#PNWPokerCal Planner for 08 December 2018

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#PNWPokerLeaderboard

No new additions to the leaderboard database, but the top cash is for someone who’s never been mentioned here: Roderick Chavez from Bellevue took 1st place at the WPT Five Damond NLHE Seniors tournament Wednesday at Bellagio, beating out at least three others at the final table with more than $500K each in lifetime winnings. Roderick has about $44K after winning more than $30K in the tournament. A veery nice way to close out the year.

Dylan Wilkerson continued his streak to the end of 2018, winning WSOP Circuit Planet Hollywood #4 NLHE, a $400 buyin with 176 entries.

Steve Chanthabouasy says he’s out of the mix games and focusing on NLHE tournaments for the big money, which he’s certainly got a point about after winning the 174-entry $560 buyin WPT Five Diamond #4 NLHE. There was a deal heads-up, and the other player got a little more money, but Steve got the win. Angela Jordison may be laying odds as to which lasts longer: my poker retirement or Steve sticking to NLHE.

Rafael Lebron from Puyallup made the final table of the WSOPC Planet Hollywood $500K GTD Main Event, taking 9th place. If you aren’t familiar with Lebron, his fourth-ever recorded cash was winning a bracelet in the $3K buyin Limit Hold’em 6-Max in 2016. That was four days after he was runner-up foor a bracelet in the PLO 6-Max.

Usually, a 26th-place finish isn’t enough to get you on the leaderboard even if it’s a big buyin, I try to limit it to significant ROI or I’d be overwhelmed, but Auburn’s Thomas Kornechuk took that spot in the $3500 buyin WPT Seminole Hard Rock Main Event, which had nearly 900 entries, so yeah. It’s good enough.

One Month Three Weeks One Hundred 98 Kay

The chances of beating my self-imposed deadline/goal of $100K in earnings by the end of the year is getting increasingly more unlikely. Last night’s liquidity error at the Final Table $20K really reduce any possibility of putting together the seed money for a trip to somewhere I could run it up. The shot at the WPT Five Diamond is gone.

Pretty much down to Venetian events at this point, unless something happens where I can look further afield.

This Week In Portland Poker

Next weekend will be all about the Portland Meadows $30K GTD NLHE.

Only a Day Away

  • The last event (ever) on my calendar is the Venetian Deepstacks Extravaganza V. Which starts 20 December. There’s a $100K GTD the first weekend, and a $260K GTD Monster Stack just before the New Year’s ($400 buyin).

The cards in the header were up by the cash registers at the Mall 205 Dollar Tree this afternoon, in case you’re looking for stocking stuffers.

R-Day Minus 25

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The Poker Mutant will be retiring (mostly) from poker on 1 January. This is the latest installment in his thrilling countdown to the End of Times.

Tonight was possibly my last big poker event anywhere and I have to say I’m a bit disappointed in how it went. My table at the Final Table $20K GTD NLHE First Friday was pretty active.

On one of my first hands in seat 8, I raised with A♦ T♦ and got several callers. The flop was J♣ T♥ 9♠ and there was an early-position bet. I folded, then a player in seat 1 re-raised to 2,200. The original bettor shoved and the raiser called fairly quickly, showing JX 7X. The original bettor had the straight with QX 8X. Then the board ran out AX AX, and I would have had the second nuts. Not that I was going all-in on that draw.

Seat 1 rebought but managed to get stacked and forced out of the game in ten minutes. In all, by the end of the first hour or so, there were 15 rebuys, and a third of them were from our table. But they weren’t coming my way.

The end for me came with a whimper. I limped in with JX TX and less than half my starting stack, but still about 30bb. Nearly the whole table was in the hand and the flop was KX JX 5X. A guy who’d been making a big fuss about winning the previous week’s $10K (at a table with the likes of Kim Pok and Casey Ring) opened the betting and I called. We were heads-up. The turn was a ten, I was first to act, and I went all-in. He took a while to think about it, then finally called with a pair of aces that he’d slow-played. Two aces, three kings, four queens, three fives. It was a king.

As you may know, I am not a fan of rebuys, but I figured there wouldn’t be too many more options to do so. I hadn’t stopped by the bank to get any cash out for a rebuy, so I told Bourbon Bill that I needed to hit the ATM. When I got there, though, the screen said it was Out of Order. I walked back to the table as Bill was dealing a new hand and told him I wasn’t going to be able to do it, and he started to gather up the cards for a misdeal (since he’d dealt in my position), A couple of people offered to loan me the money, but by then I figured I’d caused enough trouble and slunk into the night of Southeaast Portland.

Played a couple of Ignition Casino $2 NLHE Jackpot Sit-n-Go tournaments. Won one, lost one.

Here’s how I spent Pearl Harbor Day six years ago:

“A Day of Poker That Will Live In Infamy”

R-Day Minus 26

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The Poker Mutant will be retiring (mostly) from poker on 1 January. This is the latest installment in his thrilling countdown to the End of Times.

No poker played today, but I have a good excuse because it’s our 30th wedding anniversary, so going out for a game might have been a bad idea.

R-Day Minus 27

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The Poker Mutant will be retiring (mostly) from poker on 1 January. This is the latest installment in his thrilling countdown to the End of Times.

No poker played today.

