Monthly Archives: October 2021

PNW Poker Leaderboard — 22 October 2021

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Too much going on to jawbone right now. I’m going to do this chronologically because so many people are cashing in the same events.

Don’t think I’ve mentioned this for a while, but the Pacific Northwest Poker Leaderboard is compiled poker tournament stats for the states and provinces of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Alaska, British Columbia, and Alberta. I try to put a report together every two weeks, but it’s a labor of love, so real life can slow me down sometimes.

James Romero GPI: 216 was 5th in a field of 107 at the Merit Poker./partypoker MILLIONS North Cyprus #13 $500K GTD NLHE High Roller. It appears as if the 50 re-entries (at $10.5K each) were not counted as part of the reported entries, the total prize pool was $1.44M. Romero went on to cash 68th at the World Series of Poker #17 NLHE Millionaire Maker. Romero holds at #5 on the PNW Poker Leaderboard.

Vancouver BC’s Harpreet Gill GPI: 3415 jumps more than a hundred places on the Leaderboard to #84 by taking 3rd place in another event at the same series, the $5.5K buy-in Merit/partypoker #23 $3M GTD NLHE. That tournament posted 556 entries and 283 re-entries, with a prize pool of $3.8M. It’s Gill’s best-ever cash.

On the other side of the world—at Round Rock, Texas’s The Lodge Millionaire Mayhem #4 $1.25M GTD NLHE Main Event Michael Bernstein of Edmonton GPI: 4384 placed 13th out of 1,621 to climb 350 places to #967.

World Series of Poker Event #4 $5M GTD NLHE The Reunion

The Reunion was the big kickoff event for the returning WSOP and it pulled in nearly 13,000 entries, making a prize pool of $5.45M from $500 buy-ins. Four players from the PNW made it deep enough to be picked up by my tracker. Out of Roseburg, Sandra Bratton GPI: 27964 came in 48th. That’s the top 0.4% for those of you thinking 48th doesn’t sound so hard. Bratton goes from #2375 to #1810. Ryan Stoker (Spokane) moved up nine spots to #165 with 42nd place, before going on to win a bracelet after stats were compiled for this Leaderboard (I’m not sure if WSOP Online stats will get rolled into Hendon Mob leaderboards, but congrats, Ryan). Stoker is GPI: 1667. Seattle’s Katsushi Yoshida GPI: 4095 picked up a best-ever cash for 26th place and rises to #1686, nearly 1200 spots on the Leaderboard. Also from Seattle: Cheang Yoo, the 25th-place finisher. Yoo GPI: 644 is up to #344 from #400.

Steven Sporre from North Plains, Washington got their first-ever Hendon Mob cash with a 4th-place in the Orleans 2021 Fall Poker $75K GTD NLHE. Sporre is GPI: 40274 and debuts on the Leaderboard at #4259.

From Renton, Maria Pearlie Tapang GPI: 17111 goes from #6439 to #2993 after taking 3rd place (their best-ever cash) in Venetian Deepstack Championship #6 $50K GTD NLHE MonsterStack. That event got 205 entries.

Back over at the Rio, it was Adam Hendrix GPI: 2 in another big buy-in tournament, the WSOP #6 NLHE 6-Max High Roller. Hendrix took 8th of 135, in a prize pool of more than $3M. Hendrix’s position on the Leaderboard stays at #24.

Sean Fitzpatrick from Mill Creek, Washington GPI: 26166 won the Rio Daily Deepstack Series NLHE 7PM on 3 October. Fitpatrick beat 134 other entries and climbs almost 900 spots on the Leaderboard, to #2054.

Out of Eugene, William Tinoco moves from #1863 to #1289 by taking 4th out of 263 in a Wynn Fall Classic $200K GTD NLHE. It’s Tinoco’s GPI: 12488 best-ever cash.

