WSOP Coverage

Sixteen hour-long episodes of the Main Event air at 5pm and 6pm (Pacific time) on various days of the week through November 1st. If you missed the premiere this week, both episodes are scheduled to run again at 10pm and 11pm on Thursday (September 17). The first three weeks run on ESPN2; after that they run on ESPN.

Coverage of the final table will show on ESPN with a 30-minute delay at 5:30pm on Sunday, November 8th, with more at 8pm the same day. Coverage re-starts at 5pm Monday the 9th, and at 6:30pm on the 10th.

Encore $40K

Congrats to SM and BP—who I met through the blog—for their cashes in the Encore $40K guarantee last Saturday. SM made the top eight players, who chopped for more than $5K apiece. Wasn’t able to play it myself, but after work, I got there just as BP busted, and railed SM for a while before I headed home.

Muckleshoot v. Chinook

Today is the opening of both the Muckleshoot Poker Summer Classic in Auburn, Washington (south of Seattle and east of Tacoma) and the Chinook Winds Fall Poker Classic at the coast in Lincoln City, Oregon. I’m not going to make either of them, due to work and family considerations, but I was asked the other night which I would play. Chinook is the only one running anything other than full-ring NLHE this time around, with a Big O tournament today, Limit Omaha Hi-Lo tomorrow, and a 6-Max NLHE game Friday. They’re also the only one with guarantees ($100K for the Main Event on Saturday).  Muckleshoot, though, draws on a player base from the entire Seattle-Tacoma-Olympia metro area and adds money to the prize pool. As I write this Tuesday morning, there are three cash tables running (two 4-8 HE and one 3-5 HE, according to the Bravo Poker Live app). The buy-in for the Main Event at both venues is essentially the same: $550 (with re-entry) and a $200 add-on at Chinook; $750 at Muckleshoot, but while Chinook has just squeaked into their guarantees since the days when it was a Deepstacks Poker Tour event, at Muckleshoot the last reported $750 Main Event had a prize pool of more than $140K. 160 mile drive to Auburn v. 100 miles to Lincoln City, more cash games (usually including Omaha) v. small cash room, big fields with just NLHE v. small events and a few non-NLHE games. I’d have to pick Muckleshoot. But whatever your choice (if you get to choose at all), have a great weekend. (NOTE: You can pre-purchase your tickets to the Chinook series online.)

$100Ks in Portland: Deal of the Day

I was going to pick a couple of concurrent Reno events for this week (Jason Somerville’s Run it Up Reno and the ElDorado Resorts Poker Challenge) but then Final Table announced the latest incarnation of their $100K guarantee for the weekend the Reno series are running, and not having to leave town beats leaving town.

11am on October 24th at Final Table Poker Club on SE 122nd & Division in Portland. $100K guarantee, $300 buyin, one rebuy if felted, $100 addon at break. When it ran in March, this tournament got 310 entries (I came in 252nd after playing almost four hours!) and had a prize pool of $133,550.

The week after that is the Encore Poker Series VII, four days of events with a total of $200K in guarantees, with the $100K main event on Sunday, November 1st. Buyin is $500, with a $200 addon. Sorry, I don’t have stats on the first of these they ran in April during EPS VI, I didn’t get the chance to play it. Encore has a more limited space, but it should get a couple hundred entries in, with alternates, which would make the guarantee, with at least another $30K in addons.

The end of October looks to be a little exciting.

Two-Fer

I don’t like to toot my own horn (lately, there hasn’t been much of a reason to toot) but I did have the chip lead in two HU chops Monday night, which gives me some amount of satisfaction even if they weren’t huge numbers. ADDENDUM: On the other hand, it took me a total of five hands to blow through my buyin and rebuy in Tuesday night’s 10pm….

This Week in Portland Poker

With a lot of the serious players out of town for Chinook or Muckleshoot, I expect things to be a little quiet here, but if you can’t make it out to the coast or up north:

• Portland Players Club is running another Saturday $3K at 6:15pm ($30 buyin) with three freeroll satellites at 11am, 1pm, and 3:30pm. The freerolls have optional add-ons and live rebuys, but one player the other day made it to the final table of the $3K on just the 2K freeroll stack he got by paying his door fee. Sunday is the monthly $500 guarantee HORSE game ($50 buyin/rebuy, $20 addon) that I hardly ever get to play.
• Encore Club’s Friday night $14K guarantee is awarding a $500 satellite seat for the November 1st EPS VII main event (see above) to the 1st place finisher. The info is not explicit about whether the $500 is added to the prize pool or not. These will be running weekly through October 23rd.

Only a Day Away

• The Commerce Poker Series is running until Sunday at Commerce Casino in City of Commerce (LA) until the 20th. Thursday is the start of the $1.65K buyin $500K Main Event.
• The Venetian Deepstack Extravaganza 3.5 runs until October 4th. The big event this weekend is the $600 NLHE with a $150K guarantee.
• The HPT is at Grand Sierra Resort in Reno until Monday, with $1.65K flights to the main event on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday (2 flights). HPT Thunder Valley started yesterday and runs through the 28th; a $200K guarantee there ($425 buyin) has starting flights Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.
• As mentioned above, the Chinook Winds Fall Coast Classic and Muckleshoot Poker Summer Classic start today. Chinook runs through Sunday. Muckleshoot ends Monday.
• Card Player Poker Tour and the Bicycle Casino start up Big Poker Oktober on Monday with a $250 buyin, $300K guarantee. Two starting flights each day Monday through Thursday, with 10% of the field making it to Day 2. Next Friday the 25th has two $550 flights getting more chips, with 20% of the field merging with the earlier flights on Saturday (or you can buy in directly to Day 2 for $2.4K). If you qualify in more than one Day 1 flight, you get $2.5K in cash.

Check out the Pacific Northwest Tournament Calendar for more poker.