2019 Poker Update

Thought I should provide an update before I hit the full year mark since my last post (November 2018). 2019 has been relatively quiet on the poker front. I’ll start with the CPMG 2019 Tournament of Champions. As some of you know, there was talk of the tournament being scrapped this year for various reasons, but I volunteered to track the TOC points and donate a prize for the winner of the tournament. For the prize, I ended up purchasing a custom engraved bracelet, pictured below. The bracelet quality is much sharper than I expected and I’m excited to award this to the winner of the 2019 TOC. Remember you can qualify for points through December 15th. Julie agreed to host the tournament sometime in January.

I haven’t played poker or hosted many games this year. In fact, I’ve only hosted twice. First was a $50+10 bounty tournament on January 4th that drew 22 runners; my best turn out yet. I didn’t do well in the tournament, but put my new (at the time) cash game chip set to use and eked out a small profit.

I also hosted a $0.50/0.50 Dealer’s Choice cash game in June that had a great turnout. We had a full table of 9 for much of the night and played a variety of games, some that I’ve never played before. Adam Rhodes introduced the group to fun games such as Scrotum 8, Scarney, Drawmaha, SOHE and more. We also played games you’ll recognize such as PLO, PLO8, Stud and 2-7 Triple Draw. It was a lot of fun and I was the big winner of the night. Bought in for $80 and cashed out $613 (+533). Not bad for a low stakes cash game!

A week after the cash game, on July 5th to be exact, Parma got hit with a massive rain storm that dropped over 4 inches in less than an hour. Unfortunately, this caused the city sewers to back up and our basement flooded. We lost a lot of things, including 2 of my poker tables, but I was able to save my 2 best tables. Everything was cleaned and sanitized immediately after the flood, so I can still host. We've just been busy and I haven't been able to get a proper game going.

I've played a few times at Julie's house and a few times at Krazy Joe's new house as well. Joe really went all out with his set up. I also joined Doug Poker downtown at the JACK for one of the High Hand promotions. We played O8 to improve our chances of hitting the High Hand. I've always been pretty pessimistic about this promotion, but to my surprise I hit quad Aces and it held for a nice $500 win! The timing was perfect too because someone hit a straight flush a few minutes later.

I've also been dealing regularly at a local home game, which has been fantastic since I'm trying to save extra money to help one of our teenagers get a car. It's a $1/2 PLO/NLHE rotation that plays more like a $2/5 game. I've seen some of the sickest pots at this game... believe me, the action is insane.

Hopefully I get around to posting more updates. I plan to host a handful of games before the end of the year, especially since I have ZERO TOC points.

More to come soon!