Encore Club $10K Guarantee (10,000 chips)

I got into the game just as the button was finishing its first trip around the ten-handed table and was seated at black table 2 seat 5, with a couple regulars I knew by sight on either side of me. There’d been some significant action already, with one player in the middle of a re-buy as I took my place. Seat 6 welcomed me to an interesting table.

It got even more interesting in short order when a player sat down in empty seat 2 and started complaining that she couldn’t get her chair closer to the table—always a problem when they’re ten-handed. She was jerky and abrasive, and seemed a bit amped-up as she demanded the table be squared up. The dealer and several of us mentioned that we were squared, with the cupholder across from the dealer right between me and seat 6. Seat 3 suggested moving the chair for the currently-empty seat 1 back from the table and she responded by saying someone could be sitting there soon. She got up from the table after the button went past and stalked off. Eventually, the floor director came back when she was there and she brought the subject up again. He just pulled the chair in seat 1 back and that settled the matter for the moment.

Things only got nuttier when a guy showed up for seat 1. From the way things had gone a little earlier, you might have expected fireworks to fly but suddenly seat 2 was cordial as hell, at least to the guy in seat 1. Seat 1 started flinging in raises and raking in chips, and nobody was in much of a mood to push back. I can’t remember at what point seat 2 went all-in but she got stomped and rebought, which didn’t seem to make her mood much better.

Some of the other players’ suspicions were tracking along with mine, and someone asked if seat 1 knew seat 2 (not that most of the people regularly playing in a $100+ buy-in game in Portland don’t know most of the other players by sight, at least) and he claimed anything but the sort, pointing down to an older player in seat 8 who’d just put in a raise and exclaiming: “But this guy, I know this guy….”

Not too long after that, seat 8 was working on his action (seat 9 and 10 were out pre-flop) when seat 1 jumped in with a raise and the dealer tried to redirect. Seats 1 and 2 got puffed up and started jabbering on about how it was up to the player to keep action from passing them by and the rest of the table weighed in that acting out of turn wasn’t proper procedure. According to Roberts’ Rules of Poker:

To retain the right to act, a player must stop the action by calling “time” (or an equivalent word). Failure to stop the action before three or more players have acted behind you may cause you to lose the right to act.

So they were wrong about the action moving on because there hadn’t been enough players acting behind seat 8 but more importantly:

Deliberately acting out of turn will not be tolerated.

If seat 1 knew seat 8 hadn’t acted, then the action was deliberate, which is a penalty offense. The second time he did it, the dealer warned him.

None of that had anything to do with me. I was doing reasonably well at the break, up a little from the starting stack. I went out and talked to JB and a guy in a brony shirt in the rain. JB was sitting right behind me on black 1 and not long after things got started a couple players at the high end of the table were knocked out and the brony guy joined us. I went long for a straight draw that I had to fold when a second ace hit the board. Brony flipped pocket aces. Two hands later on BTN, I raised all-in withb [2x 2x] but my stack didn’t have much in the way of power to blow anyone off. I got called by the brony who had an ace high. I got a full house but it was aces over deuces, which made two quad ace hands for the brony. Can’t argue with that kind of luck.

Two and a half hours. -100% ROI. 54th of 71 players.

Only 21 winning days before EPT Prague.