The WCOOP non-Hold'em championship slate is the part of PokerStars' 25th anniversary series that most players scroll past, and it is also the part with the best structural value on the entire schedule. The $1,050 Razz Championship ran September 10, the $1,050 HORSE Championship ran September 7, and the $1,050 NLH PKO Championship follows on September 13.
Those events sit inside a series that runs September 6-30 with 121 numbered events across 350 individual tournaments and total guarantees near $40 million. In a schedule that size, four-figure mixed game championships are easy to miss. They are also, for the right player, the most exploitable events on it.
Why the Non-Hold'em Championships Are Structurally Softer
This is not a controversial claim, but it is worth laying out the mechanism rather than just asserting it.
Online poker's talent distribution is extraordinarily lopsided toward No-Limit Hold'em. Solver work, training content, hand history databases, coaching, and study infrastructure are all overwhelmingly built around NLHE. A player who has put a thousand hours into No-Limit Hold'em study has access to a genuinely mature body of strategy. A player who has put a thousand hours into Razz study is working from a much thinner library.
The consequence is that the variance in skill within a Razz field is far wider than within a comparable NLHE field. In a $1,050 NLHE championship, the gap between the best player and the median player is real but compressed — everyone has broadly the same map. In a $1,050 Razz championship, that gap can be enormous, because a meaningful fraction of the field is essentially improvising.
For a competent mixed game player, that is the entire opportunity. You are not looking for a game where you are the best player. You are looking for a game where the distance between you and the field is largest.
The Four Championships in Context
The full championship cluster on the 2026 WCOOP schedule includes:
- $5,200 NLH 6-Max Championship — September 6
- $1,050 HORSE Championship — September 7
- $1,050 Razz Championship — September 10
- $1,050 NLH PKO Championship — September 13
The buy-in pattern is telling. The NLHE flagship sits at $5,200. The mixed games sit at a fifth of that. PokerStars is pricing for expected field size, and the $1,050 level is a deliberate compromise: high enough to signal "championship," low enough that the non-specialist recreational player who fancies a shot will actually register.
That pricing decision is what makes these events worth playing. A $5,200 Razz Championship would draw 60 entries, nearly all specialists, and be brutally tough. A $1,050 Razz Championship draws a field with a long tail of NLHE regulars taking a punt — which is exactly the field composition a specialist wants.
Mixed Games Are Having a Moment
The timing is not accidental. Mixed games have been quietly returning to prominence across the industry in 2026.
PokerStars is preparing to bring mixed games back to its US offering on the FanDuel platform, with 8-Game expected to be the first variant, potentially going live as soon as September or October. Mixed games have been absent from that platform since the switch earlier in the year, and their return was part of the original commitment.
Meanwhile, live mixed game series have expanded on the tournament calendar, and the WSOP's own mixed game bracelet events have consistently drawn strong fields relative to their buy-in levels.
The pattern behind all of this is straightforward: as No-Limit Hold'em strategy has converged toward solver-approximate play, the entertainment value of NLHE for strong players has declined even where the profit remains. Mixed games offer what NLHE increasingly does not — genuinely unsolved spots, format variety, and edges that come from understanding rather than memorisation. Our mixed games strategy material covers the practical entry points.
What This Means for Players
Start with one game, not eight. The single biggest mistake players make approaching HORSE is trying to learn all five disciplines simultaneously. HORSE rotates Hold'em, Omaha Hi-Lo, Razz, Seven Card Stud, and Stud Hi-Lo. Learning one properly and playing the rotation at a competent-but-unremarkable level in the others is far better than being mediocre across all five.
Razz is the natural starting point, and it is why the standalone Razz Championship is such a useful entry event. Razz has the simplest rule set of any stud variant — lowest hand wins, straights and flushes do not count against you, aces are low — and the fewest strategic dimensions. It is the fastest mixed game to become genuinely competent at.
Adjust your bankroll expectations. Mixed game fields are smaller, which means shallower payout structures and lower variance in some respects — but the games themselves are higher variance per hand, particularly the split-pot disciplines where you can be quartered. Standard bankroll management guidance still applies: at a $1,050 buy-in, you want a tournament bankroll of at least $50,000 to play these regularly without meaningful ruin risk.
Understand the limit structure. HORSE and Razz are fixed-limit games. That changes almost everything about how you think. Pot odds become the dominant consideration because bet sizing is fixed; you are calling a known price into a known pot far more often than in No-Limit. Players coming from NLHE consistently fold too much in limit games, because their instincts are calibrated for a game where opponents can charge them heavily for continuing. Our pot odds explainer is the right foundation.
Starting hand discipline is worth more than post-flop skill. In Razz specifically, the majority of your edge comes from third-street decisions. Three cards to a wheel is a hand. Three cards under eight is usually a hand. Anything with a face card is usually not. That sounds simplistic, and at low levels it essentially is — the profit comes from opponents who cannot bring themselves to fold a broken start.
The PKO Championship Is a Different Animal
The $1,050 NLH PKO Championship on September 13 is grouped with the mixed games by buy-in but belongs in a separate strategic category entirely. Progressive knockout tournaments distort standard tournament strategy substantially: the bounty attached to each opponent's stack means chip EV and monetary EV diverge, and correct play involves calling wider and pressuring covered stacks more aggressively than ICM alone would suggest.
The common error is treating the bounty as a bonus rather than as a direct input into the decision. In a PKO, a marginal call against a covered opponent frequently becomes clearly correct once bounty equity is included — and the size of that adjustment is larger than most players intuit. It is worth running the numbers rather than relying on feel; our poker odds calculator is useful for the underlying equity work.
The Bigger Picture
Twenty-five years into WCOOP, PokerStars still puts non-Hold'em championships on the schedule at accessible buy-ins. That is a choice, and it is a defensible one even though these events will never generate the traffic of the Main Events.
Mixed games are the format where poker's strategic frontier is still genuinely open. Every additional year of solver development narrows the No-Limit Hold'em edge available to strong players. The stud family, by contrast, remains substantially underexplored — and that is precisely why the players who commit to it are quietly finding some of the best games on the internet.
If you are considering making the jump, the WCOOP schedule still has three weeks to run, and the low-tier equivalents of the championship events are priced for experimentation. Our poker hand rankings page includes the low-hand rankings that Razz and the hi-lo games depend on — the single piece of reference material you actually need before firing your first stud event.