I had already written part of this post when I got the news about the passing of Calvin Nithikhun Sr., known by a lot of us in the Portland poker community as Twitch. If you can, head over to read the GoFundMe post from Krystle Cline. (photo from Calvin’s Facebook page.)

It’s been nearly a month since I wrote the last Poker Leaderboard. Tournaments were already shutting down then (Bay 101 Shooting Star had just ended in a multi-way chop so they could shut things down) and all that was left to come in were some straggler results of which there is exactly one big enough for me to report on and that’s from the Pacific Northwest’s new #1, Seth Davies. Davies extended his lead over Scott Clements (which was only $13K on lifetime earnings for each of over $8.2M) by taking 2nd in the partyPoker MILLIONS $50K NLHE Sochi Super High Roller, an event with 31 entries.

Like a lot of other people, the COVID-19 quarantine put a real hitch in my poker giddyup. I only had a little money left on Ignition, and ran it down with a bad streak of $2 Jackpot Sit-n-Gos.

Jonathan Levy and Grant Denison put together a deal with Nitrogen Sports (who’s been a sponsor of their podcasts) to recreate the currently-shuttered Portland Meadows Poker schedule. I missed the first Saturday noon game but did play Saturday night and Sunday noon, seeing a lot of the regulars like Jackie Burkhardt, Liz Tedder, and, of course, Meadows club owner Brian Sarchi.

Did last night’s freezeout and made it to 5th place as 2nd largest stack but got into a pissing match with the 3rd largest stack in a blind v blind battle and he rivered a flush after we were all in, so I still haven’t cashed one of those. I’ve had a bit more luck playing 0.0.1/0.02mB to 0.05/0.1mB PLO there (roughly $0.07/0.14 to $0.35/0.70 blinds).

And I’ve had the chance to play three tournaments on America’s Cardroom, inclufding one PLO and a 7-Card Stud Hi-Lo tournament. Who knew it would take the end of the world to finally get me into a Stud/8 game? Almost played one of those “organized on PokerStars Home games with play money but ‘this guy’ is collecting real money though Venmo and will pay the cashers” games because it was HORSE, but something came up, I didn’t make the money transfer, and the whole PokerStars system apparently went down that night while they were 90 minutes in. So, a win for me, I guess.

Stay safe and wash your hands!