Clocking in from Panama

Hola from rainy Panama City where I’ve been since Friday, having arrived in time to help cover the PokerStars Championship Panama series for the next week-and-a-half.

Had a chance this morning to get out and about a little, then again at lunchtime when my friend Nick and I were able to find a very busy local establishment to enjoy a Sunday brunch of Panamanian fare. The temps are warm and the air humid, and right now as I write a thunderstorm is pouring down sheets of rain outside. (Meanwhile, check out what happened back at the farm this morning -- nuts!)

Inside the Sortis Hotel and Casino the PSC continues with the $50,000 Super High Roller, a “shot clock” tournament in which players have 30 seconds to act, unless they want to use any of their three “time bank” chips that give them an extra minute each to be a decision.

I’m not sure if I ever have covered a tournament using a shot clock before -- if I have, I don’t recall it -- but yesterday made it seem an awfully attractive addition to tournament poker. My sample is a bit misleading, given that the players (all high rollers) are pretty much without exception both experienced and skillful, and the dealers are also top notch, making the incorporation of the clock (a hand held time piece) seem not at all intrusive.

From a reporter’s standpoint, the shot clock is very welcome given the way it obviously sets a limit on the amount of time any one hand will take. It’s nice to know something is going to happen relatively soon whenever you get involved watching a hand, and to avoid ever getting lost in those endless tanks that end in folds and little to report.

These guys (the regular participants in SHRs) generally act fairly quickly, anyway, of course. I could see how the shot clock wouldn’t be so welcome among more varied fields. Then again, I can also imagine everyone getting fairly used to them, and don’t necessarily see their introduction as being that much different than other experiments with structures designed to make events play out more quickly. I’m remembering not being so crazy about such an idea three years ago or even more recently, but I could warm to it.

Get over to the PokerStars blog to see how the $50K SHR is (rapidly) playing out and everything else happening in Panama.

Photo: courtesy Neil Stoddart / PokerStars blog.

Back from Paradise

A quick one today to report I’m back home safely from a week-and-half in the Bahamas on Paradise Island, a trip which as I mentioned before was timed in such a way that I missed entirely the Great Snowstorm of 2017 here on the farm.

Eight inches dumped down on us the day after I left, and by the time I returned on Monday it was all melted, very likely the only snow we’ll see all winter here in NC.

“Well played, Shamus,” said Vera on my return.

The trip was fun, and as has been the case these last three years the series in Nassau tends to operate as a kind of annual reunion for many players, media, and staff, so it was good again to see friends, some of whom I hadn’t seen since last January. Good to get home, though, where I’m expecting to stay put for at least the next couple of months.

That pic up above was one taken by the great Carlos Monti of a group of Selene Vomer fish, better known as “Lookdown” fish, just one of more than 250 species of marine life one can see in the aquariums and around Atlantis. I love looking at the Lookdown, which have such expressive faces and uncannily appear two-dimensional.

Poker-wise, the trip was a bit more entertaining than average, I’m going to conclude. My time was split between three big events, the $100K Super High Roller, the $5K Main Event, and the $25K High Roller. Jason Koon, Christian Harder, and Luc Greenwood won those (respectively).

In the latter, Luc actually knocked out his brother Sam just shy of the final table, and indeed the win represented a breakthrough for Luc, the biggest cash of his career by tenfold (nearly $800K).

Incidentally, prior to this first ever PokerStars Championship, I had a chance to interview a number of people for a piece that appeared on the PokerStars blog just as things were getting going in the Bahamas, something called “Anatomy of a PokerStars Championship.”

These things are such huge, complicated undertakings, and it was kind of fascinating to talk to some of those involved with putting them together. Because of space limitations I had to cut out a lot, but hopefully it at least comes across how much goes into the planning and staging of these things.

Relatively speaking, farm life is a lot more simple. That said, as I’ve noted before, every time you look up there’s always something else to do around here.

Photo: courtesy Carlos Monti / PokerStars blog.

Slides, Celebs, and Likes

Been in the Bahamas for more than a week now, having left the farm just a day before the Great Snowstorm of 2017 hit to cover the place with eight inches of the white stuff. Vera and our four-legged friends all managed okay, though I felt more than a little guilty not being around to help deal with it all.

Quite a contrast down here, weather-wise, as you might imagine, with temps in the mid-to-upper 70s, the cloudless skies baby blue, and the water an even darker, more brilliant shade of blue. It’s been busy, but I did manage to goof around on the water slides on two separate occasions already, including daring to plunge down “The Abyss.” It only lasts a few seconds, but it’s still long enough for all manner of existential doubt to overwhelm a dude before splash landing at the bottom.

The PokerStars Championship Bahamas festival is now heading into its home stretch, with the High Roller and Main Event both ending tomorrow. The poker’s been fun to follow, as I was on the $100K Super High Roller to start, then the Main Event, and now the $25K HR.

That first event saw the actor-comedian Kevin Hart take part, livening things up quite a lot for the first day-and-a-half before he finally busted a second time. Aaron Paul of Breaking Bad fame then played in the Main, so there was a lot of star-gazing going on between those two.

