Lately Oklahoma has garnered much attention, particularly when Devon Energy Corp.’s (NYSE: DVN) $1.9 billion spotlight burned so very brightly on 80,000 acres in the Stack play.

Big deals in the Stack and bad prices everywhere have taken a little of the bloom off the rose in the Anadarko Basin.

So much the better for Denver’s FourPoint Energy LLC: on Feb. 25, FourPoint made a cagy $385 million deal to purchase Chesapeake Energy Corp.’s (NYSE: CHK) Western Anadarko assets.

While the Stack and Scoop soak up attention—and dollars—FourPoint gained control of over 473,000 net acres in another part of the Anadarko Basin.

After the acquisition closes in late April, FourPoint will more than double its acreage position to 880,000 net acres from 410,000 net acres. The company may run a rig on the acreage in the second half of 2016, Kamil Tazi, executive vice president and FourPoint’s COO, told Hart Energy.

The deal includes 3,800 3P undeveloped locations.

“Granted, only about 600 of those are economic at today’s prices,” Tazi said. But as prices improve, reserves and value will multiply.

“A moderate price increase will generate some very compelling economics,” he said.

“We continue to believe that so much more potential is associated with the Western Anadarko basin,” Tazi said. “It is much easier for us at this point … to accumulate what we think is an unprecedented position in a world class basin.”

FourPoint, naturally, wouldn’t mind being in the Stack or Scoop. But the sweet spots for those plays are tightly controlled by a handful of companies.

“The sweet spots have already been largely identified,” Tazi said. “There’s not a lot of guess work as to where they are.”

But Tazi prefers the Anadarko’s potential. The Stack and Scoop has perhaps 3 million net prospective acres and four or five good benches.

“By contrast, if you look at the Western Anadarko, [there are] close to 5 million net acres and arguably 10-12 benches that are prospective in the core,” he said.

FourPoint’s clever disguise is that it’s the latest iteration of Cordillera Energy Partners. In 2012, the company sold 254,000 net acres in the Granite Wash, Tonkawa, Cleveland and Marmaton plays for $2.85 billion. The company’s institutional knowledge of the Anadarko is likely among its most valuable assets.

“We’re very familiar with the geology and the petroleum system,” Tazi said.

FourPoint has mapped out the entirety of the basin and has a well-defined understanding of the prospectivity of every section. It’s what guides its acquisitions, leasing and drilling programs.

When opportunities emerge, FourPoint already knows what it likes and how it fits in with the company’s acquisition strategy.

The latest Chesapeake deal was hatched from its last Oklahoma deal—an $840 million August deal to purchase Chesapeake subsidiaries in the Anadarko Basin. The complex three-way negotiation among FourPoint, Chesapeake and GSO Capital Partners LP added acreage and 1,500 producing wells.

While in the process of evaluating the acquisition, FourPoint started asking Chesapeake about its willingness to divest the rest of their Western Anadarko holdings.

“We kept that conversation going and we were able to leverage the relationships built over the course of the previous transaction to make inroads and ultimately come to a mutually agreeable arrangement,” Tazi said.

While the production from the acquisition is gassier, the company is more interested in profitability.

“While we certainly are mindful of the product mix, in evaluating acquisitions we pay more attention to the cash flow, reserves, upside potential, fit of the asset and the returns we think it can develop,” Tazi said, “rather than strictly saying we’re only going to look for an oil asset or a gas asset.”

Operators have been exploring and drilling wells in the Anadarko since at least the 1930s. Horizontal drilling revitalized the basin and opened up even more ways to get at the resource.

The heightened interest in the past eight months in the Scoop and Stack is yet another leg in that evolution by which operators continue to gain greater understanding of the petroleum system and develop technologies to economically produce the resource, Tazi said.

FourPoint is being somewhat contrarian, Tazi said, but it’s buying in an area he thinks is full of potential.

“Let other people and operators spend premium dollars trying to acquire positions in an area we feel is pretty much locked up right now,” he said.

FourPoint, it seems, will stick to what it knows.

Darren Barbee can be reached at dbarbee@hartenergy.com.