#PNWPokerCal Planner for 13 December 2017

Heads up at the 2016 World Poker Tour Five Diamond Poker Classic: Ryan Tosoc (left, and the winner of the 2017 event) and James Romero (right). Photo via WPT.

Portland On TV

The WPT Five Diamond World Poker Classic closed out on Sunday, with Chicago’s Ryan Tosoc—last year’s 2nd-place finisher—coming in first this year in a record-setting field. But if you were watching the live stream on PokerGo, you might have missed the fact that the first episode of last year’s Five Diamond—won by James Romero of Portland—was airing early Monday morning on Fox Sports. Igor Yaroshevskyy, Justin Bonomo, Alex Condon, Jake Schindler, and, of course, Tosoc. Worth watching again or catching it for the first time if you missed it’s first run.

And if you happened to have a bunch of last summer’s WSOP Main Event live coverage  from ESPN recorded that you were watching in the background, you might have seen a familiar face, though Lon and Norm seemed to think he was from the other Vancouver.

And while it’s technically not TV, there is the last episode of the third session of PokerTime:

PokerLeaks

The summer WSOP schedule has been released earlier every year that I’ve been paying attention, but Barry Carter at pokerstrategy.com wrote an article on Friday about an accidentally-published version that showed up on the ClubPoker forum before it was put back under wraps.

Then, on Tuesday, the official schedule was released, and plans for the summer kicked into high gear. There are 78 bracelet events on the docket, with more than a dozen of them kicking off after the Main Event, which has typically come close to the end of the list. New events of particular interest to the Poker Mutant are Event #11 $365 GIANT PLO which runs on five consecutive Sundays, with a Day 2 in July; Event #47 $565 WSOP.com PLO 6-Max in late June; and Event #67 $1,500 PLO oogle D just after the Fourth of July. Of course, there’s lots more stuff but as usual it’s going to come down to a race between what I can afford to play and how much time I can get off from work!

Kenny Hallaert has already posted the Google Sheets link for his combined 2018 Las Vegas summer series schedule with the WSOP events.

Have a Poker New Year

The next couple of weeks are kind of quiet for poker tournament series—even in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. The Venetian New Year’s Extravaganza runs through the Christmas season (see below), but most of the other venues just have regular schedules running until 2018. That’s only a couple of weeks away, though, so let’s look out a couple of months at what the new year brings for Northwest players.

At Gardens Casino in LA, the week-long Gardens Poker Championships start on New Year’s Day. I hesitate to mention them, because there was a bit of a scandal there just a couple of months ago, when they added flights and pushed out Day 2 of a $1M GTD tournament. There’s a 12-day HPT series in Chicago stqarting a couple of days later, then two weeks of tournaments at Tulalip Casino north of Seattle starting the first Saturday of January.

On 9 January, the Los Angeles Poker Classic starts it’s 25th run, with events all the way through to 1 March. The WSOP Circuit Thunder Valley is north of Sacramento two days later. Tulalip, the LAPC, and Thunder Valley are all running the third week of January when the Venetian January Extravaganza plays for six days.

Near the end of the month, Oceans 11/Card Player Poker Tour has a weekend in San Diego. Then it’s just the LAPC running until 7 March, when HPT Golden Gates returns to Colorado. The middle of February has a WSOPC at the Rio in Las Vegas starting a day before the Chinook Winds PacWest Poker Classic at the beach in Lincoln City.

That’s not to mention stuff here in town like the 12th Annual NW Deaf Poker Tournament in lat3e February and a hinted series at Portland Meadows next month.

My Time Is Coming

Just not this week. I didn’t play anything live or online most of the week due to some emergency family business, then got to Final Table’s impromptu $20K last Friday just vbefore the end of entries, did a rebuy and addon, and promptly started a decline, then misclicked trying to put out an amount easier to make change from that ended up being just enough to trigger a raise (should have said “call”!) After that it was a fast slide and out the door in 35 minutes. Missed out on an overlay of more than $2K.

I played a bit online over the weekend, in-between other projects,making it about two-thirds of the way through both a Hundredaire maker and a Thousandaire maker, profiting in some PLO cash games, and cashing 6 of 15 Jackpot Sit-n-Gos (including a couple 5x multiple jackpots). Sunday, I came very close to cashing one of the Ignition 12 Days of Turbo events, a $15K GTD tournament with 222 entries, after making a royal flush at a critical point when I was short-stacked. Buuuut, 41st place with 36 paying.

This Week In Portland Poker

There is an announced $25K guarantee freezeout tournament for Saturday, noon, at Portland Meadows.

Only a Day Away

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