Speaking of poker-playing actors, Jennifer Tilly is here, too, and in fact took runner-up in a $5K turbo event this week, one where the final table included David Peters, Benjamin Pollak, and Mustapha Kanit.

I’d met her before but finally had a chance to talk with her a bit more this week. She’s a great follow on Twitter by the way -- @Jtillathekilla2 -- and one of the things we talked about were the folks we follow on there.

I also confessed to her that I never have gotten in the habit of favoriting tweets. I’ll retweet ones I like occasionally, but I just never got around to start “liking” them. For example, I liked one she sent a few days ago sagely observing: “Poker tournaments are like life: We're all gonna die, just some of us last longer than others.” But I just had to tell her I liked it as I didn’t “like” it on Twitter. (She assured me that was fine.)

(That reminded me of something similar I’ve been known to utter around poker tournaments.)

Vera kids me about not “liking” tweets. I’ll tweet something and get a bunch of likes, then mention it to her. “And how does that make you feel?” she asks with a grin.

“I like it,” I reply.

One more day of poker tomorrow and then back home to the horses where the snow has already melted. There’s a pic to the left from the day after that I tweeted before. It’s totally okay if you didn’t favorite it.

The Name Game

Glad to be back home where I’ll be settled over the next stretch, at least until December when that very last European Poker Tour stop in Prague arrives.

Got to talking with a couple of different people last week about the EPT (and LAPT and other tours) all coming to conclusions here with the end of the calendar year. Well, nominally coming to conclusions, as for the most part a lot of the same stops are still going to be featured among the new “PokerStars Championships” and “PokerStars Festivals.”

I was writing about back in September not long after the announcment was made in Barcelona about the new branding and tours.

This New Jersey festival was interesting in part because there were many folks from different tours all there, kind of like happens in the Bahamas each January (at the no-longer-named PCA).

Kind of got the sense everyone is a little sorry to see the specific tours go away, which’ll mean the records and stats associated with them will be somewhat frozen right where they are going forward. But folks also seem intrigued to see the beginning of this new schedule and the unifying of all the tours (and the start of new records and stats).

The PokerStars Festival New Jersey ultimately played out like a kind of “preseason” event, I think -- not quite what the Festivals are going to be going forward, even if sharing the same name.

Will be interesting to see, say, six months or a year from now what the thoughts are regarding it all, and whether the new names change the games or not.

Image: PokerStars Live.

Travel Report: LAPT9 Uruguay, Day 1b -- Going for Three

The second and last Day 1 flight for the $1,500 buy-in Latin American Poker Tour Uruguay Main Event was bigger -- no surprise there -- with the ultimate number being 438 entries, making a prize pool of $571,590 with $110,870 up top (barring a final table deal).

I mentioned how the event is a re-entry, and today it was Oscar Alache busting just prior to the dinner break (after which late registration concluded and the re-entry option ended), then he bought in again and in just four levels spun up a tournament leading stack heading into Sunday’s Day 2. Both he and Nacho Barbero made it through today on what was each player’s third entry in this sucker (both entered once on Day 1a, then twice on Day 1b).

Alache, of course, has won two LAPT titles before, as has Mario Lopez who’ll return to a top five stack and Barbero (who is sitting just outside the top 20 with 155 players left. Only Fabian Ortiz is missing from the two-time champs club, as he didn’t make the trip this time. No player has ever won three.

I suppose these references to all-time records during the nine seasons’ worth of LAPTs will be set aside starting next year, although we’ll probably find a way to keep bringing back what has become a fairly invovled history of events in the various LAPT stops.

And from what I’m gathering, they’ll probably be going to back to all of the current ones next year, mostly as “PokerStars Festivals” with the one in Panama being a “PokerStars Championship.” In other words, while the LAPT may technically be ending this year, the “tour” of Central and South American stops will continue as usual, only as part of the larger global tours.

It strikes me that the players who typically populate the fields in these events in places like Chile, Uruguay, Panama, and Brazil (and Peru, Argentina, and a few other places in the past) are all still likely going to come to the newly-branded series when they come around. (Truly, if you step back and take a look, when the LAPTs come around they fit into ongoing, year-round tournaments being offered at all of these stops, anyway.) And if the new “Championships” and “Festivals” work to draw a few more players from North America, Europe, and elsewhere, so much the better.

More mañana. Check that PokerStars blog to see if any of these two-timers really get close to making it tres.

Photo: courtesy Carlos Monti / PokerStars blog.

Looking Back Along the Long and Winding LAPT Road

Was just reading a nice post from my friend Sergio Prado for the Brazilian PokerStars blog in which he looks back at nine years of the Latin American Poker Tour.

I’ll admit I had to use Google translate, as my Portuguese is essentially limited to a single word. That said, I think I can make out what his title means well enough: “Minha homenagem ao LAPT.”

Sergio has been an important part of the LAPT for the entire way, ever since the first LAPT event took place back in May 2008 in Rio de Janeiro. As he recounts in his post, tournament director Mike Ward and Reinaldo Venegas (who like Sergio has blogged while also serving other roles with the tour) have both been there throughout as well. A number of others have been there for much of it, too, and Sergio does a nice job remembering them while sharing some nice photos along the way.

