I always look forward to HORSE tournaments because I get so few opportunities to play them. My only WSOP bracelet tournament cash is a min-cash in the 2021 HORSE event that Norman Chad bubbled. But this was not to be another one.
Since the tournament didn’t start until 4pm, I headed to the Tillamook Air Museum, housed in the only one of the WWII blimp hangers left in the nation. It’s full of planes, including some replicas of fighters from a century ago that somehow only weighed as much as I do.
The tournament went well for just about four hours, I was cruising along until three devastating hands in Seven-Card Stud Hi-Lo took me from 15 big bets (well above average in the aggressive structure) down to 5BB, then I was run down on the river holding aces up by a flush.
Brad (First Friend of the Blog) Press was still in, though, and he maintained a decent chip stack through to the money, then crabbed his way up on the final table. Smaller stacks were busting out quickly with the chip average under 3 big bets, and a double elimination left him as the short stack between two equal-ish big stacks. He had a rolled-up pair in the last hand of Stud Hi-lo, took third place when it didn’t hold up, and so far I’m ahead in our $5/5% swap for the series.
This started off months ago as the wrap-up of my uneventful and mercifully brief trip to this year’s World Series of Poker, where I made attempts on two bracelet events (Event #7 Limit Hold’em and Event #9 Seven-Card Stud), played next to a very annoying person in an Aria $50K GTD HORSE tournament, ran a pair of aces aground in a Wynn $50K GTD NLHE Survivor that would have saved my trip, and at the Orleans $50K GTD NLHE before I headed home.
But I got bored writing about it and bored thinking about people not reading it even if I finished, so I put it off until the next month, and the next month, and by September I wasn’t sure I’d ever write another post here (it’s happened before, I have a personal blog on politics, programming, books, and games that’s gone years without updates).
That’s all water under the bridge, though. I barely remember the details.
What I do remember is, I have a database of every single cash game and tournament I’ve played since Black Friday in 2011. So here are a few numbers.
Overall Stats
Nearly 500 entries in the database with only 19 cash games. 149 profits in tournaments (31.5%), but that looks better than it actually is, for reasons I’ll get to in a minute. 4% ROI overall, 9% in tournaments. I wasn’t able to make either of the Chinook Winds series this year or any of the Wildhorse events.
Ignition Casino
Most of my play this year was online on Ignition, with 385 tournaments and 2 cash games. Most of that was in the $2 Jackpot Sit-n-Gos, 3-player turbo tournaments where the payout for first place is $4 or—in a very small percentage of the games—up to $2,400. I have never seen a payout larger than the 5x multiplier for $10. I won 117 of 320, which would have been a loss of $172 except for a number of $10 payouts, so a 4% ROI.
I played a number of Irish Poker Open qualifiers and satellites in the early part of the year, then mostly stuck to Fixed-Limit Omaha Hi-Lo, POLO, and PLO8 tournaments where I had a little success early on but lost money overall.
Home Games
My original home game group only got together once during the year (though I did just get an invite to the first game of 2024!) and even though I took 3rd, since I did a rebuy I lost $20. Do not rebuy in single-table tournaments inless you’re just there for the company.
The other home game is only at home for me. One of the players from the original game introduced me during the pandemic to a group that almost always meets for some $20/$25 home games using the Home Game feature of the PokerStars play money client. There’s an accompanying Zoom call, though I’m not usually on it since I just play from the living room while my wife and I are watching TV. Often, there are two—sometimes three—games during the night, usually starting out with NLHE, then a Bounty game of some sort: NLHE or PLO8. Just a couple of tables at most. Played 44 of those over the course of the year and cashed in 15 for a 25% ROI.
America’s Card Room
I had a little bit of money left on ACR at the beginning of the year, but I’d forgotten about it. Remembered it mid-year and that ACR had a better selection of non-NLHE tournaments than Ignition, so I played for a bit during the summer until I ran down my account (or did I? I’d better check). Took 4/55 in a Stud/8 tournament on my second outing and a 2/155 in a Big O Progressive Knockout, plus a bunch of min-cashes in games where I’d done a rebuy (this is called a loss), so -22% ROI over the course of 23 tournaments and 14 low-stakes Big O and Stud 8 cash games.