The first PNW bracelet of the season goes to Jaswinder Lally from Vancouver, British Columbia, in only his third recorded tournament cash, in WSOP #7 Dealer’s Choice 6-Max. Lally GPI: 6726 moves from #6535 to #643. Nice to see that particular bracelet come back to the PNW!

https://twitter.com/WSOP/status/1445626721990942722?s=20

World Series of Poker Event #8 NLHE Deepstack

The first of the $600 buy-in events this year drew 4,527 entries, and there were only three players from the PNW who made it to the Leaderboard from there (others cashed but not for enough to make it into this report). Chris Niemeyer of Lake Stevens GPI:16110 came in 28th; putting them on the Leaderboard for the first time at #4071. Yakima’s Theodore Demoe GPI: 6810 made it to 21st, and has a new Leaderboard ranking of #3915. GPI: 11192 Marty Stephens from Coos Bay placed 16th, their best-ever cash and a clip of 1500 places to #2382.

Moving up the Leaderboard from #18 to #17 is George Wolff, with a 6th place finish out of the 134 entrants in WSOP #9 Omaha Hi-Lo Championship and 23rd in the WSOP #25 NLHE 6-Max. Wolff is GPI: 1129.

Portland’s own Wayne Harmon was 48th out of 1,790 entries in the Wynn $1M GTD NLHE. The prize pool was nearly $2.6M. Harmon GPI: 624 is up more than twenty spots on the Leaderboard, to #205.

Sukhpaul Dhaliwal from Langley, British Columbia GPI: 4562 took 5th in the WSOP #10 NLHE Super Turbo Bounty, beating 1,635 other players to move two spots up on the Leaderboard to #59.

I’m including Tacoma’s Bin Weng GPI: 12466 in this edition of the Leaderboard even though the +47% ROI they made from their 5th-place finish in WSOP #11 NLHE Heads-Up Championship wasn’t nearly enough to get a mention, usually. (They’re going to make it into the next edition without a problem, from results posted since I ran this collation.) But you have to admire the sheer balls of someone with $12K in recorded tournament earnings and just three cashes, ponying up $25K to play heads-up matches with the likes of Adrian Mateos—Weng’s first match, Dan Zack—Weng’s third match and the player who knocked them out of the tournament, David Peters, and Cary Katz. I mean, jeez. Weng’s cash takes them from #3551 to #1296.

Kevin Erickson via PokerNews

Vancouver, Washington’s Kevin Erickson almost won a bracelet in WSOP #12 LHE, losing heads-up to Yuval Bronshtein. The limit hold’em event drew 422 entries. Erickson’s third and best tournament cash leapfrogs him over more than four thousand other players on the Leaderboard to #784.

Landen Lucas, Portland still, according to Hendon Mob, GPI: 290 has a two-fer, with 10th place in the WSOP #13 NLHE Freezeout followed up by 33rd place (out of 5,326) in WSOP #17 NLHE Millionaire Maker. Lucas goes from #353 to #271 on the Leaderboard.

Rafael Lebron

Puyallup’s Rafael Lebron GPI: 2927 was the next PNW player to win a bracelet, in WSOP #14 Seven-Card Stud, not the one where Phil Hellmuth threatened to burn down the Rio, the other one, where LeBron bested David Williams among others.It’s Lebron’s second bracelet, and the victory moves him up 19 places on the Leaderboard to #89.

World Series of Poker Event #15 NLHE 6-Max

Two PNW players made the last few tables of this 1,450-entry tournament. Just missing the final two tables at 13th place was Jonas Mackoff of North Vancouver, British Columbia, GPI: 4858. That’s goof for three spots on the Leaderboard, they’re now #40. 8th place was Kirkland player Jonathan Baylor‘s largest score GPI: 2704; it’s a climb of nearly two thousand places on the Leaderboard for them, to #1352.

The legendary Terrence Chan GPI: 10620 was at the final table of WSOP #16 LHE Championship, coming in 4th. 92 players put up the $10K entry fee; Chan remains at #33 on the Leaderboard.

It was a notable first recorded cash, in 8th at the Grand Poker Series #22 $500K GTD NLHE for Phillip Latimer of Moses Lake, Washington. Latimer debuts on the Leaderboard at #3475.