I’ve got a thing Thursday, so I’m unlikely to play anything then, but Friday is the monthly Final Table $20K GTD NLHE First Friday. If that goes well, then I may well be on a flight Saturday morning to Las Vegas for the WPT Five Diamond Super Satellite at noon at Bellagio, or the 7pm Turbo Super Satellite (though it would pain me to put $1100 into a 15-minute/level tournament). Next week is a Thursday afternoon satellite to the Venetian/CPPT $500K GTD NLHE Main Event, which would sort of bring me full circle to 2011 when I plunked $2500 down for the most expensive tournament I’ve ever played (see “Grasping for the Ring”).

Meanwhile, congratulations to Steve Chanthabouasy for bringing another trophy back to the Northwest.

R-Day Minus 29

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The Poker Mutant will be retiring (mostly) from poker on 1 January. This is the latest installment in his thrilling countdown to the End of Times.

A downswing that started—well, months ago—continued tonight at Claudia’s PLO8 tournament. I went because I wanted to see if my travel partner David Long was there (he was, and regrettably, I was the player who busted him off the final table). I won this the last time I played it, but tonight I had to rebuy two hands in, after entering late. It was a little like a reunion of Portland Players Club regs, with Noah and Paul, and others at the two tables.

I didn’t quite make the money, going out in 6th place after losing two multi-way hands in a row with aces in my hand. Gotta love PLO8. (They were running a Short Deck PLO cash game tonight on PokerGO’s Poker After Dark, if you want real degeneracy.)

The aforementioned downswing is not helping my plans to get myself out of poker jail by the end of the year. No four-figure cash since July, 20 straight losses in the Thousandaire Maker; it’s enough to put you off poker if you hadn’t already promised your wife you wouldn’t spend every night online or at a poker room.

If you’ve been a fan of the WPT Bay 101 Shooting Star, you know it wasn’t held the past couple of years as Bay 101 built a new facility. It’s coming back this March, though, and you can win seats to the $5200 Main Event starting in less than two weeks! What a great Christmas present for yourself!

R-Day Minus 31

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The Poker Mutant will be retiring (mostly) from poker on 1 January. This is the latest installment in his thrilling countdown to the End of Times.

Played a little Ignition Casino $100 NLHE Super KO while watching the broadcast recaps of the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure Main Event from last year. Last hand I played 5♥ 6♥ flopped TX 5X 6X and managed to get it all in against jacks, then the board paired the turn eight on the river and I was out without so much as a bounty after 35 minutes.

The end of the day was the Final Table $2K GTD NLHE. I got to the club just before the first break and got sat in between the blinds, so I didn’t play either of the last two hands before break, late-regging despite my better judgment.

I got aces on my seventh hand (there were only 7 players at the table) in the small blind. Aces in the small blind again at the beginning of my second level of play. I was below average but considering that nobody had busted completely after six levels (half the players had rebought before the break), I was doing fine. I got queens in the small blind and took hand with an all in.

A pair of jacks was where things started to go wrong. A couple of the stacks were getting short, one went all in for about 8bb in early position, I shoved with the jacks to isolate, but the small blind woke up with kings. The short stack made two pair with AX 9X, and I was down to about 6bb.

I managed to survive through a couple of punishing big blinds (shoving 2♥ 4♥ and showing, at one point) then Dave—one of the aggressive players at the table—min-raised at the 1200 big blind level. I only had 3300 but I had a Mutant Jack hand: A♣ J♣ and shoved. The player whod had the kings shoved over the top from the small blind (again) and Dave called with deuces. The small blind had 9♣ 8♣. The flop was jack-high with two spades, putting me in the lead, but the board ran out a backdoor straight for the small blind.

Congrats to Ryan Stoker for taking sixth at one of the opening events of the WPT Five Diamond at Bellagio this weekend! And condolences to Darin Stout who had a good Day 1 in the Wynn $250K GTD NLHE but ran into some trouble on Day 2.

R-Day Minus 32

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The Poker Mutant will be retiring (mostly) from poker on 1 January. This is the latest installment in his thrilling countdown to the End of Times.

Just a month to go and it was the last live game of November, the $10K GTD NLHE at Final Table. It didn’t go well, which is why I’m writing this instead of still at the club.

In the first level, I raised AX JX, got a call, and was re-raised by the button. I played it conservatively when there were a couple calls of the re-raise, then the hand played out and I was a little irked with myself when the button won the hand with [ax qx[ after the board paired my jack. Which played into my decision to go all in on over a turn raise from the same player on a hand with AX QX and a flop of AX TX TX, only to get myself stacked by KX TX.

Managed to lose half of my rebuy stack before the start of the final level before the add-on break, then got it all in with A♥ 5♥ over two limps, Another player raised all in for a lot more with TX TX and the short stack on my right got in with KX QX and just 75 more chips than me. The flop came down AX KX QX and the guy on my left was elated until a jack on the river made Broadway for the tens.

R-Day Minus 33

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The Poker Mutant will be retiring (mostly) from poker on 1 January. This is the latest installment in his thrilling countdown to the End of Times.

November is almost over and after an evening hanging out at the new Portland office of a virtual reality game development company, then out to my father’s for some computer support (and no poker), it was back to the virtual felt for the Ignition Casino $7K NLHE tonight.

Things were going pretty well, I doubled up early, then got all-in with KX JX against QX JX. We both paired up, but he ran out backdoor quad queens.

I doubled up with a pair of jacks and was sitting with about ten big blinds when I shoved jacks, got called by AX JX, and he hit the ace on the river!

Just did a little $2 NLHE Jackpot Sit-N-Go after that. $10 payout but I ended up in 3rd.