Portland Area
This is The Game, Final Table, and Last Frontier (in La Center). The year kicked off great at Last Frontier, where my first poker of 2023 was a three-way chop in a $10K GTD Limit Hold’em tournament. Then I thought I’d take that run and apply it at The Game’s Big O tournament where I was the first player out (after losing 25bb in NLHE cash). Back to Last Frontier for an early out in a $25K GTD NLHE tournament, and in October, Brad Press convinced me to drive up for the $8/$16 Limit Omaha 8 cash games. Waited around for those for a while, got in, and blasted away a couple hundred pretty fast.
At Final Table, I played several of the $20K GTD NLHE First Friday tournaments, never getting into the money (or closer than about 35% of the field) but there’s something about the jumps in the top of their payout structures that’s been bugging me since I noticed it last December.
ROI for all of that: 0%. $8 profit on $2,595 costs, with everything zeroed out only by the January score at Last Frontier!
Vegas
The trip to the World Series of Poker this year was a complete bust, poker-wise. I only had one weekend, spent it at Ellis Island with my co-worker Ben, and got in a quick meet-up with Kevmath while I was waiting for Brad Press to get through to the registration desk.
My targets were two of the smallest $1500 buy-in bracelet events of the Series: #7 Limit Hold’em and #9 7-Card Stud. Didn’t make it even close to Day 2 of either one. Brad and I headed over to Aria on my third day to play the $50K GTD HORSE tournament there. I made it halfway through and suffered through a pro sitting next to me who felt entitled to reach his pinkie under my arm to flick my ante chip in when he through I was going to be too slow getting it in for the next hand. Brad did well, though, coming in 5th, and his buddy Bobby got first. I busted out and late-regged a Wynn NLHE Survivor tournament with a $5K payout that would have completely saved the trip, doubled up almost immediately, then let my aces get cracked on a paired board by Q9. My last day, it was the Orleans for a long slog in their $50K NLHE tournament where I beat two-thirds of the field but went home empty-handed.
Portland Meadows
When I was playing more often, I spent more time at Final Table than Portland Meadows, because I tried to avoid weekend games, and the bigger games at Meadows were on Saturday, while the major weekly tournaments at FT have always been on Friday night, which didn’t impact our home life as much. On the other hand, Meadows runs more non-NLHE tournaments, so I found myself drawn over there several times this year, starting with their Biggest of Os Big O tournament in February (brick), then their HEROS tournament in April (also brick). A rebuy in a little PLO tournament in August gort me halfway through the field.
Then, on a whim, I went out for a Saturday night NLHE Freezeout in September and a two-way chop. Then, the next month at the Big Bet Mix I nabbed 2nd out of the field of 55.
Back in December for the weekend of the Oregon State Championship, I busted from the NLHE day before the end of registration, but got through the 111-entry field for the Big O championship to the foinal table with the largest stack, staying that way up to the point I was heads-up with the eventual winner. Another straight -out 2nd place, no deal, no chop.
So, overall, it’s been a profitable year. More profitable if I hadn’t gone down to Vegas, but that’s probably not going to stop me from doing it again in 2024.
Enough about me! Let the wild rumpus begin!
Pacific Northwest Poker Leaderboard: End-of-Year 2023
The last Leaderboard was almost exactly a year ago. I didn’t think I was going to run it again, but after talking to people about this here blog at the Big O tournament earlier in the month, I thought I’d check to see if the script I wrote six or seven years ago would still do the job, even though it would need to deal with a lot more data (a year’s worth of results rather than a month) and I couldn’t be sure the formats of the Hendon Mob state/province leaderboards hadn’t changed. But everything worked!
My previous methodology was to report on every player with a cash of more than $10,000 in the reporting period, but as you can guess, with a period 12 times as long (there are nearly 250 new players on the lisrt by the old measure); I’d never get a year-long Leaderboard done because, let’s face it, nobody’s paying me to do this and I’m a lazy, semi-retired poker player. So this edition is going to be sort of seat-of-the-pants*, and I’m going to look for highlights. Apologies if you should be on here for your accomplishments last year and I didn’t include you!
* After finishing this sucker off, this is the methodology:
Only new or updated players with $120K of earnings reported on Hendon Mob over the past year.
Only events with payouts of $10K or more; many of these players have other cashes through the year under $10,000.
Only events with 400% ROI. This rules out a lot of cashes that are five or even six figures where the buy-in was substantial.
Presented in reverse order of their current standing on the Leaderboard, not by the amount won in 2023, although that’s a rough gauge.
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.
Nahm hasn’t shown up on the Leaderboard before because he hasn’t had a five-figure cash since I started tracking British Columbia, but he racked up four cashes at the WSOP and one at the Venetian this summer, including the PLO bracelet.
