According to Craig’s list, the Winstar Thrusday chips are a hot property, as people are asking $3,000-$5,000 for the sold-out $2,100 seats. I’m curious as to how many of those folks are having any luck. Comments? Anybody? Personally, I’m not seeing any deals working and am thinking that there will be a lot of late comers who couldn’t flip their chip.

Thursday is starting up the TV crew is running about. I’ve requested Survivor updates for Wednesday and should have those later today. I would already have posted them, but the person with the goods told me that he didn’t want to walk over to the poker room and get it. He’s a nice enough guy, but when, oh when will Winstar figure out that there’s live “Beyond The Tent”. (Is that domain available?)

Updates to come.

 

Karridy knows how to represent.

Despite negative reports about a too-fast blind structure and terrible dealers — from players who may or may not have been juiced with some residual Day 1-bustout tilt and therefore focusing on isolated incidents inherent to putting on any event that’s bigger than any other you’ve put on before — I couldn’t stand it … I just had to get in on the action. Sounds like too much fun going on at The River, and who better to buy a small piece of than Karridy? I like his chances. After all the last tourney he played with notably bad blind structures and dealers — he won!

He also apparently got the last spot available for Thursday, and if I learned anything from running Lodge tourneys, it’s that late-late entrants seem to have a disproportionately high percentage of Top 3 finishes. Seriously. Not sure why that is, but it’s true. I’ve seen it. You know, math …

Anyone got any updates from WinStar? So far 60 people have moved on … presumably 60. Yesterday’s field didn’t sell out — like 265ish runners or thereabouts. Not sure if they stuck with 10 percent of the field moving on (26 or 27 players) or went with the full 30 to keep Friday’s Saturday’s action at a nice, round 150 players fighting for the final table.

Surely some names we know and care about have advanced, right, along with some others that we don’t yet know we care about? I’ve reached out to my hookups at WinStar, but let’s just say they’re no Nolan Dalla … so info is hard to come by.

One of the guys playing The River today yesterday is/was ItsOverJonny — not sure how he’s doing or how anyone’s doing … don’t think they have phones yet in Oklahoma … but regardless, if you’re not reading IOJ, well I’m not gonna say you should be, because, hey, we’re all busy people. But think Gary Carson, only more bitter and jaded. Good stuff, as you could imagine.

Though Jonny did play in the big $2k event yesterday, he wasn’t exactly happy with the WinStar crew after playing in a $500 event — and he spells it out, plain as day, what beefs he has with their dealers. Though I suspect the WinStar may poo-poo his free-of-charge poker room consultation because who cares when you’re making so much damn money these days, I can attest that he definitely knows a thing or two about how good games are supposed to run, and just about any poker room management should wanna use his post as a litmus test for what their dealer crew should and shouldn’t do. Some highlights from his blog:

Jonny played in Winstar’s $500+50 today. 61 players. Same shitty Winstar structure. Dealers were fucking horrible, and between dealers fucking everything up, maddening noise from all directions, and idiot clowndick players, I was tilting beyond belief, even though I hadn’t hardly played a hand for a while at the time. Seriously - where do they get these retard dealers that they stick in the tournaments? It’s not like it’s a $60 nightly tournament - it was $550 - get some dealers that can run a table without making repeated stupid mistakes, and then giving me attitude when I correct them until they finally figured out that they had indeed made a mistake. Your job consists of the most basic of math, making a little change, and distribution of cards. How do you manage to fuck that up?

More…

Defending Champ: Sure, I may have gotten lucky on the river, but hey, I had the best hand going in!

So what do you do after beating TJ Cloutier to win $230k? That’s not exactly lottery money, after all — especially after taxes — but it was enough to (kinda) change the life of Vik Vijay, the Oklahoma poker dealer who won the 2007 Red River Roundup (now called, more elegantly Oklahoma-y, The River) and then delivered on his post-victory promise to quit his job and move to Las Vegas with highly energized bankroll in hand. Since then:

hey dan -
yeah, im headed down to winstar next week to defend - ive got the last starting day - thursday the 21st. hopefully it will go well. the last year has been interesting - i moved to vegas and have mostly been playing. i worked at the venetian this summer, dealing poker for their summer tournament set, but they didnt keep any of us on for anything regular. the poker has been going well, but i really got to lay off the blackjack. other than that, life is pretty good.

