Yesterday I played in a HORSE tournament. Not basketball in someone’s driveway, but a mixed game poker tournament with one round each of Hold’em, Omaha hi-lo, Razz, Stud, and Eight-or-better (Stud hi-lo), all played at fixed limits. Rinse, repeat.
These tournaments are a long, slow grind, with much patience required. It’s much harder to bluff without a no-limit or pot-limit structure, and even the biggest clashes are tempered by the caps on betting. What does happen, if you put the effort into it, is your skills at reading relative hand strength and analyzing other players’ betting tendencies get sharper in this format. Each variant requires a slightly different thought process. Spending this time outside of your comfort zone makes your overall reading and thinking stronger.
Not only that, I got to play a lot of hours of poker, and out of 25 entries, made it to the final two where we decided to split 1st and 2nd place money equally rather than battle for another hour or more.
Hooray for me!
Congrats. I try to play different poker games as much as I can, as I find that different games help build different skills. For instance, one of the reasons I play PLO (besides it being a fun and lucrative game) is that it really hones board reading and positional play. Fixed limit hold’em is great for reading bet sizing tells. Even Razz, as silly of a game as it is, puts me out of my comfort zone and makes me really consider each hand (which is not something I do when I’m autopiloting NLHE). Anyway…