Catch the PokerMutant on today’s Poker In the Ears podcast (#215), head-to-head with Joe Stapleton on the Superfan vs. Stapes segment with James Hartigan officiating. We’re answering questions about the 1985 Martin Scorsese film After Hours, a quintessential film about life in New York City 25 years ago. The fun starts at 54:30.
Oh, and there’s an interview with Parker ‘tonkaaaap’ Talbot, too.
Have you ever had a couple of days when everything just seemed to be going your way? Joshua Jutz from Pasco did early this month. First off, he got into the 224-entry Wynn Signature Series $40K GTD NLHE on 2 May and won the whole thing for his fifth and biggest-ever recorded cash. You know how those things go, he probably wasn’t back into his room until pretty early. But at some point mid-day on 3 May, he went across the street and joined 67 other entries in the Venetian Deepstack Championship Poker Series #1 $20K GTD NLHE Survivor, and cashed for the top prize along with 6 others. Now, I’m just guessing here, but I think he waited until Day 1B (4 May) of the 2-Day Wynn $100K GTD NLHE (626 entries), then came back the next day to take 5th, for his 2nd-best cash. All that moves Jutz onto the Pacific Northwest Poker Leaderboard for the first time at #1969.
Dylan Wilkerson moves up a slot on the Leaderboard with 8th place in the 995-entry Wynn $250K GTD NLHE. It’s enough for him to slip past Greg Mueller to #13.
8th place in the Wynn $400K GTD NLHE takes Federal Way’s Daniel Park from #213 to #197. The tournament got 851 entries over 3 start days. Renton’s Brian Meadows picked up his best-ever cash by taking 2nd in the same event; Meadows climbs from #1048 to #408.
Tyrone Smith (University Place) was runner-up in the 581-entry Wynn $100K GTD NLHE on 26—28 April. It’s Smith’s largest cash so far, and he moves more than 3,400 places on the leaderboard, to #1957.
Kent’s Jonas Laid goes up more than 1900 places to #1511 with a 2nd as part of a 3-way deal in Venetian #10 $100K GTD NLHE MonsterStack.There were 543 entries.
More movement in the Top 20 comes from Dylan Linde, whose 6 May 4th place in an Aria NLHE High Roller with 46 entries was enough to propel him past the Lees (Watkinson and Markholt) and Annie Duke(!) from #10 to #7! Exciting!
And as we often do, we wrap up an edition of the Leaderboard with a Seth Davies (#1) cash. He was the runner-up to Bill Klein in an Aria NLHE High Roller with a $25K buy-in. He came in just ahead of Ali Imsirovic.
Just checked some numbers and if @aliImsirovic was still on the WA player list at @TheHendonMob, he'd have taken over #1 on the #PNWPokerLeaderboard for the Pacific Northwest (AB, AK, BC, ID, OR, and WA) this spring. Sigh. https://t.co/uU3Ox4xwA6
— Poker Mutant (@pokermutant) May 18, 2021
Hard to believe that it’s been five years since I applied for a job working as a live reporter at the World Series of Poker. I ran across the notice, I was working part-time at a friend’s second-run movie theater, selling tickets and popcorn and beer (Yes, it was Jeff “Punk Rock” Martin’s Joy Cinema and Pub in Tigard! Give them your support!).
The summer I worked there was a little different than the years before or since. WSOP had contracted out the live reporting operation to PokerNews for several years, then they decided to move the operation in-house for 2016. I’d written over a dozen articles as a freelancer for PokerNews over the previous couple of years, and I’d followed the adventures of my editor there, Martin Harris, who’d covered events in North and South America, Australia, and Europe, so even though the word went out from WSOP instead of PokerNews, I gave it a shot. They say they’re only looking for Vegas-based applicants this year, but if you’re a reader who’s down there, it might be worth checking out. Or maybe you can bluff them.
https://twitter.com/pokermutant/status/1382432079753871364
Not many numbers for PNW players this first half of April, but there are some big numbers.
The new name on the board comes in at #3310. It’s Douglas Rogers of Kennewick, who picks up his biggest-ever Hendon Mob cash coming in 3rd out of 180 entries at the Venetian DeepStack Extravaganza #8 $40K GTD NLHE MonsterStack.
Another biggest-ever cash goes to Seattle/Henderson’s Adam Walton, taking down the 813-entry Venetian #6 $40K GTD NLHE UltimateStack. Walton jumps over 120 spots on the Leaerboard, to #194.