My first time visiting the LAPT was way back in June 2010 during Season 3 when I went with Brad Willis to Lima, Peru and we helped cover Jose “Nacho” Barbero’s second straight LAPT Main Event win. I believe that was my first time ever in South America, and the trip was followed by more visits to Peru, as well as to Chile, Uruguay, and Brazil, then also to Panama a couple of times and to the Bahamas where the LAPT likewise added an event.

Sergio’s post got me thinking again about the new branding by PokerStars of its tours and how the introduction of the new PokerStars Championships and PokerStars Festivals will mean the end of these regional tour designations like the EPT, the LAPT, the APPT, and so on. In some ways it’s just a change of name, but then again it signifies something more, given the way each of these tours developed its own history and character as shaped by the players and personalities involved.

I’m slated to go to Punta del Este next week where I’ll meet up with Sergio and along with others we will report on the LAPT9 Uruguay stop, which I’m only today realizing will be the very last regular LAPT series. There’s still the LAPT9 Grand Final to go in Brazil in November, although that will only involve a single main event, not an entire festival. I won’t be making that November trip, as I have other things happening, so the long voyage down to Uruguay will represent my last LAPT ride.

I imagine I’ll be having my own homenagem to share afterwards once that’s done, given how much I’ve valued the experience of covering those tournaments and most importantly getting to meet and work and laugh with the people Sergio lists in his post. To him and all them I gratefully deliver my only Portuguese word...

Obrigado!

Photo: courtesy Carlos MontiPokerStars blog.

Championships and Festivals

Been thinking some this week about how PokerStars has decided to change up things with regard to their several live tours, jettisoning the distinct tours in favor of a new series of PokerStars Championships and PokerStars Festivals.

It’ll be hard not to keep referring to the European stops as “EPTs” or the ones in Central and South America as “LAPTs.” I’ve had the great fortune to help report on several tournaments from both of those tours over the last few years, and even got to do an “APPT” over in Macau once.

I just got back last week from Barcelona for what is now going to be one of the last “EPTs” (technically speaking), although they’ll continue to go back to Barcelona for these PokerStars Championships going forward. At the end of the month I’ll be going to what I think will probably be my last “LAPT” down in Uruguay.

Those are the two PokerStars tours I’ve had the most experience with, and while on one level every poker tournament or tournament series is similar, they’ve always been kind of distinct in my mind, mainly because of the different player pools they attract. A few of the better players show up on both tours, but I’d have to guess a high percentage of players only play one or the other.

Since I’m not playing myself, I can’t really comment too much about player-related concerns, although my impression has always been that all of the PokerStars-run events have been especially well run. I’m going to guess there won’t be a lot of change going forward, with the same folks running the events in the same locations.

From my perspective, I’ll be most curious to see where the new global tours end up going -- that is to say, which stops remain, which go away, and how they’ll be divided among the “major” Championships and “minor” Festivals next year and thereafter.

Looks like during the first part of the year the Championships will include the Bahamas (January), Panama (March), and Macau (March-April). Meanwhile the Festivals get a head start this year in New Jersey (October-November) then in London (January). The PokerStarsLive site has details.

Like many, I’m someone who likes routines and familiarity, but also is attracted to novelty and change. So I’ll miss the old tour names and some of the continuity they provided, but I’m kind of intrigued to see what these new tours and events will be like.

Image: PokerStars Live.

Travel Report: EPT13 Barcelona, Day 6 -- Samri, Moorman, and the Kooij

A short one today as the Estrellas Poker Tour Barcelona Main Event played down from nine players to a winner in just about six hours or so.

The Frenchman Mohamed Samri ended up winning the sucker, kind of a surprise to be honest as there seemed others in the final group more likely to come out on top, including the eventual runner-up Teunis Kooij of the Netherlands and third-place finisher Chris Moorman, the British standout.

Moorman started today with the lead, and Kooij -- which we were pronouncing as though it rhymed with “huge,” often referring to him as “The Kooij” -- took it over early on. Both had big stacks and Samri was short during three-handed play, but Moorman lost a big preflop all-in with pocket sixes against the queens of Kooij, then lost the rest in the next hand to go out somewhat surprisingly in third.

Kooij had the big lead to start heads-up play, but after the last two made a deal it was Samri winning both of the all-ins to take it down. Samri had less than $4,000 worth of tourney cashes before, so the €353,220 score was crazily big for him. And Kooij had no recorded results, so it was huge for him as well. Or should I say, hooij.

Got back in the room in good enough time to give my mom a call on her birthday and assure her I was doing fine out here with the long work days and (often) short nights of sleep.

Speaking of sleep, I’m moving over to help with Day 1b of the Main Event tomorrow, which has another of those undesirable 10 a.m. starts. I’ve traded off shifts, though, so thankfully won’t be going in until later. Gonna take advantage of the extra hours here and relax some -- more mañana.

Photo: courtesy René Velli/PokerStars blog.