I’m en route from Las Vegas to DC, taking the long way I guess you could say, and was driving over the state line of Wyoming => South Dakota when I got the following DM tweet:
@Pokerati to @scarlet_lv: “10/15 is Heartland’s 5th anniversary bash near Fargo ND. Think about going. I can hook u up.”
Fargo?, I thought. Really, DanM? It was about 600 miles in a completely different direction from where I was heading, but free booze …a party?  I quickly rerouted the Prius GPS to head northeast, and arrived in the city-of-the-distinct-accent late Monday night.
Yesterday afternoon, I ate some Thai with Jen Mastrud, GM and Director of PR for the Heartland Poker Tour, based here in Fargo, ND. Waiting for the mint-leaf spring rolls appetizer, we chatted about the festivities, upcoming Season VI and VII events, and some poker poli-biz topics as they relate to a nationwide, smaller-stakes operation such as the HPT.Â
Heartland’s currently in the middle of their Season VI Shooting Star Casino event in Mahnomen, MN (just across the North Dakota border), and Friday will be celebrating their 5th anniversary with a party hosted by Greg Raymer. @FossilMan will also be on hand playing some cash, and will compete in the 2-day $1100 Main Event, which final-tables on Sunday.
The final table has been set at the WSOP Europe Event #3 – £1,000 + 75 NL Holdem as the defending champion, JP Kelly, is in contention to defend his bracelet triumph at last year’s WSOPE. If Kelly won, he would also become the first player to defend a NL holdem bracelet since Johnny Chan back in 1987-88, and the youngest player to win three bracelets. That distinction belongs to Phil Ivey.* Here’s how that final table will be seated when play resumes at 2pm:
* Credit to Donnie Peters at PokerNews.
Follow along in the updates at PokerNews or WSOP.com
Event #4 will take place at 5pm London time Tuesday, the £10,000 + 350 NL Holdem High Roller Heads-Up event. The field will contain a maximum of 128 players with registration closing when the tournament starts. In case of an unevenly sized field (more than 32, 64, or 128) there will be byes for round 1.
Elsewhere…
WPT Borgata Poker Open – Atlantic City :: Day 2 underway, just over 200 players remaining with the top 100 making the money. A brawl almost takes place just before dinner as described by BJ Nemeth here. Other updates and goings-on here.
Heartland Poker Tour – Black Hawk, Colorado :: The poker tour that people forget keeps chugging along with Mark Dunbar taking down over $180,000 in defeating a field of over 400 players. HeartlandPokerTour.com has the recap.
T.J. Cloutier Choctaw Classic – Durant, OK :: Week-long series of tournaments w/ $1,650 Main Event Sept. 25-26 – Schedule
PokerStars WCOOP :: Jason Mercier and Chad Brown in the top 30 of 1k NL event, winner takes down nearly $500,000. RaiseOnce, allegedly Phil Ivey, takes down $25,000 HU title. PokerStars Blog
Had an interesting convo last night with @HeartlandPokerTodd (not his real twitter name, though it prolly should be) …
Todd Anderson from Fargo, North Dakota, bought into his first WSOP Main Event a few days ago, and we were talking about the value of chips acquired early in this $10k, long blind-levels, triple-stacked tournament. Before long we began to conclude that a player would be fine making it to Day 2 without playing a single hand. We couldn’t agree, however, on where that chipstack would be at the end of Day 1.
So here is my attempt to calculate it … feel free to disagree and/or disparage:
As you may or may not know, our good friends at Wicked Chops and the Heartland Poker Tour have partnered up to find a new TV-hostess for the HPT. Cool American Idol meets Celebrity Apprentice on Facebook-like competition for poker-savvy women who want to look pretty and smart-ish while talking about bustouts.
We were gonna nominate the uber-young Katie for the position — seems like an adorble pre-teen who knows about bad beats and pot odds might be perfect for what the wholesome-Americana-poker Heartland is all about. However, upon learning from WCP that the notorious Ass Girl is a top contender for the job, we’re not so sure any more that this is the place for a child who hasn’t yet learned how to use breasts to her professional advantage.
(Zip it, you sick Wicked Chops readers pervs.)
Anyhow, they’ve got just a few days to go before nominations in this open casting call are closed. From there three finalists will fly to the HPT event at Turning Stone in New York for a May 14 pageant-off.
Who says tournament poker is dying/hurting? It’s hard to go anywhere on the planet these days without finding a major soccer poker tournament. Lots of kids with disposable bankrolls, it seems … and lots of older folks trying to grab it.
At the EPT Deauville, which just wrapped up, all eyes were on Elky and Peter Eastgate to take down the biggest tournament ever in France. But out of 768 runners, they went out in 9th and 8th, respectively, with 21-year-old Brit Jake Cody winning the €847,000 top prize and presumably earning himself a spot on the PokerStars Kids Team.