Congratulations to Adam Walton of Henderson, NV who was the winner via a four way chop in our 11:10 AM DeepStack Extravaganza Event #06 $1100 NLH UltimateStack $400K guarantee on 4.4.21
Adam takes home the gold DeepStack Extravaganza Champion Coin, the trophy, and $106,901 pic.twitter.com/CfxjAT4KVv
— Venetian Poker Room (@VenetianPoker) April 5, 2021
Chris Brewer continues to work the tables at the Aria High Rollers, cashing in 5th on both April 2nd and 3rd, in fields of 31 and 30 (both of which were won by former PNW Leaderboard regular Almedin Imsirovic). It;s good enough for Brewer to move from #75 to #60.
And up top at #1, it’s Seth Davies, who continues to put space between himself and everyone else with two 4th-place finishes at Aria on the 1st and on the 3rd, just ahead of Brewer (Imsirovic took 2nd on April 1st; I miss having that guy in my regular standings).
And that’s it! Off to play some Big O!
Kevin Mathers (@kevmath on Twitter, follow him if you have somehow been living under a rock for the past year, hey, we sort of have been living under a rock!) got hold of me this morning and asked if there actually was such a thing as the PNW Leaderboard. As I explained to him, because I’m compiling my stats entirely from the Hendon Mob state and province leaderboards, I’m not going to just republish their data. The numbers you see here are entirely my own, combining their Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Alaska, and British Columbia (and Alberta, I just remembered!) into a single regional Leaderboard.
And publishing just the top names out of the more than 6,000 players I track wouldn’t be any fun; as I’ve mentioned ad nauseum there’s not a lot of movement up at the top. However, Mr. Math did say he thought a quarterly Top 20 for the results of the past year might be a kind of cool thins, and since I have nothing else to do other than compiling all of the stuff I need to feed to the IRS for my audit before Monday, I figured why not?
These are the rankings on the Pacific Northwest Poker Leaderboard for The Plague Year. Last March to now, ranked by earnings (go to Hendon Mob to see what those are). Some people didn’t move at all, others just a little, and some zoomed up, despite the difficulties of (mostly) live poker in 2020 and early 2021.
March 2020 RankMarch 2021 RankStatePlayer
78275
Christopher Brewer
2524Maxwell Young
3130
Adam Hendrix
390235Wayne Harmon
2626Esther Taylor-Brady*
1197569
Brian Swanson
7164
Chad Wassmuth
1414Dylan Wilkerson
3938Kao Saechao
766552Aaron Thivyanathan
1311827Joseph Beltran Arredondo
396330Adam Walton
1717George Wolff
51761796Armin Yazdani
853648Darin Stout
42431801Derek Huynh
34471678Ilya Sofinskiy
473399Reginald Caymol
*seriously, she hasn’t lived here for a long time, but she’s still on the Hendon Mob list for Oregon
Lots of Pacific Northwest poker action going on in Las Vegas the past few weeks.
The new entry on the PNW Poker Leaderboard this time around is Vancouver, Washington’s Jaime Cervantes Alvarez, who placed 39th of 652 in the Card Player Poker Tour/Venetian DeepStack Extravaganza #26 $500K GTD NLHE, played in mid-February. The prize pool was close to triple the guarantee. It’s Alvarez’s first Hendon Mob cash and he hits the Leaderboard at #4354.
Aaron Thivyanathan of Renton placed just ahead of Alvarez at #38 in the same tournament at the Venetian. The next week, it was out to Florida for Seminole Hard Rock Tampa Poker Classic #7 NLHE, another $1.5M prize pool tournament, and 35th place out of 959 entries. Then in the second week of Marsh, back to Vegas for 17th of 253 in World Poker Tour/Venetian DeepStack Showdown #14 $20K GTD NLHE MonsterStack. He climbs from #638 to #552 on the Leaderboard. You may have noticed from his name showing up in the early February Leaderboard roundup that Thivyanathan has been busy.
Korey Payne has been keeping busy since his big win back in November.And he took 33rd in the same CPPT/Venetian #26 $500K GTD NLHE ahead of Thivyanathan and Alvarez, which moves him up 5 places to #162.
