Delving into Dealer’s Choice

I mentioned during those reports from Montreal last week how I’d gotten to meet a couple of the guys from the Canada PokerNews site. They were there at the partypoker.net World Poker Tour National: Canadian Spring Championship covering the tournament for the site, and they’ll be covering more tournaments above the border in the near future.

I got a chance to talk with Anthony and Lane about some other ideas they’ve been working on over at the site. One cool one I wanted to pass along was a new series they’ve started called “Out of the Kitchen and into the Spotlight” in which a Toronto-based player and writer, Ken Lo, is writing articles focusing on the many different variants that will be played in the new “Dealer’s Choice” event at the World Series of Poker this summer.

If you recall, the new WSOP schedule’s Event No. 41 is a $1,500 buy-in bracelet tourney in which the players will get to choose between 16 different poker variants. Here’s the structure sheet listing all of the different games.

It has been clarified since the new event was announced that players will be taking turns calling games for an entire six-handed orbit (and not just for one hand). Not strictly “dealer’s choice,” then, but the spirit of the idea remains in place.

Anyhow, Ken Lo is working his way through strategy discussions of all the different variants from which players will be allowed to choose for Event No. 41, and he’s starting with lesser known games like Badugi (and its offshoots). Here are links to the first four articles in the series.

Dealer’s Choice (Introduction)

Badugi

Triple Draw

Badeucy and Badacey

Click through and check out the articles. A neat idea, I think.

Have to say I am very curious about this event and whether or not players will indeed choose some of the less played games like Badugi, Badeucy, Badacey, five-card draw, and ace-to-five draw. (Kind of wishing they had snuck five-card stud in there, too!)