When the 2010 World Series of Poker (WSOP) schedule was released, one of the big changes was the conversion of the $50,000 HORSE event into an 8-game rotation “Players’ Championship.”  A mastery of the mixed games has long been considered one of the best ways to measure an individual’s poker prowess, which might help explain the recent explosion in popularity of online mixed games.  Whether it be the 7-Game on Full Tilt Poker or the 8-Game on Poker Stars, these mixed game rotations are drawing live pros and internet players alike.  Some play because they are bored with Hold’em, some want to prove their abilities as card players and some just think these games are a great place to make a tidy profit.

BLUFF recently chatted with two online pros and mixed game regulars, David “WhooooKidd” Baker and Jonathan “driverseati” Tamayo to get a little more insight into the mixed game craze.   Tamayo and Baker (better known to his friends as “Bakes”) filled us in on how they started playing the mixed games, the common mistakes they see online and gave us the rundown on the increasingly popular game of Badeucy:

Why do you think online mixed games have gained so much popularity in the past year or so?

Baker says he's "straight addicted" to mixed games

Jonathan Tamayo: I think what’s happening is that people are getting bored with playing Hold’em. Just within the last year they got bored and they decided to play some other games to keep it interesting. There are all kinds of weird games being played, like Badeucy. I heard they were playing top limit Deuce in Bobby’s Room at one point too.

For those who don’t know, what is Badeucy?

David Baker: Badeucy is a split pot game that plays just like 2-7.  You get five cards and three draws, with a round of betting after each draw, but half the pot goes to the best 4-card Badugi.  So, one half of the pot goes to the best Deuce hand (the nuts being 2-3-4-5-7) and then the other half goes to the best Badugi. The ace doesn’t play as the lowest card like it does in Badugi though, so the best Badugi hand is 2-3-4-5 rainbow. So, the best overall [Badeucy] hand would be 2-3-4-5 rainbow with a seven.

I don’t know that much about it, because no one really knows anything about it. If you can play both [Badugi and Deuce], you probably have a fighting chance, but it’s a really gamble-y game. You run out of cards probably one-third of the time, people will be drawing so much. They’ll be four or five players in the pot and you’ll draw three at the beginning and take two all the way up to the last draw, so you’ll run out of cards all the time and you’ll have to shuffle everything back in the deck, which takes forever. It’s a great gambling game though. It’s only spread at Bellagio and Commerce. Draw’s illegal on the East Coast, so you can’t play draw games at, say, Borgata. They play it in LA mostly.

What prompted each of you to start playing mixed games?

DB: I used to just play all the mixed FTOPS events and a decent amount of HORSE. Then there was this big fish on Stars who was playing $100/$200 8 Game every night. He was the worst player ever. Isaac Haxton and Justin Bonomo were playing him and I saw him and I thought, “Well that guy’s really bad…I could probably beat him.” So I short-stacked the game a couple of times and I became straight addicted. I started reading all these books and forums and now I have a Stud coach and I grind the $100/$200 8 Game on Stars.

I wish it would be 7 Game though—PLO is the worst. In 8 Game, the PLO plays way bigger than any of the other game except maybe Deuce. The Deuce plays pretty huge too. PLO plays the biggest though and I always lose on coin flips, which sucks because it is my best game. You would think I would have an edge, but when you take variance into account…These players are so bad and you can really punish them in Stud that I think, “I don’t want to flip with you in PLO for our whole stacks. I’d rather just bleed you.”

JT: I got into because I was playing Limit Hold’em all the time and the game started dying. I needed another source of income (laughs). I thought I better start learning other games so I have some options. I think it was in Super System 2 way back in the “old days” that there was a discussion of the age-old question: should you specialize in one game or know all the different games? Now that there is all kind of information out there about Hold’em, there is a lot of value to knowing how to play the other games, because people will sit in them thinking, “oh I can just cruise through this, nit it up.” Then they end up not nitting it up, basically not knowing what hands are worth.

DB: Yeah, I see huge fundamental errors all the time.

JT: Exactly. Then they just start throwing guesses in the dark. Maybe they get it right sometimes, but a lot of times they don’t.

The general consensus seems to be that online No Limit Hold’em and PLO cash games are a lot more difficult than live cash games. Do you think the same can be said for the mixed games though?

DB: No, I think it is definitely the opposite. I mean there’s obviously fish and stuff live too, but live is where the mixed games have been running for a long time. Online, there are very few players I would consider to be an expert in a lot of the games. On the other side, the live players aren’t crazy good or anything, but there’s a lot more experience on their side.

JT: I feel like people [online] are getting smarter. I see a lot more regulars online that are getting better as time goes on. The way I look at it is this: Think about how long it took for people who play poker to get good at Hold’em. It took six years after the poker boom to get all the information we have now about how to play the game. I think the “1,000 hour” rule really holds true. You get pretty near your potential after about 1,000 hours of doing one activity. But now, if you want to get good at mixed games, you have to put in that amount of time at Omaha H/L, Stud, Stud 8, Razz and Deuce and that’s a lot of hours.

What is the game you would say people are the worst at?

Tamayo finished 2nd in a WSOP Mixed Hold'em event in 2008

DB: I think its Deuce. I think people make bigger errors in Deuce. Like [Jonathan] was saying before, people don’t know what hands are worth and they’re guessing in the dark. Even regulars online fail to value bet. They constantly miss value bets, they don’t know how many cards to chuck, when to chuck what, when to keep what. The HORSE rotation runs way more, but Deuce is kind of a brand-new game to a lot of people.

JT: A lot of people who played poker grew up playing Stud with their grandma or something. Then they played Hold’em after they saw it on TV, but they don’t know how to play Draw games. They may have played draw games when they were kids where they chucked some cards and then turned their hands up to see who wins, but that is not how Draw games work. Like Bakes said, there are a lot of fundamental errors in Deuce. People don’t know what to raise with, they don’t know what to defend with, they don’t know what to draw or what to draw to. Sometimes people show up with the most random things online and you are just like…”wait, you have what?” Most people have never played a lowball game in their life except Razz, so they don’t know how to draw to hand. They just think, “Oh, I have to make the worst hand, that can’t be too hard. I make bad hands a lot.”

Who would you say are the top players to watch online in terms of the mixed games?

DB: I think Sebastian Ruthenberg, the Stars pro, is really good. I think Brett “get crunk” Richey is really good, but he doesn’t really play at my stakes. I play $100/$200 mostly and he plays $400/$800 and this $500/$1,000 Omaha H/L game that’s been running. In the games I play, there’s a couple, but I just know screennames. As for players people might know and recognize I think Steve “thorladen” Weinstein is pretty good and Roman “Empire2000” Yitzhaki is good too, but he doesn’t play as much anymore.

JT: Roman used to scare the crap out of me. He was very competent at the flop games and then over time he developed a knack for playing the other games really quickly. It’s not really about who to look out for, because any high stakes regular who made it to the top very quickly could learn mixed games if they want to.

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