Linde had a number of other deep-ish runs in big buy-in events that ran into six figures each, but they didn’t meet my arbitrary 400% ROI metric for reporting.
So people of the world You take a bow Cause I used to be out But I’m flaming now So hold on tight With your knuckles white, cause My time is coming
OMG, I’ve had “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” stuck in my head as an earworm this whole trip. It’s keeping me up at night; right now it’s 4:30am and I’ve been awake for an hour.
That could be because I’ve got some latent adrenaline after yesterday, or it could be because my memory for lyrics is bad, so the chorus of the song is on an endless repeat like the Sergio Leone-style anthem music the WSOP plays over and over before events start.
The restart time for Event #27 $1500 HORSE Day 2 wasn’t until 2pm, so after writing up my post on Day 1, I thought about heading down to satellite land to play the 9am mega but I decided that since Wednesday’s hadn’t had that many entries, I’d be better served keeping it fresh for the HORSE. It felt a little weird to be not playing poker for half a day, considering I’m only here for four days, but I braved the crossing to the Walgreens to pick up some goodies (by which I mean a lot of Diet Coke), rested on the couch, and talked to my wife and father on the phone.
I consulted my wife on the question of which card cap to use for Day 2, and she said to go with the gold.
So, even with only about 4 hours of sleep, I felt up to the task of trying to somehow make a stack about one-third the average last for the day.
The day started off with good news for me, because I picked up a great hand in the first game of the day—Omaha/8—and managed to more than double up, which put me in median stack territory and room to wait for hands. One of the players at the table came back with just 6500, doubled on the first hand with an AAKx hand but was still so short that he was knocked out shortly after that.
We were early in the break order, so by the next time I did an update on the PokerNewsMyStack app, I’d been moved to another table. I got another double-up there that took me to 95k. Warning #1 for anyone using MyStack, if you take a photo (at least on the iPhone) through the app, MyStack does not save the photo to your Photos library! So take the pic with your Camera and add it to the MyStack post from Photos, or you’re never going to have access to that sweet, sweet chip porn, because there’s no way to export the image.
It was a bit of a roller coaster, I have to say. I haven’t played much HORSE live or online in recent years, and I can’t say I remember my game being this swingy before. Maybe I just don’t remember it. Anyway, two hours in, I was n worse shape than when I started, with just three big bets and 45 players to go before the money.
Did You Miss Me, Baby? Here I Am.
That was right about the time I went to do an update on MyStack and noticed that I’d been reported busted by PokerNews somehow.
I mean, geez, I didn’t think I was significant enough to get even a cursory bust report. We’re they reading my Twitter reports and just extrapolating? I mean, I’m a former WSOP live reporter and a former contributor to PokerNews.com. Where’s the love? I went over to the media table to check things out and the guy was unhelpful. I suspect this is some sort of software bug, because at my last table of the day, I heard James Woods, who reports on the app, mentioning to someone on the rail that it had happened to him, and I’m pretty sure nobody’s erroneously marking him out.
Just a note to the MyStack devs who aren’t reading this post: the Feed needs times, not just the date.
Another table change and I had a couple great hands in Stud/8 that put me back over 100K. Briefly.
That was the peak for me. We had 20 places to the money still, and I got my third(?) table change, finally over to the far side of the Orange section, about three hours into the day. Half an hour later were were told we were going hand-for-hand, then after about five minutes where I could see Norman Chad and some other folks standing at a table in the middle of the section, a rumor started going around we were already in the money.. Finally the announcement came through and I’d cashed at the WSOP for the first time. It was almost a little anti-climatic.
I was back to critically short by this point. Not so much from trying to eke into the min-cash but because I’d gotten Stud hands in the Razz rounds and Razz hands in the Stud rounds. Limits were up to 8k/16k; even the 2K antes in the Stud games were eating though my shot stack pretty fast. I had to commit to a Stud/8 hand that looked pretty good with three low cars a nut flush possibility, but the best I ended up with was a pair of threes. And that was it! I was a WSOP casher on my fourth bracelet event.
Got my cash from Payout, went back to Amazon to take a pic of the tournament clock—I forgot when I busted, I’m out of practice—then headed to my room to try to catch up various people. Apologies to the little poker group I belong to, PokerTeam 1: Brad, Steve, and Daryl, who I’d been updating through the day but neglected to ell I’d cashed among all the other people I was informing.
