The Stud Rounds Are Where Mixed-Game Final Tables Are Won

Eli Elezra didn't bust the $3,000 Nine Game Mixed on a hold'em hand. Neither did Mike Gorodinsky. Between them, these two players hold 10 WSOP bracelets, 44 career final tables, and over $9.1 million in lifetime tournament earnings. And both were eliminated from Event #52 before the final seven players took their seats.

That's not a coincidence. It's a pattern.

The Nine Game Mixed Rotation, Explained Quickly

WSOP Event #52 rotates through nine poker variants: limit hold'em, Omaha hi-lo, razz, seven-card stud, stud hi-lo, no-limit hold'em, pot-limit Omaha, 2-7 triple draw, and A-5 lowball draw. Each game plays for a fixed number of hands before the dealer announces the switch.

Most players entering a $3,000 Nine Game Mixed event are competent across all nine. Nobody sits down with $3K expecting to survive on hold'em alone. But "competent" isn't the same as "profitable," and the gap between those two words is where the stud rounds eat people alive.

Between them, Elezra and Gorodinsky hold 10 WSOP bracelets, 44 career final tables, and over $9.1 million in lifetime earnings, and both were gone before the final seven.

Why the Stud Rounds Create the Biggest Edges

Three of the nine variants are stud-based: seven-card stud, stud hi-lo, and razz. Here's what makes them fundamentally different from the community-card games.

Dead cards are visible information. In hold'em, the only public cards are on the board. In stud, every folded upcard is information you either tracked or didn't. A hold'em player who drifts through a stud round without cataloging door cards is playing with a partial deck and doesn't know which partial. That's not a small leak. It's the entire game.

Starting-hand selection punishes autopilot. In hold'em, you can open-fold 70% of hands preflop and wait for something playable. In razz, whether your 7-4-2 is gold or garbage depends entirely on how many low cards you've already seen fold. The same starting hand changes value street to street based on what's exposed. Hold'em tourists tend to play their own three cards in a vacuum and hemorrhage bets on fourth and fifth street.

Pot geometry is different. Stud variants at the WSOP use a small-bet / big-bet structure. The bets double on fifth street. If you're calling loosely on third and fourth street in stud hi-lo, you're building a pot that gets expensive right when your hand clarity is lowest. Regulars know exactly when to release; tourists call one street too many, repeatedly, across dozens of hands.

The Accumulation Problem

Here's the math that hold'em players miss. The Nine Game rotation doesn't weight any single variant heavily enough to knock you out in one hand (no-limit hold'em aside). Instead, the stud rounds grind your stack in small, steady increments. You lose two big bets in razz chasing a six-low that bricks. You call down in stud hi-lo with a mediocre low that gets quartered. You pay off a rolled-up set in seven-card stud because you never tracked the door cards.

None of those pots are catastrophic individually. But across a full rotation, losing 8 to 12 big bets in stud variants while breaking even in hold'em and PLO means you're bleeding roughly 5-8% of your stack per cycle. At a final-table bubble, that's fatal.

Elezra, with five bracelets and $4.53M in lifetime cashes, and Gorodinsky, with five bracelets and $4.64M, finished 8th and 9th respectively. Meanwhile, Joseph Couden, a two-time bracelet winner with 20 career final tables, leads the remaining seven with 1,280,000 in chips.

The One Heuristic

If you're a hold'em player considering a mixed-game event at the WSOP, here's the single adjustment that matters most:

Track every upcard in every stud round, even hands you're not in. Write them on a napkin if you have to. Before you act on any street, know how many of your outs are already dead. If you can't recall at least 60% of the folded upcards at your table, you are not ready to play the stud rounds for real money. The players who survive to the final table in Nine Game Mixed aren't necessarily better at hold'em or PLO. They're the ones who treat the stud rounds as an information game, not a card game.