Just twenty-six events over this two-month period. 16 of those were online with Chainsaw Poker, whose members (not me!) had an impressive showing at this summer’s World Series of Poker in mixed events. One of the admins calculated that every $1,500 buy-in mixed event had at least one member of the club, and there was one final table where every person was a member.
Sadly, my performance in the club this past couple of months fell off from the previous months, with a couple of bubbles, a Stud/8 where I got crushed on the river after being dealt rolled-up trip 7s and I ended up going out 12/17 when I should have been a chip leader going into the second half of the tournament. Down about nine buy-ins here.
The home game in June had more players than it has for quite a while—back in the oughts we sometimes went to three tables—but I bubbled this one as well in 4th place.
My two shots at Portland Meadows: a 5-Card PLO Lockout and a 5-Card PLO Bounty were busts. Didn’t make it much past the break in the bounty (and this time I didn’t get a bounty to salve my feelings), and while I made it to the final third of the players in the Lockout. What’s a Lockout you might ask? This is how Meadows describes it:
What is a lockout tournament? In this 5 card pot limit omaha tournament there are no blinds, instead the button posts an ante every hand and action starts to the left of the button. Players may call the ante or fold preflop. Once the action gets back to the button, they can check or raise; raising re-opens the action for everyone!!!
Had the 2nd nuts in the bounty tournament that knocked me out early and I went for a rare rebuy, but that still had me out 30 minutes after I got there. 3 buyins down for Meadows.
The Beaverton Quarantine game was a bust, too. Just one cash out of seven tournaments and that was in one of the smaller NLHE bounty games. So down four buyins, but at least they’re small.
Missed out entirely on this summer’s action in Las Vegas, and I wasn’t able to get away from town even for the Chinook Winds Summer Poker Classic.
I can’t close this out without mentioning that I did go out to Final Table Poker Club for their June First Friday $20K GTD NLHE tournament, but found out at the door it had been cancelled because one of the dealers had a medical emergency in the afternoon and later passed away. Most players in the Portland-area community know how hard the volunteer dealers here work, and how much the clubs and the whole poker ecosystem here depends on them, so it was nice to see how everyone came together when something like this happens.
Coming up in August? Who knows? None of my poker plans the past few months have panned out, but starting the 20th there is the Wildhorse Summer Poker Round-Up (the winner of spring’s Main Event did just make 2nd place at the WSOP Main Event), and at the end of August, it’s the Wild West Poker Tour at Portland Meadows, with the Chinook Winds Fall Poker Classic [Facebook group link] right on its heels in early September. Crossing my fingers!
