Travel Report: Season XII WPT National: Canadian Spring Championship, Day 1a -- Red, Yellow & Green

Another day of ninja-posting as these early starts (11 a.m.) here at Playground Poker Club in Montreal are closing the window of available time in the mornings for me to post over here.

It was a fun day yesterday for the first of three Day 1 flights at in the partypoker.net World Poker Tour National: Canadian Spring Championship. The tourney attracted 219 runners, 62 of which made it through the thirteen 45-minute levels. Players can re-enter once per Day 1 flight, so a number of those who busted will likely be back either today or tomorrow.

Fun again to be back with the WPT crew who are always enjoyable to work with and after so many years of doing this have their system down very well. And speaking of having a good system in place, the Playground Poker staff do a lot of things especially well here when it comes to the management of the tournament as well as making the jobs of those doing live reporting a lot easier.

For one, they track everyone all day long here, letting us know throughout the day not only who has busted from the event but also all of the seat changes along the way. It’s the kind of thing a live reporting team might dedicate one person to handling -- if they can spare him or her -- but usually cannot be done, especially on a Day 1.

That practice obviously makes things a lot easier when it comes to identifying players throughout the day, especially in a large field, low buy-in event in which a lot of local players are participating whom we might not recognize otherwise.

There are other nifty ideas in play here, including a little “traffic light”-like arrangement on a pole attached to every dealer’s chair and sitting well above the tables. The red light calls the floor over, the yellow is a request for a cocktail server, and the green announces that a seat is open and/or requests a floor person for a less urgent reason.

It’s simple, and it’s brilliant. There’s no yelling back and forth to get a floor person to a table, nor is there a lot of extraneous fuss or delays over getting servers, filling empty seats, or keeping tables balanced.

Anyhow, if I had been more efficient with my time perhaps I could write more, but that wasn’t the case. Check the WPT blog for updates from snowy Montreal today.