#PNWPokerCal Planner for 27 September 2017

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#BitterAtTheBeach

This year’s Fall Coast Classic is in the books, we’ve got full results archived, and they’re even up on Hendon Mob already, thanks to quick work by the staff (though I did have to get them to do a correction on Main Event Winner Jimmy Nguyen, after they initially assigned it to a guy from England with $300 in lifetime earnings).

I didn’t manage to make it to the money, but I did bag chips for only the second time in the couple dozen multi-day events I’ve played (both times in fall series events at Chinook and yes, I’m that bad). Doubly pleased to be bagging and outlasting my two-and-a-half hour performance last fall at Chinook.

Obligatory Angela Jordison photo.

I was at the back of the room on table 38, and we didn’t get five players to start until about ten minutes into the first level. There were a couple of aggressive players at the table , then Steve Myers sat down in seat 5 and the game was on. One hand in the first level where I raised from early position to 300, Steve 4-bet to 5300. I lost that hand. We saw a 240bb pot in the first level, with Steve losing a big chunk of the chips he’d gained, but he came back. Eventually, though, I picked up some chips (doubling up against one of the ago players) and managed to outlast Steve and several others until the table broke after dinner.

By 9pm on Day 1, I was up to 150K, even though getting aces twice in an orbit didn’t pay off for much. I went into the day planning to write down hands, but I must be getting slow, because I quickly discovered it didn’t seem practical (to be fair to myself, taking notes in the early stage of the game before the table was full was part of the problem).

By the time we wrapped up a little after midnight (12 50-minute levels plus breaks) I had 198K, which put me in the top 20% of the returning field of 154 (from 300 entries).

My seat draw for Day 2 was decent. I was the biggest stack at the table. Henry Fields—who’d been on my right most of Day 1—was on my right again, and Kerry Yoon was on my left with a smaller but respectable stack.

Kerry got to work right away, knocking out one of the short stacks with [ax jx] v [ax qx]. I doubled up another short stack—Khanista Griffin—before calling her button all in with [kx kx] for a third of my stack from the big blind with [9d td] (Kerry turned to me and said “How do you make that call?”). Patrick, between us in the smalll blind, was all in as well, but I flopped a flush and knocked them both out. That put me up to 273K.

One table broke almost immediately at the start of the day, and more the 40 players were gone in the first hour level. We picked up several new players, including Max Young, who came to the table with what looked like 300K and sat on my right. So I was sandwiched between Max and Kerry, who by this time had more than tripled the 101K he’d started with for Day 2,

I had a fairly significant setback twenty minutes into level 14 (the second level of Day 2) when I called an early position raise to 16K with [kc jc], flopped top pair, check-raised 40K after a 16K bet on a [kx 5x 7x] flop, then felt I sort of had to call the 72K all-in (against [kx qx]. Like I said, bad player. That ate up about half my stack and I texted my friends that I was down to 112K at 12:25pm.

Then came the end, in what was one of the craziest hands of poker I’ve ever been involved in.

I had exactly 110K, at the 3K/6K/500 level. We were going up to 4K/8K/500 in about half an hour, by which time I’ll be down to just about 90K. I get [9d 9h] in UTG1. Max is UTG and he folds. I shove with only a couple of other stacks covering me behind.

Kerry, on my left, is one of them, with what I estimated was more than three times my own count. He makes the call, which is probably a bad sign, I was thinking. Behind him, the guy I lost half my stack to folds. Toma Barber, who made the final table the only other time I bagged chips (min-cash for me, that time) is all in with a very short stack. Then River Rich, who I played with a lot in the old Encore Club days and who’s doubled up to about 200K since he got to the table, takes a minute before he shoves over the top. There’s nearly 400K in the pot now, the button and blinds fold, and Kerry has to make the decision about whether to put another 70-80K in, which he eventually does. My nines are up against Kerry’s [as kd], [kc ks] for Toma, and [ad ah] for Rich. The last king bangs out on the flop: [kh qh th], giving Toma the chance to quadruple his stack. The turn [2d] didn’t change anything, but the [jh] gave me a king-high straight flush. Unfortunately, Rich made a royal flush with the ace of hearts, so I was only second-best with the penultimate poker hand.

Despite an overlay in the opening event (up against the Muckleshoot and WSOPC Thunder Valley Main Events, gotta watch those calendars, people!) it seemed like folks were having a good time, folks were giving the staff kudos, and dates for the winter series have been announced already (14—25 February, up against the WSOPC event in Last Vegas at the Rio, of course).

They’re Baaaack…

Willamette Week reported Tuesday that the Oregon Lottery is still being used as a wedge to try to peel off poker from the offerings at Portland Meadows. That was followed by stories by Mo Nuwarrah at PokerNews and Brian Pempus at CardPlayer.

Guys, if you need photos of actual poker being played Portland, let me know!

More Poker Time

Pacific Northwest Poker Leaderboard

Results from the Chinook and Muckleshoot series haven’t been integrated into the state-wide rankings at Hendon Mob yet, but I can tell you that four of the nine final table finishers in the Chinook Main Event made their first recorded cash last weekend, and for a couple of others, it was the biggest cash by far. But we’ll get to that next week.

It was a good week for Bend’s Seth Davies, who played in the $100K buyin Poker Masters tournament at the Aria. He took 4th place. You can watch the action on PokerGo. Or rather, you can if you can get it to load for you. (They’re running $300/$600 PLO this week on Poker After Dark, by the way.

This Week In Portland Poker

Usual schedules this week in Portland.

Only a Day Away

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