There is not one no-limit hold'em tournament on the schedule. That is the whole idea. The Chainsaw Mixed Series of Poker is back at Caesars Palace from August 24-31, 2026, running eight events at $500 apiece, and it has quietly become one of the more interesting experiments in Las Vegas live poker.
The series is the creation of Allen "Chainsaw" Kessler, a player better known to most of the poker public for his relentless public scrutiny of tournament structures than for his own considerable mixed-game résumé. He built the series around a simple premise: there is a real, underserved population of players who want to play stud, draw and split-pot games, and almost nobody schedules for them.
The No-Hold'em Rule
Excluding no-limit hold'em entirely from a Las Vegas tournament series is a genuinely unusual commercial decision. Hold'em is what fills rooms. It is what the broadcast audience understands, what recreational players arrive knowing how to play, and what every major series builds its schedule around.
Kessler's bet is that the exclusion is the feature. A mixed-game player attending a conventional series has to navigate a schedule where their formats are relegated to a handful of events, often at awkward times, frequently with thin fields. A schedule with no hold'em on it guarantees that everyone in the building is there for the same reason, and that every event on the calendar is one they actually want to play.
The evidence suggests it is working. The series has now run multiple editions across Las Vegas venues, including a spring 2026 run at Caesars Palace from April 18-25 with the same eight-event, $500 buy-in template and a $5,000 Player of the Series prize pool. The concept has survived multiple iterations and moved between properties, which in the Las Vegas tournament economy is a meaningful signal of viability.
The $500 Price Point
The uniform $500 buy-in across all events is another deliberate structural choice, and it matters more than it might appear.
Mixed games attract a bimodal population. At one end there is a small cohort of extremely strong specialists — players who have spent decades on stud and draw variants and who hold enormous edges. At the other there is a large group of curious recreational and semi-serious players who enjoy the variety but have not put in study hours across seven or eight distinct formats.
A high buy-in would price out the second group and leave the specialists playing each other, which is a fine hobby and a terrible business. A $500 buy-in keeps the recreational contingent in the field while still being serious enough to attract accomplished players. It is the price point at which a mixed-game series can actually function.
It also caps the damage. A player who wants to try a full week of unfamiliar formats can budget the whole series at a knowable number. That predictability matters enormously for the recreational player, and it is the kind of consideration that our bankroll management guide argues should drive far more of your event selection than it typically does.
Is Las Vegas Actually Going Mixed?
There has been a persistent argument through 2026 that Las Vegas is leaning harder into mixed games than at any point in the last decade. The Chainsaw series is part of the evidence, alongside a broader increase in mixed-game tournament offerings across multiple properties and a healthy dedicated mixed-game cash scene.
The structural driver is not sentimentality. It is edge availability. No-limit hold'em has been studied to a degree no other poker variant approaches. Solver outputs, preflop charts and training content have compressed the skill gap in hold'em to the point where a dedicated student can reach competence relatively quickly, and where the edges available to even strong players against a studied population have narrowed considerably.
Mixed games have not received that treatment. Solver work on stud variants, triple draw and split-pot games is dramatically less developed, the training-content ecosystem is thinner, and the population's average technical proficiency is far lower. For a professional player looking for a place where fundamentals still produce large edges, the mixed-game world is one of the last obvious answers.
That is the honest economic case for the mixed-game revival: it is not that players suddenly rediscovered a love for razz. It is that razz is where the money still is, relatively speaking.
The Community Angle
The series is supported by the Allen Kessler Mixed Game Facebook group, which has grown into a genuine community hub for mixed-game players nationally. That community infrastructure is doing a lot of the work here, and it is worth noting why.
Mixed games have a discovery problem. A player who wants to learn pot-limit Omaha can find a hundred training resources in an afternoon. A player who wants to learn 2-7 triple draw has a substantially thinner menu, and the fastest route to competence has historically been finding other people who play it. The community group functions as that route — a place where games get organised, where structures get debated, and where the series itself gets promoted to exactly the population that will show up.
Kessler's own record in the format adds credibility. He captured a H.O.R.S.E. Championship in May, taking home $11,906 and a trophy shaped, appropriately, like a chainsaw that he helped design. Running a series you can also win is a decent proof of concept.
What This Means for Players
If you play hold'em exclusively, this is your invitation to stop. The single highest-leverage move available to most mid-stakes players is not another twenty hours of solver study in a game that has been ground flat. It is learning a second variant well enough to be dangerous in it. The edges are larger and the competition is thinner, and $500 is a reasonable price for an experiment.
Start with the variants closest to what you know. If you play hold'em, Omaha is the natural first step, and our hold'em vs Omaha comparison covers the specific adjustments that trip up crossovers most often. From there, the stud family and the split-pot games open up.
If you already play mixed, the value proposition is obvious. Eight events in eight days at a manageable buy-in, with a field composed entirely of people who chose to be there, is about as good as the format gets outside of the WSOP's summer schedule.
And if you are learning online, the mixed-game situation is thinner but not empty. Several rooms spread mixed formats at low stakes, and the online mixed-game population is generally weaker than the live one, which cuts both ways — softer opponents, but fewer of them. TigerGaming and BetOnline both spread formats beyond hold'em, and our cash games guide covers how to approach variant-hopping without bleeding money in the process.
The Broader Point
The Chainsaw series matters less as a tournament than as a demonstration. It shows that a schedule built entirely around what a niche population actually wants can sustain itself commercially in the most competitive live poker market in the world.
That is a useful counterweight to the industry's default assumption that scale requires hold'em. It does not, necessarily. It requires knowing who your players are — and in a Las Vegas calendar where nearly every other series is competing for the same no-limit population, being the only room in town not playing hold'em turns out to be a reasonable place to stand.
The series runs through August 31. For players thinking more broadly about which format actually suits their game, our poker strategy hub and poker hand rankings reference are the right starting points.