World Series of Poker Event #17 NLHE Millionaire Maker

In addition to James Romero (mentioned above) five other PNW players had significant cashes in the Millionaire Maker this year. Anchorage’s Kristy Becker GPI:16854 busted just after Romero, in 67th, and moves from #1436 to #1170 on the Leaderboard. Bruce Herman of Ellensberg, Washington #16814 achieved their best cash with 72nd, enough to climb more than 700 places to #1835. Vanessa Kade GPI:465 moves up six positions to #122 with a 75th place finish (followed by 19th in the WSOP #25 NLHE 6-Max). Climbing nine spots to #124 is Bellevue’s Dien Le, GPI: 179 who made the final two tables at 17th. And on the final table, picking up their best-ever cash was GPI: 6323 Adam Sherman of Seattle at 8th. Sherman goes from #903 to #359.

Adam Sherman

Seth Davies has to make an appearance in the Leaderboard each edition by contractual obligation, and this time is no excepton. with a 3rd-place finish in Aria High Roller 25 NLHE. 22 entries, looking at the payouts, there may have been a 4-way deal between Davies, Jake Schindler, Nick Petrangelo, and Stephen Chidwick. Davies GPI: 50 remains #1 on the Leaderboard and just keeps putting space between himself and everyone else,

339 players entered the Wynn $200K GTD NLHE and Seattle’s Brian Heeb came in 7th. Heeb is up nearly 200 places on the Leaderboard, at #1073.

World Series of Poker Event #21 PLO8/O8/Big O

Charles Coultas of Mill Creek, Washington GPI: 6961 was the 10th-place finisher in this event with 641 entries. Coultas climbs three places on the Leaderboard to #85. The winner of the bracelet was Dylan Linde, #6 on the Leaderboard and GPI: 112, bringing yet another bracelet to the PNW.

Dylan Linde

Darren Kennedy GPI:31626 of White Rock, British Columbia bested me by 79 places in the WSOP #27 HORSE, coming in 5th and moving up about eighty places to #313.

A Tale of Two—Maybe Three—Kaos

And that brings us to the the other PNW player who was at the HORSE final table: Kao “Flexx” Saechao. That’s the Seattle-area Kao, who placed 4th in the tournament and posted a number of other results the time period covered by this edition of the Leaderboard, including a min-cash in the Millionaire Maker. The problem is, Washington Kao’s results get mixed into those of Oregon’s Kao Saechao, not only the final table finish of the HORSE but even to the point where the results of both Kaos were attributed to Oregon Kao

Not to be outdone, Kerry Moynahan posted on Facebook that two other players with the his name cashing in an event at the Venetian last year.

In any event, I can’t reliable rank either Kao because there’s a mixup of results, and that throws everything else into flux. Not by much, but some. Anyway, great job, both Flexx and Kao. Between the two of them, they’ve got four WSOP cashes and a win in a Daily Deepstack in the past couple of weeks.

That’s all for now!

WSOP 2021: Day-No-Mont!

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Is it just me? Every time I walk past this in the hall on the way to the WSOP, I don’t see a patio chair turned into wall art as much as I see an old man’s walker, crushed under an SUV on Valley View trying to get across to one of the Subways in the Gold Coast, covered in colored crepe paper and stuck up to hide the evidence in plain sight.

I took another shot at the 9am mega-satellite on Friday, ending up firing two bullets because the field got to 38 (three full $1500 payouts and one $1200), but didn’t manage to ever get anything going (hence the second bullet).

I debated playing some single-table-satellites, but since I hadn’t been able to connect up with the person I probably would have sold the lammers to (I cannot imagine myself trying to hustle lammers to people in line, even in a full WSOP; I just don’t have the ‘strike-up-a-conversation-with-strangers’ gene) I decided to wait until the $250 Deepstack at 1pm, which has been getting a couple hundred entries the past week.

I made some call in the late morning, then headed down to the All-American Bar & Grill for a salad before I headed in to Pavilion. It was a little after the 1pm start time by then, but I wasn’t too worried, since the levels were 30 minutes. But even though the line didn’t even extend from the satellite cages all the way to the central aisle, it wasn’t moving at all, at first. There were maybe 20 people in front of me and three windows open, but I stood in the same place for a long time. It was nearly. Half hour before I was seated at the table. And I only lasted about 25 minutes, loving a couple chunky hands, then raising [kc js] in middle position, getting a couple calls, then seeing a [9x 8x 7x] flop and [qx] turn and getting my stack all in and called by [9x 9x]. Then, of course, [qx] on the river.