A little further up the winner’s list on that tournament you find one of my favorite people, Kao Saechao, who placed 29th. Saechao went on to cash in several more tournaments at the Venetian over the next three weeks, including WPT/Venetian #5 $15K GTD NLHE Survivor that ended up with a prize pool of $73K and 14 $5,200 payouts, and WPT/Venetian #8 $15K GTD NLHE Survivorthat did the same for 18 players. He also made it to 12th of 259 in the WPT/Venetian #7 $75K GTD NLHE Monster Stack. Need I say it? $250K prize pool. For this and more, Saechao moves not at all from his already prestigious #38 position.
Reginald Caymol jumped another 18 spots on the Leaderboard, to #399 taking 13th of 809 in the WPT/Venetian #13 $250K GTD NLHE Ultimate Stack. The Seattle player adds the cash to several smaller cashes at the Wynn earlier this year.
The WPT/Venetian #10 $1.5M GTD NLHE Main Event was a big draw for PNW players, several of whom went deep. The field drew 937 entries and had more than $4.3M in the prize pool. Out of Olympia, Raymond Dandrea cashed in 84th. He rises 40 spots on the Leaderboard to #526.
At 74th in the money, Kao Seng Saetern (Portland) bumped all the way up from #1509 to #1216.
Ten places higher, Port Orchard, Washington’s Kristopher Rundquist got his largest-ever cash for 64th, and goes more than 1700 spots up the Leaderboard to #2306.
pasco, Washington’s Joseph Beltran Arredondo came in 37th. He is now #827 on the Leaderboard.
George Wolff made the final three tables at 24th. He stays at #17. On the other hand, Adam Hendrix making 17th was just enough to push him from #31 on the Leaderboard to #30.
Finally, as usual it’s the high rollers that gobble up the big-money attention. Christopher Brewer continues to wreak havoc on the Aria tables, and cashed three tournaments in quick succession. It was a 2nd place for him in the Aria High Roller 04 NLHE. With just 14 entries, it looks like he did a 2-way deal with former PNW Leaderboard mainstay Ali Imsirovic that gave Brewer his career best cash. The next day, Brewer took 3rd in the 16-entry Aria High Roller 05 NLHE (no deal for him this time, though it looks like Sam Soveral and Jake Schindler chopped the top two spots). Then a week later it’s Aria High Roller 08 NLHE, with 6 payouts out of 39 entries and Brewer in 4th. For all that, he climbs 40 places to #75 on the Leaderboard.
Angela Jordison represent!
Three QUEENS of Poker on International Women's Day!
1) Canadian recreational @puppypack1
2) American shark @Angelajordison
3) Worldwide crusher @pokerkatMy latest piece for @themaplecasino https://t.co/e0dP8oUIEh#WomensDay #WomensHistoryMonth #WomenSupportingWomen #Poker pic.twitter.com/hwIyXzSCGS
— High Roller Radio (@HighRollerRadio) March 8, 2021
I didn’t really think I’d be seeing much go on in just a couple of weeks, but it may be a good sign for the future of poker in 2021.
Most of this week’s action comes courtesy of the World Poker Tour in various forms, and mostly in Florida, but we’re going to start in Las Vegas.
Keizer, Oregon’s Alex Dickson picked up his third-largest cash by taking 3rd in the WPTDeepstacks/Venetian DeepStack Showdown #15 $40K GTD NLHE MonsterStack. 177 entries pushed the prize pool over $90K. Dickson moves from #716 to #630 on the Leaderboard.
Two cashes at the WPT Lucky Hearts Poker Open in Hollywood, Florida put Aaron Thivyanathan of Renton, Washington on this edition of the Leaderboard. The big one was 18th place in Event #1 $300K GTD NLHE Deep Stack, which had over 3,000 entries and a prize pool of nearly $1.6M. Thivyanathan moves just behind Dickson to #638.
It’s not common to get much movement in the top 10 of the Leaderboard without a big score, but there’s a unique situation with the four players between 7th and 10th only about $40K apart. So even Lee Markholt‘s 8th place finish in WPT Lucky Hearts #25 $100K GTD NLHE was enough to move him ahead of both Lee Atkinson and Annie Duke (yes, she’s technically still on the Oregon leaderboard at Hendon Mob) to #7. Interesting note: the expected field for this side event, which was a $5K buyin, needed just 20 to make the guarantee. It had 134 entries for a $636K pot.
Chad Wassmuth was 4th in WPT Lucky Hearts #16 $200K GTD NLHE, another event that showed the pent-up passion for poker being released in Florida, America’s aggression-relief valve. 335 entries made a $670K prize pool. Wassmuth moves up 6 slots to #64.