Elky, meanwhile went pimptastic/not-gay in his homeland, sponsoring Team ElkyLady:
Across the continent, in Atlantic City. the World Poker Open at the Borgata is rolling along, with their $3,500 main event starting Sunday. They’re still drawing fields in the multi-hundreds, making Borgata the East Coast place to be.
But let’s not forget Mississippi — which used to be the preferred place for poker players to kick off the new year. They only got 208 entries into the $10k WPT main event at Beau Rivage. The final table for the Southern Poker Championship is set:
Name Chips
Hoyt Corkins 2,069,000
Tyler Smith 1,169,000
Jerry Vanstrydonck 1,044,000
Jonathan Kantor 894,000
Jared Jaffee 762,000
James Reed 377,000
Halfway around the world, the Aussie Millions is into Day 2 of their main event. After a festive Australia Day celebration, things got underway for the big-daddy of this Southern Hemisphere main event:
Some other cool tourneys at the Crown Casino still going … It’s very 2 Months $2 Milliony In the Australian heads-up championship, they’re duking it out to see which four will advance to the money matches against Andrew Lichtenberger, Barry Woods, Vanessa Selbst, and Martin Gudvangen.
And action is just getting underway for the Team Event. Here’s how they play team poker down under:
How Does Team Poker Work
The game is No Limit Hold’em. Teams of two, only one member from each team is on the felt at a time.
The partner’s rotate whose turn it is to play the team’s stack each level. The first players in the game get half of the team’s start bank, if they bust in the first level the team mate comes in immediately and plays with the other half of the team’s starting bank.
That person will play the remainder of the first level, and the second, before the original partner resumes play in the third level.
From the second level onwards team will have their full stacks in play, and once it’s gone the team is eliminated.
And our new-good friends at the Heartland Poker Tour are in Quapah, Oklahoma — at the Downstream Casino in the far northeast end of the state, running qualifiers for their next televised main event, which gets underway this weekend. This one is good clean All-American fun for the kids, too, as you only need to be 18 to play.
Tons os news stories to blow through … John Caldwell can now say definitively that it takes the work of three men to replace him. But the poker news keeps beating. On this week’s docket :
– everyone’s abuzz about Rush Poker. Full Tilt seems to have come up with a catch-on concept that makes no bones about feeding the addiction in a way that seemingly takes multitabling to a whole new dimension. But will Hevad Khan ever be able to play?
– the new WSOP hygeine rule. Yuck. But does it affect strategy?
– and the Heartland Poker Tour flies in to town to pit Vegas locals against “heartland” tourists, bringing more action to Red Rock than Station Casinos coulda anticipated. My personal poker dreams re-crushed.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
When you’re surrounded by poker but aren’t winning let alone competing in the events you’re covering, you tend to lose the WSOP main-event dream that brought so many of us here in the first place. You understand the lottery component, and you just have seen up close so many people live relatively pathetic degenerate lives in pursuit of it all. However, the HPT offers something a little bit different, and seemingly a lot more attainable.
I got into a $250 satellite on a freeroll. (Pokerati has its privileges.) And I’ll be playing that tonight. The cool thing about it is that 20 percent of the field will win seats into the $1k main event. 20 percent? Hmm … I can do that. And then at that point, it’s just another tournament, conceivably against a lot of folks who may just be a little too excited about being in Vegas to win. (Heartland chartered four jets to fly qualifiers in for this event from elsewhere around the country.) And the typical 1st prize payout on the Heartland Poker Tour is anywhere from $80k to $150k … nice! While not exactly life-changing money, for a guy whose biggest cash thus far has been $11k, a six-figure payout of any sort … or even five figures for that matter, would certainly be year-changing money.
So wish me luck … and follow me on Twitter as I seek to survive today, and take it down this weekend.
For more details on HPT-Red Rock, click here. Tons of satellites running, their first ever celebrity-charity event, a funky party to go with it … and a television crew.
Oh, that’s a whole-nother story … and testament to the grind-it-out success of the Heartland Poker Tour. Look how much TV coverage they’ve finagled and see how different that is from the typical poker model on FSN.
It feels good to run good … and because it’s important to know whom you’re up against, here are six players you may wanna congratulate/look out for at the tables live and online, as their most recent noteworthy successes suggest they are running particularly well.
Mary Joe Belcore-Zogman Heartland Poker Tour’s “The Grand Series”
Onamia, Minnesota
Bested 201 players to take down $85,723 — making her the second woman to win an HPT event, and part of the first husband-wife team to both win on the Heartland Poker Tour. Dan Zogman won $220k in Gary, IN, last year. The Zogmans hail from McHenry, IL, about 60 miles outside of Chicago.
Phil Ivey Full Tilt Million Dollar Cash Game
London
Made a stab at his 6th bracelet in the £2,500 HORSE at WSOP-Europe (banking more than US$25k for 6th place), and while overseas was the big winner in the million-dollar cash game against his fellow Full Tilt pros and other highest-stakes players. Finished +$536,400, dominating the competition for the second time in the event’s 3-year history.
Mary Joe Belcore-Zogman
Phil Ivey
