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Remember when poker felt like a game you could actually beat? Then everyone got a solver, and the easy money in Texas Hold’em quietly disappeared.
Alex Livingston has a table where it hasn’t.
“Most mixed game tables still consist of people who learned the game a little bit more organically,” he says. “If you look at the average mid to even high stakes game, it’s a lot of people who have just been playing mix for a long time and built their base with experience.”
Livingston should know. He finished third in the 2019 WSOP Main Event, and then did something most players in his position would never consider. He built his career around games other than no-limit hold’em.
Two WSOP bracelets and a PGT 10-Game championship later, he has become one of the leading voices for mixed games, and his case for them is refreshingly simple. This is where the soft money still lives.
Fewer people, more games, bigger edge
So why are the fields still soft? Livingston’s first answer is the simplest one. Fewer people play.
He reaches for a sports comparison to make the point. “It would be very hard to get to the absolute top of the game in soccer because it’s such a popular sport internationally. But if you devoted your life to being insanely good at table tennis or European handball, you probably have a better chance.”
Pick the smaller sport and the podium gets a lot closer. But there’s a second reason, and it’s the one that keeps the games soft even among experienced players. It is hard to be good at everything.
“Most people will still have a preference,” he says. “Say you play 10 Game Mix. Some people will be really good in the stud games, some will be really good in the draw games, some will be really good in big bet.”
No one has fully mastered all of the games. “If you look at it like a sports video game,” he adds, “getting to that 99 player rating is a little bit harder.”
In hold’em, a strong reg is strong in every hand they play. In a mix, even the regs have holes, and the game rotates you into those holes every few hands whether they like it or not. That is the edge Livingston is talking about. It isn’t just that the fields are smaller. It’s that almost nobody at the table is complete.
Start where it actually matters
The obvious objection is that mixed games are intimidating. Ten formats, several betting structures, and a whole vocabulary that means nothing to a hold’em player. Livingston’s answer is that you don’t try to learn ten games at once. You start with three.
“If we’re including PLO, I would say learn PLO,” he says. “But if we’re just looking at the traditional mixed games, Deuce to Seven Triple Draw, Omaha Eight or Better and Razz are the first three you should learn. You want to learn a draw game, a stud game and a flop game.”
Each one earns its place for a reason:
- Deuce to Seven Triple Draw is, in his words, “such a foundational game for all the draw games.”
- Omaha Eight or Better introduces split-pot thinking, which shows up everywhere in a mix.
- Razz is the gentlest way into stud. “It’s the easiest of the stud games to get to a six out of ten at,” he says. “Suits don’t matter, it’s pretty straightforward, but it’ll teach you the betting structure and the concepts in stud.”
Three games, one from each family, and suddenly the rest of the rotation starts to look like variations on things you already understand rather than a wall of new rules.
Learn the ropes on the way
So what does the learning itself look like? Livingston jokes that you can pay him $500 an hour for coaching, or get his full course for about the same price and keep it forever. But the part he keeps coming back to is simply getting in the mix and playing.
“There’s no substitute for experience. Jump in at low stakes online. The nice thing about online poker is you can play pretty much as small as you want, so you can just get reps in.”
He points to Dylan Linde’s mixed games book as a solid read, but the formula he keeps coming back to is study first, then volume. “Watch the course and then just get tons of reps in online, because you can play small.”
The one warning he gives is about ambition. “Don’t overwhelm yourself at first,” he says. “Don’t jump into a 10-game mix right away, because it’s probably a little too much to learn.”
His advice is to build up gradually. “Try to learn a couple of games at the beginning, and then take it from there.”
You don’t have to be great at all of them
Here is the part that should reassure anyone who has been putting this off. You do not need to master the whole rotation before you can win.
“It’s all going to depend on your competition,” Livingston says. But when it comes to how you spend your study time, he is firm. “It’s more important to get better at your weak games than it is to get even better at the games you’re already good at. There’s more value in going from a three to a seven in a game than there is in going from an eight and a half to a nine and a half.”
That is the whole philosophy in one line. In a mix, your results are set by your worst game, not your best one. Plug the leaks and the edge takes care of itself.
And if the edge isn’t enough of a reason, Livingston has one more.
“It’s simply more fun than playing hold’em.”
Skip the trial and error
If you want to skip the trial and error, Livingston’s complete Master Mixed Games course is available right now at PokerCoaching.com.
It covers all ten formats, from Omaha Eight and Razz through Triple Draw, Badugi, and Badeucy, with preflop charts for every game, live webinars with Alex, and quarterly access to PokerCoaching Premium and the PeakGTO platform.
Grab it at pokercoaching.com, then go get your reps in.