That was the last tournament poker for me for this trip. I figured that I would go pick up my media credentials, mostly to add them to the collection, and went back to the room to rest up from the excitement of my HORSE min-cash. I saw that I now had a WSOP.com player page and my Hendon Mob profile has the update already, Sadly, it’s not enough to get my on the next installment of the PNW Poker Leaderboard.

I wandered back down to the Amazon room and ran into Kevmath (again, because he’d been one of just five people—including myself—in the drastically-reduced media room earlier) and we firmed up our connections for getting together later. The final two tables of the HORSE tournament were running, and I very much wanted to rail PNW player Kao “Flexx” Saechao, who was second in chips at the time to eventual champ Anthony Zinno (who I’d won a pot from earlier in the tournament, I will remind everyone from now on), but I contented myself with harassing PokerNews because they had Oregon’s Kao Saechao linked in their player profile.

No thanks for that, but they did fix it not long afterward. They might just have noticed that the guy in the player profile looked nothing like the guy at the table. Flexx made 4th place, so great congratulations to him, and he will appear in the Leaderboard. Now wee just need Portland Meadows—named after a horse-racing track—to put on some HORSE tournaments to make Portland the home of Big O and HORSE!

Picked up some beer for Kevmath, went back to the room for a while, then he DMed me to let me know it would be a bit later than he’d expected because of a big news thing, which turned out to be he last-minute announcement of two more day 1s for the Main Event and a reshuffling of the rest of the schedule, to accommodate the relaxation of COVID travel restrictions to the US. He made it about two hours later than he’d originally expected (and I left him waiting outside he door for five minutes because I didn’t see his first couple of DMs, my apologies, Kevin), and we watched some of the endgame of the $5K NLHE 6-Max, from 3-handed until just about the time it ended in real life (though not on the 60-minute PokerGO delay feed) while I got to hear some details of how he came to play next week’s Turbo Bounty bracelet event, and other insights into the weird niche he’s carved out for himself as poker’s social media ganglion.

Time to finish packing up and head out in a few hours. Have a great WSOP, everyone!

WSOP 2021: My Time Is Coming

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So people of the world
You take a bow
Cause I used to be out
But I’m flaming now
So hold on tight
With your knuckles white, cause
My time is coming

OMG, I’ve had “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” stuck in my head as an earworm this whole trip. It’s keeping me up at night; right now it’s 4:30am and I’ve been awake for an hour.

That could be because I’ve got some latent adrenaline after yesterday, or it could be because my memory for lyrics is bad, so the chorus of the song is on an endless repeat like the Sergio Leone-style anthem music the WSOP plays over and over before events start.

The restart time for Event #27 $1500 HORSE Day 2 wasn’t until 2pm, so after writing up my post on Day 1, I thought about heading down to satellite land to play the 9am mega but I decided that since Wednesday’s hadn’t had that many entries, I’d be better served keeping it fresh for the HORSE. It felt a little weird to be not playing poker for half a day, considering I’m only here for four days, but I braved the crossing to the Walgreens to pick up some goodies (by which I mean a lot of Diet Coke), rested on the couch, and talked to my wife and father on the phone.

I consulted my wife on the question of which card cap to use for Day 2, and she said to go with the gold.

So, even with only about 4 hours of sleep, I felt up to the task of trying to somehow make a stack about one-third the average last for the day.

The day started off with good news for me, because I picked up a great hand in the first game of the day—Omaha/8—and managed to more than double up, which put me in median stack territory and room to wait for hands. One of the players at the table came back with just 6500, doubled on the first hand with an AAKx hand but was still so short that he was knocked out shortly after that.

We were early in the break order, so by the next time I did an update on the PokerNews MyStack app, I’d been moved to another table. I got another double-up there that took me to 95k. Warning #1 for anyone using MyStack, if you take a photo (at least on the iPhone) through the app, MyStack does not save the photo to your Photos library! So take the pic with your Camera and add it to the MyStack post from Photos, or you’re never going to have access to that sweet, sweet chip porn, because there’s no way to export the image.