-vik vijay.

I think cards are already in the air for the pseudo-shootout River Tournament at WinStar in Oklahoma. Alas, I am not there … am still in Vegas as the first of five groups of 300 players play down to 30.

Though this is not yet confirmed, we think with 1,500, a $2,000 buy-in, and a guaranteed $3 million prize pool that this might-well be the biggest non-WSOP event at $2,000 or more in the history of ever. At a minimum, it’s the biggest event of the year for Texas poker — and Oklahoma poker, too, of course. Was hoping I’d be able to make it back to glorious Thackerville to bring you some WSOP-style coverage of this biggity poker hoedown, but it just doesn’t seem likely.

Last year’s runner-up TJ Cloutier starts today. I’m sure lots of other players we know and love are also there — in fact, if anyone has any updates, be sure to let us know. (Send me an email if you want me Ed to set you up to CSR from the felt/rail.)

Also, last I heard, today is sold out, but 140 seats overall remain. I gotta imagine they’ll fill up if the WinStar is still running single-table satellites … and I know at least two Dallas poker rooms are running sats, so …

Paul in Dallas sends along some info about the upcoming River Touranment in Winstar, Oklahoma. (OK, technically it’s Thackerville, but Winstar is what puts this border town on the map, so …)

As for the River tourney, I’ve been up several times during the months of “qualifying,” and it has been fairly impressive. More impressive is the price you can get for your seats, nearly full price. I won a single table satellite and was able to sell the chip on Craig’s List for $1900 (buyin is $2100). The rake they’ve been able to steal on many satellites has been most impressive- they have been running big tournaments each month ($400+40) for seats, which isn’t too obscene at 10%, but they have been been running $55 single table sat’s to those tournaments, 10 to a table, with winner taking a seat ($440 value) and the house keeping the other $110. And yet people keep playing them.

Not sure if you’ve been kept abreast of the Winstar goings-on, but they did start serving liquor during the summer, and it has changed weekend play considerably. Many tables running 24 hours from Thursday to Monday morning each week. Squishy soft.

Wow. Damn. I did not know. Go WinStar! Should be interesting to see how this $3 million tourney plays out. Would expect to see a virtual who’s who of Texas poker contending.

(Last year, you may recall, this event was called the Red River Roundup and had a guaranteed prize pool of $1 million, in which Vikram Vijay of Oklahoma defeated TJ Cloutier heads-up, making it seem a little bit like an old-fashioned version of the WSOP main event for both of them.)

For the 36 40 percent of our readers who happen to be non-American, we probably don’t do enough to keep you up-to-date on the goings-on of our good mates at PartyPoker. Their stock seems fine (at least better than the WPT’s) though it’s a bit of a dumb-count — the price recently skyrocketed due to a reverse split. Anyhow, our favorite site based in Gibraltar is celebrating its 7th birthday this week. Congrats! Seriously, there were at least a couple weeks in there where I wasn’t so sure you were gonna make it to 6 … but glad you guys are still around, albeit a smaller version of yourself. Miss you lots!

The annual celebration isn’t quite what it used to be, of course. Back in the day they sent thousands on a sweet cruise. This year they are splashing cash-game pots (today, with $300 every 77,777 hands), giving away PartyPoints, and inviting folks into a $7,777 freeroll. Aww … so sad/cute. It is leading up to something big, however … on Sunday Party’s having a “big” $1 million tourney — that’s a full one-third the size of the big annual tournament at WinStar this year! (Wow, think about that. Seriously. Wow.)

Anyhow … PartyPoker turns The Big 7 this week. Let’s all take a moment to reminisce and rejoice:

Jen, I was just doing a little research on the upcoming Red River Roundup — recently retitled to the Winstar World Championship Series / The River — and I noticed that Annie Duke is one of the hosts (along with Greg Raymer and Norm Hitzges) … and in their promotional stuff, she’s not wearing any UB.

I’m sure she has almost nothing to do with this — most likely Greg told her it was a good tourney, she was happy to accept a check to show up, and the Winstar’s web people ganked an old PR image off the internet — but still, just found it interesting to see her out of UB uniform. Also interesting to see a Kahnawake squaw working with the Chickasaw. Historically these two nations never battled, but I don’t think you would ever see a Cherokee dude like Scotty Nguyen make the tribal crossover.