Soooooo much going on!

It’s been suspected for a while that this year’s WSOP would be the last one held at the Rio All-Suite Hotel. There hasn’t been an official announcement yet, but cancellation of a long-standing reservation for a pool tournament at Bally’s appears to have inadvertently broken the news.

With the Rio having been sold, and slated to become a Hyatt Hotel, a move for the WSOP was inevitable sooner or later. Now, a pool tournament organizer has revealed that it's getting booted out of Bally's/Paris Las Vegas next year to make room.https://t.co/xkgnG22LN6

— Bonus.com (@BonusUpdate) July 15, 2021

Here in Portland, things are getting back to normal-ish. Final Table announced that August 5th will be the first post-pandemic $20K GTD. Buyin is $100, with one live rebuy, and there’s a $50 add-on. This Saturday is another $300 buyin/$150 add-on tournament at The Game.

I’ve only played one game live since the start of the pandemic so far, and even when I was playing a lot I didn’t get out of the metro Portland area much, but in the interests of general PNW poker, here’s a quote from Dan Gee about No Look Poker Room in Medford.

No Look has been consistently excellent, is extremely respectful to all players of all nationalities and ages and also very supportive of the disabled… excellent wheelchair access and the custom bathroom with seperate general bathrooms for men and women. But they also keep a decent amount of tourneys in the mix including a weekly Omaha day or two for those players, and games start consistently at noon…

Might be just the thing you need if you’re down in the Bootleg fire area and need a break from worrying. Stay safe.

Pacific Northwest Poker Leaderboard

This edition we’re adding in the Global Poker Index (GPI) rankings for players on the Leaderboard. If you’re not familiar with the GPI, it’s a ranking system for tournament players that calculates a value for every qualifying result reported to The Hendon Mob (now owned by GPI), based on the number of entries,size of the buyin, amount of money won, and age of the result (with more recent results counting for more and results over three years old not counted). There’s a handy explainer here.

I have exactly one qualifying result, from September 2019 when I chopped a tournament at Chinook Winds with John Gribben. When it was new, it was worth about 75 GPI points; at nearly two years old, it only counts for 15. My GPI score is 111,965.

The Wynn Summer Classic $1.5M GTD NLHE Mystery Bounty was a unique event with $600K in bounties over and above the guarantee. Every knockout on Day 1 was good for $100 (out of a $1600 buyin). If you got to Day 2, you got your $100 back and if you knocked out another player you got to draw an envelope awarding anywhere from $500 to $100,000. There were more than 1,500 entries. Beaverton’s Anthony An made it to 12th place, gaining his largest-ever score (plus whatever bounties he won). An climbs 1,050 places on the Leaderboard, to #1699 (GPI: 17824).

Oregon had two players at the final table of the Venetian DeepStack Poker Tour/PokerGO $150K GTD NLHE MonsterStack. Coming in 4th of 215 was Benjamin Garrick of Gold Beach (climbing almost four hundred on the Leaderboard to #1077, GPI: 2659). It’s Garrick’s second-largest cash. Portland’s Rambo Halpern (GPI: 5,941) got 2nd place (his second-best) making it to #430, a climb of over 200 places on the Leaderboard.

DCPS Event #90
$1100 NLH MonsterStack
$100K Guarantee

Rambo Halpern from Portland, Oregon 2nd Place ($39,599) pic.twitter.com/PV2BhiHTLb

— Venetian Poker Room (@VenetianPoker) July 6, 2021

The WPT/Venetian #88 $3M GTD NLHE had just short of 1,200 entries. Cheang Yoo of Seattle (GPI: 938) came in 34th, rising nearly 80 places on the Leaderboard to #410. Portland’s Landen Lucas (GPI: 1,449) took 16th, enough to climb from #551 to #385.

There’s rarely a Leaderboard these days without an appearance by Christopher Brewer (GPI: 164) and this is no exception, though it’s just a small one: 7th in a field of 53 in the PokerGO Cup #3 NLHE at Aria. Even the min-cash is enough to tick him up from #32 to #31.

Vanessa Kade makes another appearance here with her own 7th-place finish (out of 66) in PokerGO Cup #1 NLHE. Kade is GPI: 636 and climbs fifteen places on the Leaderboard, to #128.

Back over at the Wynn Summer Classic $100K GTD PLO, Adam Hendrix made 4th (the number of entries wasn’t reported to Hendon Mob). The cash moves him from #26 to #25. He is currently the highest ranked PNW player on the Global Poker Index at GPI: 8.

#8 on the PNW Leaderboard, GPI: 493 Lee Markholt picked up points in the Wynn $1M GTD NLHE, placing 18th there before claiming 111th in the massive Wynn Summer Classic $10M GTD NLHE Millions.

The Wynn Millions as it was called, brought a lot of PNW players, as it was sort of a fill-in for this summer’s WSOP. Though about a fifth the size, with 1,328 entries, a large-field $10K buy-in—at the Wynn, considered to be one of the best poker venues in town—was an attractive draw for folks who’d mostly been holed up for over a year. Scott Mayfield (Grants Pass, GPI: 10564) placed 73rd, bumping him almost twenty spots up the Leaderboard, to #132. Climbing nine places to #114 was Scott Eskanazi (GPI: 3976), in 76th place. Max Young made it to 29th; he holds at #23 on the Leaderboard (GPI: 32, currently the second-highest PNW player on the GPI).

The real standout result is Vancouver Washington’s Jaime Cervantes Alvarez, with (as of now) five cashes on Hendon Mob, all of them since February, with the 3rd being 7th place at the Wynn Millions. He leapfrogs from #4076 to #185 on the Leaderboard (GPI: 583). 

The big numbers for the week were put up by perennial casher Dylan Linde (GPI: 62) who placed 40th in the Wynn Millions then took 3rd in the PokerGO Cup #2 NLHE (61 entries) and winning the previously-mentioned PokerGO Cup #3 NLHE.