Back in Las Vegas, it was Dylan Wilkerson in 5th place in the WPTDS/Venetian $500K GTD NLHE Main Event. 812 entries more than doubled the guarantee. Wilkerson stays at #14 on the Leaderboard.
Esther Taylor is another ringer on the Oregon leaderboard, and she holds at #26 after an 11th place reckoning in the WPT Lucky Hearts #17 $1M GTD NLHE Main Event. There was a $5M pot made from more than 1,500 entries. You don’t see that every day in buyins that large.
Anchorage’s Adam Hendrix took the title in WPT Lucky Hearts #22 NLHE Big Stack, winning the biggest slice of the $212K prize pool made up of 415 entries. Then he just missed the final table in Event #25 $100K GTD NLHE, getting 10th. Hendrix is another non-mover despite some impressive figures, maintaining at #31.
Wayne Harmon at WPTDS/Venetian via WPT.com
Portland’s own Wayne Harmon pulled into 3rd at the WPTDS/Venetian $500K GTD NLHE Main Event. It’s Harmon’s biggest-ever cash by a substantial amount, and he jumps almost 160 places on the Leaderboard, to #235.
Last but not least, Christopher Brewer (Eugene) is back at the big boy tables, winning an Aria High Roller at the end of January, after heads-up with former PNW Leaderboard crusher Ali Imsirovic (who, as you may remember, switched his reporting to his native Bosnia & Herzegovina). The fields aren’t large (21 entries) but the money is, moving Brewer up 42 places, to #114.
That’s it for this report! Stay tuned. Same poker time! Same poker channel!
Happy New Poker Year, everyone!
Poker is still crawling out of the basement of 2020, particularly here in the Pacific Northwest. There are live venues outside of Portland that are up and running. You can follow @dave_has_aces on Twitter for their adventures at the Seattle-area Red Dragon and Palace Casino.
https://twitter.com/dave_has_aces/status/1352325138692284418
High Mountain Poker in Eugene is announcing games on the NW Poker Facebook group, along with Ontario Poker Room in eastern Oregon. In town, The Gateway near SE 50th & Powell is hosting games. I’m old, but still way down the list for COVID vaccination, so I’m out of the live game for a long while yet.
So let’s move on to the people who are actually winning.
The new entry on the Leaderboard is La Conner, Washington’s Zachary Johns, the runner-up in a 2-way deal in a Wynn Signature Series $20K GTD NLHE with 127 entries. It’s Johns’s first Hendon Mob cash in almost a dozen years. He debuts at #3729.
I don’t typically cover cashes of less than $10K, but I want to throw a bone to Portland player Derek Huynh, for an impressive run at the Venetian Deepstack Extravaganza the past month, with five cashes between mid-December and the first week of January, including three final tables that included a 7th, a 5th, and a 4th (in Event #31 $50K GTD NLHE Double Stack) that just about got there. Anyway, impressive run and Huynh moves from #4247 to #1801 on the Leaderboard.
Monty Ford from Wellpinit, Washington made it to 8th place at the Venetian Deepstack Extravaganza/MSPT #34 $250K GTD NLHE, in a field of just over a thousand and a prize pool that reached nearly a million dollars. Ford won the Pendleton Spring Poker Round-Up Main Event five years ago. He moves up two hundred spots on the Leaderboard, to #817.
photo courtesy Darin Stout
Wrapping up this first report of the year is friend of the blog, Darin Stout, who took 2nd in a 4-way deal in the Venetian Deepstack Extravaganza #9 $80K NLHE MonsterStack. The 571-entry tournament had a prize pool of more than $190K. Stout moves up to #672 from #841. Here’s Darin’s recap:
I orchestrated four way deal, they all wanted to chop evenly for $24k ish each. I said no even though I was shortest stack. Lol. I wanted first and trophy. So…I proposed $21k each and play for the remaining $12k ish and trophy. Then he had me out chipped heads up 15 mil to 2.2 mil since he took out third place guy. I battled for 40 min heads up ish at 125k/250k/125k blinds, had it up to 7.5-8 mil and almost even. Figured if I got lead on him we would chop the rest and he would give me trophy pix but could not pull it off.
photo courtesy Darin Stout
I definitely was not expecting to be posting another update before the end of 2020. There’s no live poker going on in Portland (officially). There are some tournaments going on around the country but they haven’t really ramped up to a fraction of the usual, and the usual between Thanksgiving and Christmas is minimal. But here we are, just a couple weeks on from 10th anniversary post.