It was a bit of a roller coaster, I have to say. I haven’t played much HORSE live or online in recent years, and I can’t say I remember my game being this swingy before. Maybe I just don’t remember it. Anyway, two hours in, I was n worse shape than when I started, with just three big bets and 45 players to go before the money.

Did You Miss Me, Baby? Here I Am.

That was right about the time I went to do an update on MyStack and noticed that I’d been reported busted by PokerNews somehow.

I mean, geez, I didn’t think I was significant enough to get even a cursory bust report. We’re they reading my Twitter reports and just extrapolating? I mean, I’m a former WSOP live reporter and a former contributor to PokerNews.com. Where’s the love? I went over to the media table to check things out and the guy was unhelpful. I suspect this is some sort of software bug, because at my last table of the day, I heard James Woods, who reports on the app, mentioning to someone on the rail that it had happened to him, and I’m pretty sure nobody’s erroneously marking him out.

Just a note to the MyStack devs who aren’t reading this post: the Feed needs times, not just the date.

Another table change and I had a couple great hands in Stud/8 that put me back over 100K. Briefly.

That was the peak for me. We had 20 places to the money still, and I got my third(?) table change, finally over to the far side of the Orange section, about three hours into the day. Half an hour later were were told we were going hand-for-hand, then after about five minutes where I could see Norman Chad and some other folks standing at a table in the middle of the section, a rumor started going around we were already in the money.. Finally the announcement came through and I’d cashed at the WSOP for the first time. It was almost a little anti-climatic.

https://twitter.com/normanchad/status/1448816424416280577?s=21

I was back to critically short by this point. Not so much from trying to eke into the min-cash but because I’d gotten Stud hands in the Razz rounds and Razz hands in the Stud rounds. Limits were up to 8k/16k; even the 2K antes in the Stud games were eating though my shot stack pretty fast. I had to commit to a Stud/8 hand that looked pretty good with three low cars a nut flush possibility, but the best I ended up with was a pair of threes. And that was it! I was a WSOP casher on my fourth bracelet event.

Got my cash from Payout, went back to Amazon to take a pic of the tournament clock—I forgot when I busted, I’m out of practice—then headed to my room to try to catch up various people. Apologies to the little poker group I belong to, PokerTeam 1: Brad, Steve, and Daryl, who I’d been updating through the day but neglected to ell I’d cashed among all the other people I was informing.

So, is a Smashburger a thing? Because it seems to me every short-order cook already used their spatula to smush the patty onto the grill.

Not sure what I’m gong to do with the next day and a half. I’m hoping the satellite scene picks up a bit on the weekend, plus going to try to arch up with Jeremy Harkin who’s been greatly encouraging—not to mention renting me a room wen I was down here as a reporter—and maybe grab a beer or two with Kevmath if we can squeeze it in.

WSOP 2021: Choose Your Own H.O.R.S.E. Adventure

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This isn’t (hopefully) going to be a long post; it’s a little before 8:30am as I’m typing this, hoping I’ll get sleepy by staring at the screen, but I’ve been up for over an hour and I didn’t get to sleep until 4.

Yesterday started off with me popping over to Denny’s catty-corner from the Rio. It seems like, despite the wide-open rep of Las Vegas—many of the restaurants in the casino complex are shuttered—at least during the weekdays—which has led to scenes like this.

Denny’s, on the other hand, was busy and considerably less expensive than anything I’d seen on the menus at the Rio. All you have to do is take your life into your hands by walking across both Flamingo and Valley View each direction during morning rush hour to get there.

First order of the day was to get registered for Event #196 $180 NLHE Turbo Mega Satellite. I had my three $500 lammers from the evening before, but I was hoping to pick up another $1500 in lammers from this satellite. I’m starting to think my decision to grind satellites in the COVID era was -EV. By the end of registration, only 18 players had joined in, which meat just one full payout and one of two lamps and $200 cash. I had one [ax qx] hand get all in against [ax jx] and lose, which mostly wiped me out an I ended up fifth. The other players were discussing how to potentially chop it up as I picked up my bag, while the TD pretended something on the far wall of the Pavilion room was interesting.

