Brad didn’t give me any direction on what<\/em> to write. He didn’t write a blog, read poker blogs, or play poker, he was too busy with work and with running the\u00a0WebVisions series of conferences<\/strong><\/a> in Portland, Chicago, New York, Berlin, and Barcelona. But I took the advice and ran with it, at first obsessively breaking down every tournament I played on\u00a0Full Tilt, PokerStars, and Cake Poker<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Then, about four months after I started,\u00a0Black Friday\u00a0<\/strong>happened, and I started playing live tournaments more often, including the first live game bigger than a couple of tables that I ever won<\/strong><\/a>. In the first days, I kept extensive notes which enabled me to do more complete write ups and reviews than I’ve done for live games in a while. I was already using the original version of my\u00a0Professor Frink card cap<\/strong><\/a> by that point. Production took a dive, though, both from having to take notes and being away from the computer: I wrote an average of nearly 20 posts a month between January and April, but was down to six a month for most of the year.<\/p>\n Winning a $10K at Encore Club in November kicked me back into production as I briefly held the title of the largest single prize in a regularly-scheduled Portland poker tournament<\/strong><\/a> at the end of 2011 and was\u00a0doing my best to get to EPT Prague for my 50th birthday (Surprise! It wasn’t good enough<\/a>)<\/strong>.<\/p>\n This was about the time I started to do my own crude statistical analyses, including\u00a0Why Not Rebuy?<\/strong><\/a>, one of the more popular pieces on my site over the years.<\/p>\n Only one article per week average in 2012, and that was mostly front-loaded by a prolific February. I headed down to Las Vegas in June for my first extended poker trip<\/strong>, shortly after publishing another long analysis piece:\u00a0How Good Is Good Enough?<\/strong><\/em><\/a>\u00a0The data there was derived from the long-dormant but still informative\u00a0wsopdb.com<\/strong><\/a>, which lets you do a search by name to find all of a player’s buyins at the WSOP<\/strong> for 2011 and 2012. That was the year I (briefly) played my first bracelet event, starting at a table with\u00a0Kevin Stammen<\/strong> and\u00a0Ivan Demidov<\/strong>.\u00a0<\/a>Wheeee! Apart from spending a lot of time (and playing a partner tournament with) WSOP bracelet-winner and programming colleague\u00a0Tomer Berda<\/strong>, it wasn’t a great trip (shoutout to fellow Reed alum\u00a0Mark Humphrey<\/strong> for putting me up for half of that run!) I didn’t write anything for a month-and-a-half.<\/p>\n Played out at\u00a0Wildhorse Casino<\/strong> for the first time that fall, after winning a Main Event seat at\u00a0Portland Players Club<\/strong>round-up of Oregon players at the WSOP<\/strong><\/a> the night before my wife had a heart attack (not a joke). I also did a by combing through the entry data, which was sort of the initial start on the path that led to the blog becoming a sort of clearinghouse for news about Pacific Northwest poker tournaments. A follow-up to that post, showing the progression of Oregon players through the various days of the 2012 Main Event<\/strong><\/a> is the first time\u00a0Angela Jordison’s<\/strong> name appears on the blog, several years before I’d heard of her.<\/p>\n 2013 was the year I coined the term\u00a0potmonkey<\/strong><\/a>, which has yet to catch on. Nothing to do with\u00a0cannabis<\/strong>, everything to do with\u00a0Omaha<\/strong>. Not much else was going on, though, and I barely eked out a post per month. I did, however, publish\u00a0Sweet Spot<\/strong><\/em><\/a>, an examination of tournament payout structures. It was the year I had my first outside-of-Oregon cashes<\/strong>, at a Caesars Palace Seniors tournament<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0and in a Bounty tournament at the Venetian<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n (that was after Grand Sierra Resort cancelled the remainder of a series after missing a couple of large guarantees, without sending out notices to, say, registered guests who’d already checked in for a flight the morning they cancelled). A week later I cashed in the\u00a0Deepstacks Poker Tour\/Chinook WInds Oregon State Poker Championship Main Event<\/strong><\/a>, where I first met\u00a0Toma Barber.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n I stepped up a little bit in 2014, but what really kicked things off was\u00a0In the Money<\/strong><\/em><\/a>, a sort of culmination of the analytical articles I’d been working on and the analysis I’d been running of my own experiences, not to mention a quote from\u00a0Bryan Devonshire<\/strong>. A shorter version appeared at\u00a0PokerNews<\/strong><\/em>\u2014which led to me writing pieces for them for a couple of years<\/strong><\/a>\u2014and then\u00a0Deadspin<\/em>\u00a0<\/strong>published the piece in its entirety (for which they still have not paid me).