By SirWatts on September 17th, 2008 (more posts by author)

It wasn't the best event to final table but it was a fun one! I final tabled the $500 buy-in 2-7 NL single draw event of the WCOOP today and finished 2nd for $30K. This was the first and likely only WCOOP event that will have overlay. It had a $200K guarantee on it but only attracted 308 players, and even with the added money from PokerStars it was still the 3rd smallest prize pool of the WCOOP. So most of you are probably wondering what the hell is 2-7 NL single draw and since when do you know how to play it? Basically it's a 5-card draw game in which you try to make the worst possible poker hand and ace only counts for high, just like in triple draw. So 23457 is the nuts, 23467 is the 2nd nuts and so on. Straight and flushes count against you so any straight or flush is completely worthless. You're dealt 5 cards, there are blinds and antes, and a normal round of pre-draw betting just like preflop betting in NL Holdem. Then anyone still in the hand pitches any number of cards they want and gets fresh ones from the deck. Another round of betting just like in NL Holdem and then hands get shown down.

Because there are only two rounds of betting once you know some of the math behind drawing cards it's actually not that complicated a game. I had never played it before today, and while I obviously am still far from an expert I already feel pretty comfortable playing it in a tournament setting. I definitely think it's a game that anyone with a solid understanding of general poker theory and some basic lowball math could learn to play fairly competently very quickly. Lucky for me I guess no one knew that so the field stayed small and there was an overlay. I was chipleader for much of the final table but lost a couple big pots where I ran big hands into bigger hands and then battled on the shortstack for a while. I was well behind in chips when we got heads up but I was able to chip up a little and get within 2.5:1 at one point. It just wasn't meant to be I guess as my opponent kept hitting draw after draw and making monster hands. If I had just stuck to my gameplan of trying to grind him down I may have had a chance to come back, but eventually I went for a big bluff after the draw and ran into the third best hand in the game: 23567, a completely unreasonably enormous hand to run into in a HU game. I don't think my play on the final hand was all that good but I don't think it's terrible either. Anyways it's nice to finally achieve some WCOOP success, hopefully I can build on that over the remaining events.

Mike