That took a couple hours. It was time to make a decision about the path of my next three days in Vegas. I was (discounting expenses and treating my lammers as actual dollars) slightly ahead on the trip after the first day. Do I a) buy into the HORSE tournament? or b) use the lammers for the bulk of three more $580 mega satellites? With the number of players the mega were getting, I wasn’t sure how many of those were going to be profitable for me—I really prefer the larger satellite fields—and they could mean forgoing the two other bracelet events I was interested in.

As it happened, my passions took the lead and I dropped my lammers at the cage to register for HORSE.

My first table in the HORSE tournament couldn’t have had a better location. Though it also had Ian Johns in the seat next to me. It seemed like several other players there were from Washington state, as well. The next table wasn’t so good, in the ass-end of the Tan section of Amazon with bad lighting that made it difficult for the older players—not me, of course—to see the stud variant up cards at the other end of the table. Ran into some serious hardships and was down to 7k from 25k at one point before a phenomenal O8 segment took me up over starting stack and nearly 40k.

Got moved after a couple hours to a table with better lighting but also Alan Kessler. I lost the first hand I played there (to him) and then a (for me) massive hand where I had seven hearts in stud and I had to call off on the river when he raised me with his rivered boat. That stung. I did manage to pull off a flush that held up against Anthony Zinno to recover a bit.

Got moved to a table with Barry Greenstein and was dealt [2d 3d 4d] in Razz, which got me excited. Then I got 2 black kings, which took some of the edge off. At this point, we were nearing the final three levels of play, which is still two hours before bagging, but I’d made it past the ed of registration, and if I could hang on with my <10 big bet stack, I might be able to make Day 2.

Attendance was down a bit for this event. There were 751 entries in 2019 and just 594 yesterday, which is a full 20% drop. I’m guessing that’s probably worse for someone like myself, because most of the people who aren’t showing up are the more casual HORSE players (like me).

Ran into Joe Brandenberg in the halls, and Jeff Mitseff at the next table at the end of the night. We got the “five hands” notice from the floor just as we headed into the Razz round. I think I managed to stay out of most of those hands.

Anyway, my table draw is interesting. Felipe Ramos is #3 in live tournament earnings in Brazil. Ron Ware runs the Mixed Game Poker in Las Vegas group on Facebook.

After we bagged up, I needed to find some food. If there was anything open at the Rio during the day, it wasn’t open at 2:15am. I headed across to Ping Pang Pong (crossing Valley View in the dark, yeek!) and managed to wolf down my first food since breakfast. This hibernation fat is good for something!

Going to try to make the day last as long as I can! Usually I change out the card cover each time I cash, I’ve got to decide whether making Day 2 of my first WSOP bracelet event is significant enough to swap out.

WSOP 2021: Back to the Rio

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As anyone who reads this blog knows, I am not a professional poker player. The last bracelet event I played at the World Series of Poker was in 2013. I’ve only ever played two (well, now three) bracelet events, and they were back when the WSOP first introduced $1,000 events. This year, I sunk even lower and entered a $600 bracelet event.

It’s been a long haul, folks, Years ago, I’d heard about folks grinding satellites, and even though I felt I was decent at playing them, I’d never had the discipline to sit down and just do it. So many tournaments in the summer (or anytime I was likely to be going to Vegas), so many variations. Never mind that I’d done reasonably well in the Ignition Casino Thousandaire Makers (only to blow the money I made on MTTs). Never mind that I had Dara O’Kearney’s Poker Satellite Strategy on my Kindle mostly unread.

I did put my plan into action when I came down in 2018, but bricked out. In 2019, when I ‘retired’ from poker, I had to cancel the trip at the last minute because of work, and you know what happened to 2020. So I really wanted to take advantage of this revival year—and experience a WSOP that didn’t melt me when I walked outdoors.

I made my plans as soon as the schedule was announced, centering the trip around three bracelet events: #24 $600 PLO 8-Max, #27 $1500 HORSE, and #28 $1000 PLO 8-Max. Plus the usual $180 mega satellites and the daily $580 mega satellite. I figured either this WSOP would be one of the easiest (with so many players choosing not to or unable to travel to the US) or really hard (with the people who were dedicated to making it to the WSOP being concentrated with pros).