For me, this has been one of those years where I’m just happy I’m employed and not relying on my poker winnings to supplement whatever meagre earnings I had as a security guard or grocery cashier or a freelance multimedia developer. My specialty has been live poker tournaments with fields of 60—150 players, and while I’ve never been hugely profitable, I’ve had some decent years. This has not been one of them.
For one thing, the last live game I played was in early March. I played six events for $10K and $20K guarantees at Final Table, but cashed only one of those and still came out $100 down after taking 13th because of a rebuy. And, of course, I went down to the Chinook Winds PacWest Poker Classic just as the coronavirus was becoming a known thing and didn’t cash there at all (and did a re-entry in the 6-Max, ouch!)
Anyway, most of my poker since lockdown has been on Ignition. Did a brief run on Nitrogen in the spring to support the Portland Meadows series there and had some minor success playing 1¢/2¢ and 2¢/4¢ PLO, with one session even winning 1800bb in less than an hour, but I was chasing the tournament dragon and those 4¢ big blinds get gobbled up pretty fast.
Some ambitious soul put me into some America’s Card Room medium-low PLO tournaments around the same time—my one and only experience with being staked—but I’m afraid this horse was one of those eaten by the dragon. I’ve racked those up as (mostly) losses on my personal database, even though the cost was borne elsewhere. I did manage to claw out a 60th-place finish in an 815-entry $30K guarantee, which got me a profit of less than that of the 2¢/4¢ game on Nitrogen. (I did enjoy getting to play some 7-Card Stud and 7-Card Stud Hi-Lo.)
Big Dog was another of the sites that was pumped locally. I played a few of their Big O tournaments for old-times’ sake, but no good for me.
Most of the year on Ignition has been a downswing for me. Things looked hopeful around the beginning of August, I had a couple satelllite wins and cashes in one of their series (min-cashes). I was runner-up in a $5K guarantee NLHE 6-Max for four figures, then made the final table of a 215-entry PLO8 game, cashed a Thousandaire Maker, then another 6-Max final table. Then it stopped and I was back to playing increasingly-smaller Jackpot Sit-and-Go tournaments and trying to jump-start my bigger tournament wins every few weeks.
Late in November, Portland Meadows paired up with Bomb Pot Poker for another couple online series. I managed to enter a couple of the first series (I’m not saying what I did in them was playing), and I got into three of the Oregon State Championship Series 6-Max games without any results.
So, the year has not helped me recover from the bust of the PacWest series at all. I did manage to contribute to my holiday cheer the other day by late-begging an $11 tournament on Ignition where you start with 50,000 chips and the blinds are 5 minutes long. Got to the final six (from a field of 342) and had [ad th] in the BB, the SB who has twice my stack just limps in and I shove on him with 14bb, he calls with [ac 2s] and flops two pair, which was disappointing. Then the next night I won a 65-player PLO8 turbo tournament,
Gonna need a lot more of those in the next week to get the year even, though. Just won a satellite to one of this weekend’s $221K guarantees….
Dan Beecher on the NW Poker Facebook Page posted a letter from Spirit Mountain Casino, announcing the closure of their Poker Room and their plan to disburse their promotional poker jackpot funds of nearly $120,000. Their “known carded Poker players” are eligible to qualify via a promotional kiosk game running 1—15 January 2021, with the drawing for prizes worth $100,000 from the jackpot on 16 January.
I haven’t gotten a letter myself, so I’m not sure that I qualify, but I’m holding out hope. I do have a Coyote Club card in my stack, and while I didn’t play there often (what with bigger-field tournaments kind of being my thing), I did chop the top prize at a Top of the Mountain series event back in 2013, so hopefully I’m still on the rolls!
Never good to see another venue close.
The afore-mentioned Oregon State Championship Series went off for two weeks in December, with 29 events and $40K in guarantees total, including a $220 NLHE Championship, some 6-Max, some NL Omaha, and a bunch of bomb pot and double-board (sometimes both) mixed in.
So much pot splitting you want a computer to do the work.
Hosted online by Bomb Pot Poker, I’ve got no idea what the payouts from any of the events actually were. Most were in the $500 to $1500 guarantee range, with the championship guaranteeing $10K.
