spaces run Monte Carlo instead. A four-way PLO4 preflop bomb has about 64 billion joint boards, so it samples both boards from one shuffled deck per runout until every hand's pot share converges to a ±0.3% target. The status line under the equity bar shows which mode ran and the runout count.

Yes. Copy share link, under the gear icon, copies a URL that encodes the game, all hands, both boards and any dead cards in the link itself; nothing is stored on a server for double board spots. Open it on any device and the calculator rebuilds the spot and recomputes. Save PNG next to it exports the same spot as an image. Paste either into the group chat to settle an argument about last night's bomb pot.