Up at 4am to catch the first flight to Vegas today. Disregard the enticing $250 offers from the airline to give up my seat for a later flight—we’re on a schedule, man!

Plane lands around 8:30. Now, spite months of mental preparation for this trip, I made  a very essential error: fucking Columbus Day (I’m using that instead of Indigenous Peoples’ Day because this is a comment about how the day screwed me over). I wasn’t planning to travel with a huge wad of money, just enough to get me through the first day or so, but Friday was a bitch and Saturday I had stuff to do around the house, I old just pick up my cash from the bank on Monday, right? Did I remember that banks were going o be closed on Monday? No. And even the cheap-ass PLO game was more than an ATM puts out.

So, when I get to Las Vegas, I need to get to a branch of my bank, of which there are a number in town, one just a couple miles from the airport. It even opens at 9. I get there a quarter hour before it opens and it’s a cubbyhole inside the student union at UNLV. I just hope it has money.

Branch opens up, the very nice branch assistant tells me my specific ask is no problem, until they get to the part where they give me the money and they tell me that there’s some weird thing about the way the business account I have had for my sole proprietorship for more than a quarter of a century is set up in their system and I’m somehow not the “owner” of the account. Fie on you, Christopher Columbus! Anyway, it’s resolved by me transferring the amount I need to my linked personal account and taking it out of there. I was reminded that when I had some a paycheck—from Caesar’s Entertainment, one of the largest employers here—to my account a few years ago, one of the branches in a grocery store couldn’t take my deposit without the branch manager being there, which they were not. It was not, dear reader, a large sum of money.

So that’s all before 10am.

The Rio at 9:30 this morning was quiet. Hardly any line for the registration cage. Mid-week mornings are good. I was bought in an hour before the event and kicked around. It was surprising to see what’s operating next what’s not. There were a fe people sitting at the tables inside Starbucks, but the lights were off and I didn’t see anyone behind the counter. That’s fine, I don’t drink coffee except socially.

So, how’d my first bracelet event in eight years go? Not so great. I was in a steady drift down for most of my time in the tournament, with a couple of players—one at the far end of the table and one just to my left—picking off chips. I looked at their stacks a couple of times before anyone had been knocked off the table and was a bit puzzled at where they’d all come from, I’d lost a lot but not that many, and it seemed like other people had more than me, too. I shrank down to less than a fifth of the 30k starting stack over the first four levels, then suddenly caught some fire in Level 5.

Our little corner of the Brasilia room didn’t see any water service for a couple hours. I was damned if I was paying for some other drink. I wanted my 10oz/$1 water. Maybe the lack of hydration was messing with my game.

My stack got up to almost where it had started three-and-a-half hours before before I potted with a rainbow AA44, got called by two players, then shoved on a KQx flop where I ought to have known I was beat. Both players shoved, one with an open-ended draw and the other with a set of kings and the wrap made a king-high straight.

So naturally, instead of looking for something t eat or drink (all I’d had since the night before was airplane biscotti, which was pretty good), I went back to the reg cage to get into the $580 mega. Now the lines were a bit longer, it took about 40 minutes to get my ticket, even though the line—full of anxious PLO re-entries—didn’t reach the main hall. It’s almost enough to make me go sign up with Fastrac, which I was discussing with a couple of the folks in line behind me, only to have someone who’d just signed up have some serious frustrations with the machine outside registration.

So I got to the mega almost 90 minutes in, with 10k of chips and 400/800/800 blinds. Just the way I like to burn $580. This went a to better, even though there were a couple of large stacks. I was one of the later entries but there were only 24 by the end of registration, which was going to yield two payouts of $5k in lammer chips and one of $2k.

I was playing tight (12bb!) then less than half an hour in I had to call with AK and the guy who’d been opening a bit too much a little sheepishly turned over Q2 after raising 10x. The the big stack on my right raised a hand and I caught trip 9s on a flop with [ts 9s] which knocked him out. So I had a quarter of the chips as we went into a break and consolidated to a table of 9.