So, is a Smashburger a thing? Because it seems to me every short-order cook already used their spatula to smush the patty onto the grill.
Not sure what I’m gong to do with the next day and a half. I’m hoping the satellite scene picks up a bit on the weekend, plus going to try to arch up with Jeremy Harkin who’s been greatly encouraging—not to mention renting me a room wen I was down here as a reporter—and maybe grab a beer or two with Kevmath if we can squeeze it in.
This isn’t (hopefully) going to be a long post; it’s a little before 8:30am as I’m typing this, hoping I’ll get sleepy by staring at the screen, but I’ve been up for over an hour and I didn’t get to sleep until 4.
Yesterday started off with me popping over to Denny’s catty-corner from the Rio. It seems like, despite the wide-open rep of Las Vegas—many of the restaurants in the casino complex are shuttered—at least during the weekdays—which has led to scenes like this.
Denny’s, on the other hand, was busy and considerably less expensive than anything I’d seen on the menus at the Rio. All you have to do is take your life into your hands by walking across both Flamingo and Valley View each direction during morning rush hour to get there.
First order of the day was to get registered for Event #196 $180 NLHE Turbo Mega Satellite. I had my three $500 lammers from the evening before, but I was hoping to pick up another $1500 in lammers from this satellite. I’m starting to think my decision to grind satellites in the COVID era was -EV. By the end of registration, only 18 players had joined in, which meat just one full payout and one of two lamps and $200 cash. I had one [ax qx] hand get all in against [ax jx] and lose, which mostly wiped me out an I ended up fifth. The other players were discussing how to potentially chop it up as I picked up my bag, while the TD pretended something on the far wall of the Pavilion room was interesting.
That took a couple hours. It was time to make a decision about the path of my next three days in Vegas. I was (discounting expenses and treating my lammers as actual dollars) slightly ahead on the trip after the first day. Do I a) buy into the HORSE tournament? or b) use the lammers for the bulk of three more $580 mega satellites? With the number of players the mega were getting, I wasn’t sure how many of those were going to be profitable for me—I really prefer the larger satellite fields—and they could mean forgoing the two other bracelet events I was interested in.
As it happened, my passions took the lead and I dropped my lammers at the cage to register for HORSE.
My first table in the HORSE tournament couldn’t have had a better location. Though it also had Ian Johns in the seat next to me. It seemed like several other players there were from Washington state, as well. The next table wasn’t so good, in the ass-end of the Tan section of Amazon with bad lighting that made it difficult for the older players—not me, of course—to see the stud variant up cards at the other end of the table. Ran into some serious hardships and was down to 7k from 25k at one point before a phenomenal O8 segment took me up over starting stack and nearly 40k.
Got moved after a couple hours to a table with better lighting but also Alan Kessler. I lost the first hand I played there (to him) and then a (for me) massive hand where I had seven hearts in stud and I had to call off on the river when he raised me with his rivered boat. That stung. I did manage to pull off a flush that held up against Anthony Zinno to recover a bit.
Got moved to a table with Barry Greenstein and was dealt [2d 3d 4d] in Razz, which got me excited. Then I got 2 black kings, which took some of the edge off. At this point, we were nearing the final three levels of play, which is still two hours before bagging, but I’d made it past the ed of registration, and if I could hang on with my <10 big bet stack, I might be able to make Day 2.
Attendance was down a bit for this event. There were 751 entries in 2019 and just 594 yesterday, which is a full 20% drop. I’m guessing that’s probably worse for someone like myself, because most of the people who aren’t showing up are the more casual HORSE players (like me).
Ran into Joe Brandenberg in the halls, and Jeff Mitseff at the next table at the end of the night. We got the “five hands” notice from the floor just as we headed into the Razz round. I think I managed to stay out of most of those hands.
Anyway, my table draw is interesting. Felipe Ramos is #3 in live tournament earnings in Brazil. Ron Ware runs the Mixed Game Poker in Las Vegas group on Facebook.
After we bagged up, I needed to find some food. If there was anything open at the Rio during the day, it wasn’t open at 2:15am. I headed across to Ping Pang Pong (crossing Valley View in the dark, yeek!) and managed to wolf down my first food since breakfast. This hibernation fat is good for something!
Going to try to make the day last as long as I can! Usually I change out the card cover each time I cash, I’ve got to decide whether making Day 2 of my first WSOP bracelet event is significant enough to swap out.