On Thursday, December 12, PokerStars will be hosting the first-ever Mixed Games Main Event during the 2024 European Poker Tour festival currently happening in Prague.
The €2,200 tournament came about as a response to the growing number of requests coming from the player community, asking for more variety and more tournaments outside of realms of Hold’em and PLO.
Hearing these voices, PokerStars decided to take the plunge and set up a Mixed Games Main Event, featuring a rather affordable buy-in for EPT standards and as many as ten different variations, giving participants a real opportunity to show off their versatility.
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One Tournament, 10 Different Games
The EPT Prague Mixed Games Main Event will be a real test for poker players as the tournament will rotate between ten different poker variations. This will make it one of the most challenging events on the schedule as even learning the rules of all games is difficult enough, let alone figuring out at least basic strategies for all of them to give yourself the best chance at winning.
The tournament features a buy-in of €2,200, which should help entice more players to join the action and give it a go, even if their knowledge of certain variations happens to be limited. The full list of games in the rotation is as follows:
- FL 2-7 Triple Draw
- PLO
- FL Stud High-Low 8 or better
- FL Badugi
- FL Hold’em
- No Limit 2-7 Single Draw
- FL Stud
- FL Omaha High-Low 8 or better
- No Limit Hold’em
- Fixed Limit Razz
What makes mixed games tournaments interesting and different is that most players in the field are experts in a few variations, so they try to maximize on their opportunities during those rounds. Keen observation skills and paying attention to table dynamics are probably just as important as knowing your odds and percentages.
Players Looking for New Challenges
The demand for mixed games events has been on the rise for a while now, and it’s been a rather fascinating trend to observe. To try and better understand this trend from the players’ perspective, pokerfuse caught up with Parker ‘Tonkaaaa’ Talbot, one of the young guns who’s been making strides in the world of mixed games.
Sharing his views, ‘Tonkaaaa’ speculated that the rise in popularity in mixed games could be down to “people looking for something a little bit different.” “Maybe it is the overall speed at which No Limit Hold’em is progressing to a higher level,” he continued.
With the proliferation of training tools, coaching and solvers, players can achieve more advanced skills in the game much faster than they were able to 10 years ago, Talbot believes. “So, I guess at the speed at which No Limit Hold’em is getting tougher and tougher, maybe makes more room for mixed games these days.”
Parker also said that he doesn’t expect mixed games to ever replace Hold’em as the go-to option for most players, but his theory about the rise in mixed games certainly seems to hold water. With so many resources readily available for the Cadillac of Poker, players are ready to explore some other variations and make their experience on the felt a bit more exciting and unpredictable.
The action in the first-ever EPT Mixed Games Main Event will be getting underway soon, and it will be interesting to see what kind of a turnout there is and if this tournament will be the first of many mixed games main events to come.
