 Vegas June 2026 |
| WSOP HORSE |
| Last Updated: 2026-06-11 12:19:28 |
| Starbucks breakfast, Salt & Ivy lunch and on to Paris to play WSOP Event #37 HORSE.
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| I was in the 2-seat, a few hands in someone wearing a WSOP bracelet sat down in the 8-seat. Turned out it was one David Bach, winner of the 2009 Poker Players Championship back when they only played HORSE and that was the bracelet he was wearing. $50,000 buyin highly prestigious and exclusive event, these days it's a 9-game mix of HORSE plus NLH, PLO, 2-7 Triple Draw and NL 2-7 Single Draw.
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| Last year Michael 'The Grinder' Mizrachi won the PPC for the third time(!!!) and won the Main Event, in case you didn't know, and was immediately inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame in a special election because of what he did. Winning even one PPC is a big deal!
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| But, I digress...
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| 5 games, all "limit", order is Hold'em, Omaha 8/b, Razz, Stud, and stud Eight/b. Random game to start, I registered a little late and got sat at a brand new table and we randomly started off with O8. Play 8-handed so 8 hands of each game (even if the table has less than 8 players you still play 8 hands).
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| In 8 hands of O8 I played two hands. Chopped a pot to earn a single 100 denomination chip and raised out preflop and took blinds. That was it.
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| 6 of 8 Razz hands I started with a face card in the hole. Face cards bad. The two times I had two good down cards I had exactly the King of Spades up ... the worst possible card to have up in this game because you are always the bring-in (forced bet to start the action from the worst up-card in all stud games). My down cards were so good in both cases I actually called the inevitable raise only to get another face card on 4th street and give up.
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| Round of Stud I actually had a few good starting hands, but drew nothing but bricks and had to give up on all of them.
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| Not a great start!
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| Finally in the round of Stud-8 a hand came through!
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| Started out with KK3. People make fewer low hands in this game than in O8, so you can more profitably play high-only hands. The beauty of this hand with the 3 as the up card is that when you raise out people assume you are going for the low, and if you ever catch the king your opponent(s) will assume it's a bad card for you when in fact it gives you a very strong high hand.
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| I raise out and get one caller. His hand ran out all kinds of disconnected cards some low and some high but he was clearly going for a low of some kind while I was betting every street as my hand ran out (can't make it up) 2-4-5-A to make a straight and a nut low!
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| He did call my river bet and revealed an inferior low and no pair to my original KK so actually any low card at all would have still scooped the pot with the pair of kings and a better low than his 8-6-something.
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| Sweet!
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| 23,300 at the first break from a 25k starting stack. With winning exactly one pot of any size all that time I'll take it!
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| A lot of ABC poker after the break (limit poker is a lot of ABC poker, especially stud games) and my stack was up and down. Got as high as 30k, as low as 19k. That was until I had a good starting stud high hand and kept catching cards that gave me better and better draws ... but never actually improved and lost a good chunk to get down around 13k.
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| No concept of a "big blind ante" in stud games so after that I'm getting ante-ed to death with no playable hands for a while and dwindle down to about 8500 chips.
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| But back to hold'em, raise out with K-Q off, catch a queen on the turn and get paid off! 3 handed preflop, 2 of us post-flop and I effectively double up to 17k.
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| At this point Bach and the guy in the 7-seat have most of the chips and even tho I'm 8k below a starting stack I'm actually 3rd in chips at my table! Even at 8500 there were two shorter than me!
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| Into the next break shortly after that.
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| But ... back to the grind. Missed flops on a couple of good starting O8 hands, went through a round of Razz where all 8 hands I had one or two face cards down and I'm back down to 10k again. Argh.
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| Until ...
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| "Rolled up trips" is when you start out a stud hand with three of a kind. The odds of this are 1 in 424 hands or 0.24%. Half as often as being dealt pocket aces in Hold'Em. Very rare. And pretty much the only starting hand in stud where you can consider "slow playing" at the start.
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| On to stud and I catch 4-4-4. Sweet!
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| Someone brings in, someone else completes, I just call, 2 or 3 other callers. Always a little scary to play even a strong hand with that many other people in the hand, but I'm low on chips again and I need a big pot ...
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| Nobody catches anything interesting on 4th street, original raiser leads out, everyone calls. Finally on 5th street I drop the hammer and raise in the bigger betting round, only caller is a stack actually shorter than mine, everyone else folds. I get him all in on 6th, show my trips, bunch of "oh wow" uttered around the table, I don't improve but neither does he and I go from 8k to exactly a 25k starting stack of chips!!!
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| Unfortunately that was the high water mark for me for the rest of the tournament.
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| Once again couldn't put two good hands together and build up a stack for a change. I started working my way back down again, mostly card dead and the few hands I played never worked out.
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| Totally missed with A-Q in hold'em, nothing in O8, had a great Razz hand but only person in the pot only had about 6k to start so the pot only got so big (at the time went from about 9k to 16k) and just couldn't make any real progress.
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| 14,900 at the next (and for me final) break.
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| Not long after the break in a stud 8 hand I decided to commit myself to the pot with A-5-3 and two diamonds. Four handed pot with me eventually all-in and the other players still betting in the side pot.
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| Everyone's board was running out such that nobody could make a low and on 6th street I had a pair of fives, an ace and four diamonds. Aces up would probably scoop the pot, three fives or a flush would almost certainly scoop ... my last card was a red queen ... of hearts.
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| Ugh. Probably around 50k in the main pot I could have won, but no luck for me.
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| It was fun playing HORSE, always like my mixed games, but it was seven hours of grinding and just could never get a run of cards to put me in good shape. You'd think at some point over seven hours you'd have a few hands in a row work out for you just once.
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| For Thursday (I can't keep track of what day of the week it is, I actually had to look just now!) just Starbucks breakfast before heading over to MGM grand to play a little hold'em at 11am. |
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