One Jungleman took the win of the Championship, with The Ponz making series point leader, cashing in nearly a third of the offered tournaments.
Apparently, gone are the days when someone who doesn’t even make a final table in a series can win a trophy around these parts!
In these hard times, it’s important to remember the people trying to help and Ben May at Final Table had a Thanksgiving give-away I should have caught in the post earlier this month. Final Table gave away $2,000 in gift cards to people in need the day after the memorial tournament for Heath Bloodgood.
Also worth a mention here is Kat Mullins, who has worn a number of poker hats around town over the years as well as posting contact info for racial justice protests here in Portland through the summer and fall, is leaving (or left by now) our burg for San Diego.
There’s not a huge amount of info to cover since early this month, but it is kind of big information. No new players to report on, but cash game veteran Chris Brewer from Eugene started banging out some tournament cashes in the international leg of the summer’s WSOP on GGPoker, then hit the Wynn High Roller series this month to pick up three cashes in the $10K buyin events. One, we reported on earlier in December, but since then, in two smaller events, he took third (18 entries) and a win (20 entries, beating Alex Foxen and Sam Soverel). These aren’t huge ROI, but the quantities are decent. Those two cashes move him 120 places, up to #156 on the PNW Leaderboard.
Then there’s Max Young, who won the Seminole Hard Rock Poker Open Main Event, which had 779 entries and a prize pool of $1.2M. Max doesn’t move anywhere from his #5 spot on the Leaderboard, but he’s incredibly close to breaking the $2M mark for live earnings. He broke the $1M mark a little over two years ago, and it’s all a long way from playing at Aces on Powell.
Interviews with Max indicated he might be thinking of moving to Florida, which would take him out of the purview of the Leaderboard, but I’m hoping he makes the $2M mark before that happens!
The first post on this blog was December 10, 2010! I’d been playing poker in a home game for a couple of years by then. I’d played a bit online on Cake Poker, PokerStars, and Full Tilt. I’d written a program that evaluated hundreds of thousands of hands to develop starting ranges and incorporated it into an iPhone app that you could use surreptitiously to dial up statistics I’d derived (mostly as an exercise in learning the new field of iOS programming). I’d gotten back in contact with a colleague from back when I was still a bit of a thing in multimedia programming, Tomer Berda, just before he won his WSOP bracelet. I was talking with another long-time friend, Brad Smith (who’s now my boss), about my interest in poker, and he suggested that I should start writing a blog about it. As I was “between employment”, I decided to do it, brushed up on my WordPress skills, did some graphics, and here we are.
The first few months were all about online and my attempts to get to the Irish Open in 2011. Then, of course—as anyone who has been watching the final EPT Retro streams from the 2011 season has been reminded—there was Black Friday and the virtual shutdown of online poker in the US (though there are still some options out there).
Anyway, there’s a lot of stuff in the back catalog if you care to look, not to mention links to the articles I wrote elsewhere.
Good News, Everyone!
Just in case you needed something to cheer your spirits as 2020 drags us toward it’s grisly cave, Limon is back! Banned from Twitter as LimonPoker far too long ago, he’s revived his InfiniteStacks account and is talking about poker (a little) and politics and dissing Bitcoin!
https://twitter.com/InfiniteStacks/status/1329992916790493187
Also hanging with Wayne Chiang on YouTube talking PLO!
PNW Poker Leaderboard, 10 December 2020
Poker is slowly crawling back, and with the imminent beginning of immunizations, maybe there’s hope that things will be back to semi-normal by next summer. If I was the WSOP, though, I’d definitely be looking to delay the starting date from Memorial Day to about where it usually ends around July 4th.
Meanwhile, most of the big action continues to be in Las Vegas, notably The Venetian, where the Venetian/Mid-States Poker Tour DeepStack Extravaganza #29 $200K GTD NLHE did some amazing numbers, putting up a prize pool of over $1 million with 1,123 entries and a first prize larger than the guarantee. Andrew Rogers (Anchorage, AK) placed 8th, and climbs 1140 places to #1700 on the Leaderboard. It more than doubled his Hendon Mob earnings.
Smaller big-buyin events are back, as well. Another Anchoragite, Adam Hendrix entered a 64-player $10K at the Wynn High Roller series and placed 8th. I wouldn’t normally report on a min-cash like this, but there’s not much other news out there. Hendrix maintains his place on the Leaderboard at #31.
