Winter weather tends to hit the Portland area hard, since freezing temperatures here generally mean ice rather than snow. Yeah, yeah, everyone from Eastern Oregon and Colorado and the East Coast, you know how to drive in snow, Portland doesn’t know how to keep the streets clear of snow, yadda, yadda, yadda…. None of you suckers are good on ice.<\/p>\n
Anyway, conditions led to some closures and delays in poker schedules around town. The storm didn’t hit until after the big events for the weekend in Portland were over, but Black Diamond Poker Room in Albany had to reschedule last Sunday’s $310 Deepstack tournament<\/em><\/a> for next Sunday.<\/em><\/p>\n The Hardest Working Man In Portland Poker<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Through it all, Chadd’s been there night and day. Putting together the web site, posting to Facebook, texting players to get them in to play, wrangling volunteer dealers (who are themselves some of the best and most experienced non-Hold’em dealers you’ll ever run across), making sandwiches, blending great shakes, cleaning, stocking, etc. The club was usually open late; Chadd would be there at opening and through the evening game most every day of the long poker week. How he found time to have a wife and child boggles my mind.<\/p>\n Anyway, this phase of Portland Players Club is at an end. The last game was the day before New Year’s Eve. All but one of the tables in the club was gone. I’m going to miss the old place. I met a lot of interesting characters\u2014and a few folks I consider friends\u2014at PPC. It was the kind of place that I though might be cool to own myself if I had the money to keep the place running\u2014I can’t imagine Chadd was making a giant profit\u2014except for the fact that I knew how much time and effort he put in to the job. He’s a better man than I am. I’ll just have to settle for imagining Chadd running my imaginary poker club.<\/p>\n 2016 : My Time Is Coming<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n![\"Chadd\"](\"http:\/\/www.mutantpoker.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/IMG_2582-1024x768.jpg\")
<\/a>I first met Chadd Baker shortly after poker’s Black Friday. I got an invitation to Portland Players Club\u2014which he’d purchased early in the year\u2014for a promotional freeroll tournament. I won it\u2014my first live MTT win<\/a>\u2014after a couple of years playing in the home game that was my re-introduction to poker. PPC had been around before Chadd in its location above Biddie McGraw’s at NE 60th & Glisan, it was profiled in Bluff<\/i>\u00a0magazine (which disappeared into the void recently), but Chadd had been trying to sell it over the past year<\/a>. PPC’s been a favorite place to play for me, with cheap buy-ins and door fees, 11am start times for the first tournament, and a selection of games other than\u00a0NLHE: mostly Big O these days, but HORSE, PLO, PLO8, and more. It was close to my house: I could walk there in about 30 minutes and drive there in less than 10.<\/p>\n