\u00a0That<\/em> actually led to a\u00a02+2 News, Views, and Gossip<\/strong><\/a> thread, then some podcast interviews with\u00a0Limon<\/strong>. I got busted by a gazillionaire at the\u00a0Wynn<\/strong><\/a>. That November, I did my first round-up of upcoming tournament series in the West and started up the\u00a0Pacific NW Tournament Calendar<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n 2015 saw a return to volume. I wrote an expansion of a\u00a0PokerNews<\/em> article on WSOP Main Event Payout structures<\/strong><\/a>. That led to a couple of mentions on the\u00a02+2 Pokercast<\/strong>. \u00a0I also did a piece on the profitability of the top players in the\u00a0World Poker Tour<\/strong><\/a>. It was my first year as a media observer at the WSOP, then I did a day-by-day collation of Pacific Northwest players in Las Vegas series for June and much of July (more work than I can even imagine doing at this point). The Planner started up shortly thereafter<\/strong><\/a>. That’s been the bulk of posts for the past two-and-a-half years, aside from the summer of 2016, when it was on hiatus while I was working as a live reporter at the WSOP.<\/p>\n Thanks to everyone who\u2019s provided encouragement<\/strong> and feedback since I started up. I hope some of you find some of this info useful or at least mildly amusing! If nothing else, it keeps me off the felt Tuesday nights.<\/p>\n Considering my usual schedule, I hardly played over the past week, but I did reasonably well. Saturday, I was at\u00a0Final Table\u00a0<\/strong>for the $50K GTD tournament, along with the three other guys who make up\u00a0Poker Team 1<\/strong> (our grandiose name for an instant messaging group). Two players fell short of the money, but I got down to 20th (almost felted on a race between K<\/span>\u2665<\/span><\/span> T<\/span>\u2665<\/span><\/span><\/span> and 9<\/span>x<\/span><\/span> 9<\/span>x<\/span><\/span><\/span> with 11bb) and\u00a0Daryl Vogel<\/strong>\u2014one of my buddies from the home game that got me into the age of modern poker\u2014made the final 7-player deal for his biggest-ever cash. Then on Monday night I crushed the home game and made almost as much profit as I had at Final Table (i.e. not a lot, but still a profit),<\/p>\n There was some serious Portland player action going on down at the\u00a0WPTDeepstacks Championship\u00a0<\/strong>at\u00a0Thunder Valley\u00a0<\/strong>the other day. Angela Jordison managed to come in third in the Player of the Series standings, despite playing only three of the none qualifiers, then she made a deep run in the Main Event, in spite of a Day 2 starting table with\u00a0Bryan Devonshire<\/strong>,\u00a0Upeshka DeSilva,\u00a0<\/strong>and\u00a0Cord Garcia <\/strong><\/a>(in addition to Angela herself). She missed the money, but\u00a0Jeff MItseff<\/strong> took 17th, working a diminished stach for hours after losing some big hands. Those results won’t be up on\u00a0Hendon Mob<\/strong>‘s leader boards\u00a0until next week.<\/p>\n Upeshka DeSilva,, Angela Jordison, Cord Garcia at Table 9 of the WPTDeepstacks Championship (via WPT.com)<\/p><\/div>\n Dirk D\u2019Hooge<\/strong> of\u00a0Walla Walla<\/strong> was at the\u00a0Belgian Poker Challenge NLHE 8-Max Championship<\/strong><\/a> for a second place finish as the only US player to cash. It’s only his third recorded cash (all have been since this summer) and the largest by far. Closer to home, Vancouver’s\u00a0Ali Imsirovic<\/strong> jumped across Las Vegas Blvd. from Planet Hollywood’s WSOP Circuit event to the\u00a0Bellagio<\/strong> to play the first event of the WPT Five Diamond<\/strong><\/a> series, a ($10K High Roller), after his run at the WSOPC Main Event final table the week before; he came in 4th once again, though in a much smaller field of 28. Also at the Five Diamond,\u00a0Scott Clements<\/strong> took first place in a field of 56 in Event #5, the $1,100 PLO.<\/a><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.mutantpoker.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/IMG_0135-e1382746520526-293x300.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nMy Time Is Coming<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.mutantpoker.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/IMG_3992.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nPacific Northwest Poker Leaderboard<\/h2>\n
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<\/a>Poker Time Session 3 Episode 5<\/h2>\n