I’ve been doing the Pacific Northwest Poker Leaderboard in one form or another now for over seven years, since well before I “retired” from regularly playing live tournaments. As people have noted, I still show up at some special events (or when I just get the urge) but I’ve gone from an average of 20 live tournaments per month before I retired to about 4 per month in the first year and just a couple a month since I started playing live again last fall.
That’s a fair number of official Leaderboard posts. But I think this week is the first time that I’ve had the pleasure of seeing two people I’ve played with on the top end of the Leaderboard (technically on the bottom of the list since I build up to the bigger earners each edition).
Max Young, of course, played regularly in Portland before heading out onto the circuit and becoming the winner of multiple World Series of Poker Circuit Rings. I still remember one particularly brutal beat where he got it in bad against me at Aces Players Club and caught a card to double up, then went on to win the tournament (I did at least still make the final table). It still burns, but ah, the reflected glory!
And Angela Jordison, while I’ve played against her far less, has been a delight to watch move up the Leaderboard ranks. The rapport she has with Jacki Burkhart has rightly attracted international attention, and I think there are a lot of poker players out there envious for that combination of success (soooo close to the bracelet and ring!) and friendship. I’m still looking for the opportunity to play some Omaha against her, but I’m not challenging her to a heads-up match.
So this one’s for Max and Angela, keep the table warm, my time is coming.
Key to the Leaderboard
Name and home town (according to the player’s Hendon Mob profile).
The player’s most recent ranking in the PNW Poker Leaderboard in italics. If this is their first time on the Leaderboard, an em dash (—)
Their new standing in bold, preceded by the pound sign (#).
Their change in status on the Leaderboard (with an arrow indicating up or down), or a black club (♣) if this is their first appearance.
For each of the tournaments that are being recognized in this Leaderboard:
The name and link to the Hendon Mob listing for that tournament.
The player’s finishing position in the tournament and the number of entries.
It looks like there was at least a 2-way (possibly 4-way) deal made in this event. All four of the players whose cashes made the Leaderboard were from Washington State. Step it up, Oregon!
Though only one of them is on the Leaderboard this time (that’s Angela Jordison, twice) the duo of Jordison and Jacki Burkhart has been making the media rounds this past couple of weeks, with appearances on the Thinking Poker Podcast with Andrew Brokos and Carlos Welch, as well as an interview with Jennifer Newell at Tight Poker. Plus, there’s this:
Haven’t had a chance to listen to The Chip Race yet, but the Thinking Poker interview is long and funny and makes me wish I had the chance to hang out with people more.
I did get the chance this past weekend to see Jeremy Harkin for the first time in forever, eating some tasty BBQ cooked by Dan Butcher, who was one of the first folks I met on the Portland poker scene, back in my early days at the Chadd Baker-era Portland Players Club.
I haven’t played much live (or really, online) lately, though I did donate in both the $20K and $40K guarantees atthe grand re-opening of Final Table after their move to SE 82nd & Division. More about that at another time.
Hart’s performance in this Leaderboard-qualifying event is smaller than that of some of the other players in this tournament, but Hart also had a number of other, smaller cashes that didn’t qualify for the Leaderboard but dd boost his overall position.
The WSOP site lists Neal as a resident of Tennessee and most of their Hendon Mob cashes are at Cherokee and other Southeast US venues, but the listing at the Mob says BC.
I’d like to sincerely (but probably pointlessly) apologize to Aaron Duczak for not noticing he was from the Pacific Northwest (specifically, Kamloops, British Columbia) until he was on the final table of the WSOP Main Event. There is nobody who would have liked to make more of the fact that this year’s Main Event had two players from the PNW in contention for the $10M top prize than myself.
The combined population of the states and provinces I track in the PNW Poker Leaderboard—Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Alkaska, British Columbia, and Alberta—is about twenty-three and a half million, smaller than the population of California (38 million) or Texas (28 million), and just a bit more than that of Florida (21 million) but here we had two players who weren’t long-established pros at the final table of the biggest event of any poker year. Pretty cool.On top of that, both Angela Jordison and Stuart Young* were on the Day 4 feature table on PokerGO for a long period with the man everyone was talking about at the time, Zilong Zheng, Five players from the PNW cracked the spots between 100 and 200 in the Main Event. * And Vancouver, Washington’s Ali Imsirovic.
Though they now list online WSOP bracelet events, Hendon Mob doesn’t factor them into the rankings, so Gallagher’s 5th place finish last month in the WSOP ONLINE 2022 PLO 6-Max—a $1K buy-in with 470 entries—doesn’t affect the standing.
The lines for winners are marked with circles; the second-place finisher is marked with a box. Roll over the chart for last names and places for each year (excepting 2020).
Las week on the PokerGo Podcast, co-hosts Tim Duckworth and Donnie Peters were discussing the oft-repeated theory that playing the last day of the WSOP Main Event was the best way to run up a big stack.
As it happens, I’d taken a look at that assumption in an article at PokerNews back in 2015 (just a few months before I interviewed for a job there with Donnie and Matt Parvis, as a matter of fact).
In that article, I charted end-of-day chip stacks against entrants, breaking each day’s finishers into six groups: top 10%, 70% to 90%, 50% to 70%, 30% to 50%, 10% to 30%, and bottom 10%.
There wasn’t any statistical correlation between the number of entrants on each day and the stack distribution that I could find, the biggest end-of-day stack between 2011 and 2015 was on a Day 1A (2012). In 2011, the biggest ending stack was on Day 1A, and in 2014 the biggest stack on 1A was larger than on 1B despite a field only a third the size.
The other groupings remained very consistent. The first decile (bottom 10%) topped out consistently around 45% of the starting stack. The fourth decile (40%) had just over starting stack. The median at 50% was about 120% of starting stack, etc.
I wasn’t particularly surprised when I ran numbers for 2016 to 2022 (2020 excluded). This time, I used a percentage of starting stack to represent the end-of-day numbers, because the number of chips went from 50,000 to 60,000 in 2019. Again, everything except the top 10% is very consistent. And again, earlier starting days with fewer entries have outperformed larger fields: 2017 Day 1A had the largest end-of-day stack; the same thing happened in 2019.
Where there is a definite correlation is in the number of players that survive each day. Larger fields have a larger percentage of the field surviving to Day 2. Of the 20 starting days from 2016 to 2022, the range of survivors was from 67% to 77%, and the percentage of survivors on Day 1A was never more than 72%. The percentage of survivors on the last day—Day 1C until 2019 and Day 1D in 2021 and 2022—was never lower than 75%.
While there was only a 3% difference in the number of survivors between the first and last starting day in 2019, in each of the other years, there were between 5% and 9% more entering players making it to Day 2. Only on 2022 Day 1C were there more survivors on a later starting day.
So if you’re looking for a reason to play the last entry day for the Main Event, that’s your reason.