Another Wynn High Roller had Eugene, OR’s Christopher Brewer come in 2nd out of 49 entries, in a deal with Martin Zamani—remember that name—for his best-ever cash, doubling his Hendon Mob results and jumping more than 500 spots on the Leaderboard, to #276.
The only new name on the Leaderboard is a doozy. Portland’s own Korey Payne beat 1,238 others to win the Venetian/MSPT #38 $400K GTD NLHE Main Event in mid-November. He jumps right onto the Leaderboard at #170, and it’s literally his first Hendon Mob-recorded cash. He beat out—Martin Zamani, who came in 3rd. #TEAMNOCHOP
Korey Payne topped a 1,239-entry field to win @msptpoker @VenetianPoker $1,600 Main Event for $327K.
Here's the @PokerNews recap -> https://t.co/4bvagfiyzm pic.twitter.com/wGWsFakcnB
— Chad Holloway (@ChadAHolloway) November 24, 2020
The champ had some words to say:
Thank you to @msptpoker @VenetianPoker @PokerNews — the PDX poker community that accepted me this last year w/ it being my first yr playing full time — & everyone that sent me texts all weekend saying they knew I was going to win. So happy right now but we got more work to do pic.twitter.com/3786jDxcEb
— Korey Payne (@DGenerationAux) November 24, 2020
Happy Holidays and (most likely) see you in the New Year!
“Poker Game on the Moon“ by Jim Algar
It was five months ago today that I played my last hand of live poker, the longest gap in my live play since I started playing home games with a group of guys my cousin’s husband introduced me to back in 2007. And that last live session was with what remains of the same group, which has been whittled down considerably from the days when we regularly needed two tables. Maybe I drove them away…
It’s not that live poker hasn’t come back to Portland, albeit in a somewhat reduced fashion. Both of the largest poker rooms in the city and state—Final Table and Portland Meadows—are open, and a number of the smaller rooms have games running. I haven’t partaken myself, as I’ve been on the deck for helping out some folks with medical issues and can’t really afford an accidental exposure because of my love for poker.
Without any live tournaments, the Pacific Northwest Poker Leaderboard has been dead. I’d been hoping to have something to report after the WSOP.com online replacement for the World Series of Poker’s 50th anniversary (yes, you read that right, last year was the 50th WSOP but this would have been the 50th anniversary), but the last event was over a week ago and they’re apparently not adding them to the database.
So, all I have left is me.
I’ve played a wider variety of online the past five months than I had in a long time. I started off on my tried and true Ignition Casino. I didn’t have a lot of cash left there but the first NLHE Jackpot Sit-n-Go I played after lockdown went well, and I got another one that day, but meanwhile dropped five times my winnings in a $25K GTD, a PLO Turbo, and a 6-Max Turbo. I finished out march with a few small Jackpots.
Portland Meadows—which had just reopened before Oregon locked down—had a deal with the Bitcoin-only Nitrogen Sports (home of The Poker Guys). I bought some Bitcoin and transferred it to Nitrogen to play a few of the Meadows-branded events, busting out mid-field in the first couple. Then I started playing their micro stakes PLO cash games and did fantastic, with one of them putting me up 850bb in about 20 minutes. Of course, I promptly booked a session with a loss of 700bb. Then another for nearly 1500bb. Thankfully, those were both smaller stakes than the win, but still.
Meanwhile, Kheang Tang convinced me to play part of the America’s Cardroom High Five series. I played a $30K GTD PLO8, $40K GTD NLHE, and a $1K GTD Stud8 without even getting into the top half of the field.
The cash games for me on Nitrogen were still going well, but the tournaments were a complete bust. Back on ACR. I min-cashed a $20K PLO8 after being in the top 5 for a good section of the tournament. April ended with me still cashless in tournaments at Nitrogen and a couple of losing PLO sessions in a row depleted my balance there. I made the final table of a 45-player PLO tournament at ACR, but a rebuy made me just break-even.
I got back over to Ignition on May Day, intending to focus on 6-Max and satellites. It didn’t go so well. Booked a couple of profits at 2¢ PLO cash, but it was just losses in satellites, PLO Turbo tournaments, and 6-Max for over a week before I cashed in even a $2 Jackpot SnG. Three weeks and more than 20 tournaments in, I finally picked up an MTT cash with 60/851 in a $30K GTD. Not much, but something.
Meanwhile, I was also plugging away on ACR. Apart from a satellite ticket and a negligible profit in a $500 GTD 6-Max, that was going nowhere.