But then work interrupted. Something back home att the job was messed up. It was probably my fault, and I’m getting calls from the client who I don’t usually talk to, what with me being a worker grunt and not the face of the enterprise. I faltered and raised [qs js], then called an all-in from a player at the other end of the table, who had enough to halve my stack, which was more than everyone else, but not especially deep.

The highlight of the evening was probably when I called with [kx qx] against an all-in from a two-time bracelet winner (someone I should have recognized, but it’s been a few years since it was my job to know these guys) and cracked his Ax hand. That wasn’t long before he shoved a small stack with tens [ts tc], got called by [th 9h] and the board ran out [4s 8c 4h 4c 4d] for a chopped pot, which must just have been crushing, even to a pro.

We got down to 4 players, on the bubble and K, the player on my left and I were tied at about 37k, less than 10bb. I was getting the best of it, because the other old man at the table, P, gave me a couple walks and K wasn’t getting that, so he got a little shorter than me. T, the player with the most chips, proposed a chop, with him taking the full $5K, and P and myself passing a lammer chip each to K. Who am I to turn down a deal that pus me in the red for the day (not counting other expenses.

Everyone agreed to the deal, we went through the process to get out lammers, and that’s how I got my first-ever payout at the WSOP, though it’s not technically money. All for of us waved to the payout room together, T got his chips first, P went up to the window, but even though I had to wait in line for a little to get my paperwork and payout, P was still at the window. Both T and I hung around to make sure K got his other chip (I’d flipped him one right after I got them), and P paid off his part in casino chips for some reason. Everyone satisfied (except for the part where I blew $3500 in equity) we headed our separate ways. I got checked in, got some fluids, and had a nice pork-fried rice.

PNW Poker Leaderboard — 02 October 2021: Before the Deluge

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It’s only three days in to the 2021 World Series of Poker so there weren’t a lot of results yet from Las Vegas when I ran the numbers this morning. The only WSOP tournaments that had completed were Event #1 NLHE Casino Employees and Event #3 NLHE Covid-19 Relief, both two-day events that wrapped up on Friday. Several others have concluded by the time I’m writing this, though, including the one I had my hopes on: Event #2 $25K HORSE, so I’m already behind and I haven’t even gotten to Vegas yet.

A pretty short list of results this time around, with what seems to have been a lulll in events before the WSOP started up.

First off is Toppenish, Washington’s Rafael Haro, GPI: 4,889, with a 3rd place finish in Los Angeles, at the Commerce Hold’em Series NLHE Main Event. The tournament drew 399 entries for a prize pool of $399K. Haro placed one spot higher than Barry Greenstein. Haro moves nearly 1,000 places up the Leaderboard, to#923 from #1920.

Seth Davies GPI:64 continues to do well in the high stakes games with a runner-up finish out of 38 entries at Poker Masters #10 NLHE. Davies maintains his #1 position on the Leaderboard.

And believe it or not, we’re already at the final result for this Leaderboard: Yesit’s Christopher Brewer, winner out of 57 entries in the Poker Masters #8 NLHE. Brewer isGPI:65 (just one spot behind Davies) and moves up on this Leaderboard five spots, to #16, jumping over the likes of Darren Rabinowitz, Quinn Do, Matthew Jarvis, George Wolff, and Tyler Patterson.

Also, want to mention that Hendon Mob is great people!

Kevmath Quarterly Top 20

I’m actually a little late with this one, I should have done it a couple weeks ago, but life intervened. These are the top tournament earners from the PNW for the past three months (some movements are the result of late reporting from 2020 tournaments). Player whose names are followed by an asterisk were on the list last quarter.

June 2020 RankJune 2021 rankstateplayer
11Seth Davies *
3216Christopher Brewer *
76Dylan Linde *
4071186Jaime Cervantes Alvarez
1515Matt Affleck
2624Adam Hendrix *
2221Darren Rabinowitz
417204Aaron Thivyanathan *
4283591Matthew Jewett
8779Homan Mohammadi
2325Maxwell Young *
551353Landen Lucas
55James Romero
88Lee Markholt
642431Rambo Halpern
2122923Rafael Haro
390233Kris Steinbach
316260Cuong Lieu
1283761Kevin Theodore
123114Scott Eskenazi