The Poker Mutant will be retiring (mostly) from poker on 1 January. This is the latest installment in his thrilling countdown to the End of Times.

That was an…interesting…night.

Friday night at publication time, I was still in the Final Table $10K GTD NLHE.

I left the house a few minutes behind schedule, and got further delayed because I live a couple of blocks from Peacock Lane, a four-block stretch of a SE Portland street that has a Christmas light display every year. So I was a few minutes late once I drove out Division to the clup.

Imagine my surprise when I saw a number of people smoking outside the doors shortly after the 7pm start time. Typically, anyone that’s there at the time is in or waiting in line. As I walked toward the door, Rick James was heading the other direction, and told me: “They’re shut down. Game’s cancelled.” I knew enough to not listen to his bullshit, though I did think that perhaps there was some sort of power outage that wasn’t immediately obvious to me—high winds had knocked out the power a few days earlier. A locksmith’s van pulled up at the curb, a guy jumped out and started pulling tools out of the back. I assumed he was there for the auto parts shop next door.

When I got in,  I could see that the tournament hadn’t started yet, and as I walked up to the counter, I saw  a Multnomah County Sheriff’s Deputy kneeling downbehind it at one end. Ron C. was there, and when I asked him what was up, he said the deputies were seizing  all of the cash, as a part of some sort of judgment against one of the club owners, but nothing to do with the operation of the club itself.

This, on the face of it, seems incredibly wrong, as money paid into the prize pool in Portland’s social clubs explicitly does not belong to the club. It can’t be distributed to the club, even in part, according to the ordinances. That’s why there’s no rake. That’s why there are no multi-day events.

There were at least three  more deputies in the office (and the locksmith) and they left carrying a small brown bag about ten miinutes to eight. TD Kat Mullins had repeated an announcement I’d missed about the pan to start at 8pm, and, for the most part, that’s what happened. Meanwhile, I caught up with Kao Saechao, who was back on his home territory after a very successful year, and said hello to Liz Brandenburg, who was also capturing some of the flavor of the evening.

I’m not going to bother recounting how the tournament went except to say it was my usual path to the final table. I got pretty short at one point, got lucky a couple of times, made it to the final table as one of the shortest stacks, and somehow ended up in the top three. This time a player named Lee was the big stack. It was already well after 5am, and when I proposed the same deal that had been offered to me last week—with the big stack taking just under 1st place money and the other two chopping the remainder—both lee and the other player were ready to go and I’m sure the remaining staff was glad to get out of there after a long and stressful night.

Played a NLHE Jackpot Sit-and-Go in the afternoon and bused in third. Tried my hand at a 1-Seat GTD NLHE Satellite for Sunday’s $100K and was chip leader through most of the game, got down to HU with a 2:1 advantage and had a hand with top pair on the flop against bottom pair on the flop and he rivered a second pair, flipping the stacks. I never recovered and busted second.