Near the end of the month, I psigned up with Big Dog Poker through Jeremy Harkin, so I could try my hand at Big O during a weekend series they were running. Tried my hand at four tournaments and a few cash games and let’s just say I’m not as good at the game as I used to be back in the Portland Players Club days. And that was never that good.
My ACR play petered off in early June along with the rest of the money in my account. I did get to play one last Stud cash session, which is something Ignition doesn’t have.
Over on Ignition, I had a run of 0.1/0.25 PLO cash sessions that gave me hope, with profits in 10 out of 15, but other than that: nada. I played almost nothing the last third of the month, between my last session on Big Dog and my last on ACR. After July 1, it was Ignition and only Ignition.
Not that that was going all that well.
I had a couple min-cashes (142/1095 in a $10K GTD and 23/155 in a 6-Max Turbo) but many more bustos, mostly sticking to 6-Max, and PLO/PLO8. Then things started to turn around after the middle of the month. 11/175 in the nightly $44 buyin 6-Max. A satellite ticket to their summer series $10K GTD O8 (where I got 14/145). Another min in a $3K GTD Turbo, and 2/176 in the 6Max, with only two busts in-between (and one of those was a $250K GTD I’d satellited into).
I busted a couple of tournaments, cashed 6/215 in a $5K PLO8, busted a couple more and won a satellite into a $35K GTD 6-Max (busted), had a couple more bust days, then played two tournaments simultaneously (which I rarely do because I am old and slow), making the final tables of both.
Hanging out at the $4K GTD NLHE 6-Max and Thousandaire Maker final tables @IgnitionCasino tonight. pic.twitter.com/bcyI8eNumi
— Poker Mutant (@pokermutant) August 5, 2020
A min-cash with rebuy meant a small loss in my first-ever NLHE Ante Up tournament (do not late-reg one of these things when you get just 12bb to start).
I noticed the last couple of Thursdays there are multiple 6-Max tournaments to lay during the series. I was considering playing all three the other day, but two of them start before I’m off of work. I wanted to sit in the living room so I could chat with my wife, so I ended up just playing the $215 buy-in because of the size of my laptop screen (if I’d been in the office, I would have used the big computer). This led to a major screw-up.
I got into a confrontation early in the game and lost a third of my chips, then drifted down further to 1/3 of the starting stack. It seems like I was down there for a long time, but looking at the hand history, it seems like I managed to recover back to a starting stack by the end of the first hour.
Nearing the end of the re-entry period, the player came in on my right with 75bb and proceeded to shove over nearly every raise made by another player. He shoved the second hand he was dealt at the table. He shoved the third hand with [ad jc] and went down to 60bb when he doubled up a pair of tens. He 6x 3-bet the next hand. Hand 4, he doubled up another player shoving [9d 8s] and getting called by [ad qh]. Down to 30bb, he shoved hands 5, 6, and 7.
On hand 8, he open-shoved from the button and I called with [ts kc], exposing his [qs 8h]. He doubled me up that time, and I was up to 40bb. He was down to 12.
This did not stop the insanity, however. The next hand there was an UTG min-raise from a 35bb, and the maniac shoved with [7d 5h]. The original raiser called with [ts qd] and the maniac doubled back to 40bb.
He took a hand off, but did it again, then just limped into my BB (and won a small pot), shoved over a 4bb raise, stayed out of a hand where I doubled up to 66bb, and at least slowed down a bit.
Which may have been why I took my eye off the ball at the wrong time. Blinds were up to 600/1200/120. There were only four players at the table at the moment, with a little over 100 left and about half of us getting paid. I was well-situated with almost 75bb which put me in the top 10 at the time. The maniac was at 40bb. I had [4s qs] in the BB, which I might call a small raise with but I had no real intention of playing. The button (22bb) min-raised, and the maniac in SB shoved and—not seeing the all-in—I called. Button folded and I was up against [9c 8c] Racing, but a nine and a club on the flop turned into a club couch by the river and nw the maniac had almost 100K and I was well out of the top 10.
My last hand against the maniac was just 5 hands later when he open-shoved SB with [9c kd] against my [jh ks] and again hit a nine on the flop.
I did a re-entry but lost a race on my first hand and was down to 1.5bb. Quadrupled up on my second hand. My last hand, I had [as 7c] and 4bb in the BB, a big stack shoved [2h 4h], and I called. He got a full house.