Daily Archives: Wednesday, 19 April 2017

#PNWPokerCal Planner for 19 April 2017

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Gearing Up

There are just 40 shopping days before the beginning of the World Series of Poker, but some of the other Las Vegas series start even earlier than Memorial Day.

PokerNews has a day-by-day calendar of events at several venues starting with 25 May, showing start time, guarantee (if any), buy-in, and fees. It’s nicely laid-out but doesn’t really hold a match to Kenny Hallaert’s summer poker tournament spreadsheet which is the comprehensive source for info on Vegas offerings (and starts on 15 May, with the opening of the Venetian Deepstack Extravaganza III).

Another consideration you might have is how good a structure is the tournament you’re thinking about playing? Two Plus Two poster plog has a site that evaluates tournament structures through a mathematical formula to derive something they call S-Points, and there’s a list of 2017 tournaments that have been calculated out for you. At the top end of the S-Points in the WSOP Main Event (339), at the bottom is the WSOP’s $1K Turbo Bounty (34). It shouldn’t be the end all of how you decide which events to play, but it can be another tool in the box.

The Young & the General

Results from the Wildhorse Spring Poker Round Up are available on their site, and local player (and a former owner of Aces Full) Bill “General” Patten had a decent weekend, taking 1st place in the Friday tournament after finishing 2nd in Thursday’s (non-High Roller) event.

And I’d be remiss if I missed mentioning Max Young rocketing to the upper section of the WSOP CIrcuit Leaderboard. As of today, he’s in 4th place on the national ranking, with an even 200 points. With only three more stops on this year’s circuit (Cherokee’s already under way, Baltimore starts next week, and New Orleans is in three weeks), he appears to have a lock on a seat to the Global Casino Championship. He picked up four more cashes at the Council Bluffs stop, with three final tables and a brush with another Circuit ring, losing heads-up to the guy who’s at the top of the leaderboard.

High Roller

Poking at the Hendon Mob Oregon All Time Money List, for the first time in a while, I saw a name that didn’t look familiar high up. With nearly $900K in earnings, Vitaly Rizhkov sits in 8th place among the Tam Nguyens, Joe Brandenburgs, and Jordan Riches. Looking at Rizhkov’s cashes, you can see that they’re all from last spring and summer, and all from just six High Roller events at Aria. Four $25K buyins and two $50K buyins (for a minimum of $200K in buyins in the events he cashed in). He also played in the $300K buyin Super High Roller Bowl (without a cash).

I have to admit, I was caught flatfooted on this one. I’ve been following poker—specifically poker players in Oregon and Washington—for a couple of years now, and I thought I had relative familiarity with the big names (if not always the faces for the names). Rizhkov is an Azerbaijan-born entrepreneur who’s once wrote an article titled “What I learned from sacking 100 employees and losing $1.5 million.”

Vitaly Rizhkov, via Poker Telegraph

From the Archive

Coming from a mostly non-gambling family, I never set foot in a casino until a trip to New Orleans when I was 42, when my brother asked my wife and I to meet with him at Harrah’s. Since I didn’t start playing poker (again) until a few years later, my first experience playing in an actual casino was after I started the blog. Thanks, Quinault Beach! Not long after that, I won a noon game at Encore, which got me into the (then) monthly Champions Freeroll (taking second to David Moshe), and I became some sort of casino whore after my first taste of the forbidden, with unfruitful trips to Spirit Mountain and Foxwoods.

This Week In Portland Poker

Nothing announced as of press time.

Only a Day Away

Remember to keep an eye on the #PNWPokerCal Twitter hashtag and the PNW Poker Calendar for upcoming events!