So last Saturday, when I was in Vegas for work, after busting out of a 10pm turbo tournament at my beloved Treasure Island poker room (terribly structured tournaments, but always a friendly crowd and dealers, plus it's truly smoke free) I sauntered over to the Rio.
After seeing The Bear (Barry Greenstein) at the final table of the 10K Limit Hold-Em event, I plunked down my hard earned satellite money and bought a seat into event #43, a $1500 No Limit Hold-Em nooner, scheduled for this upcoming Saturday.
But Chris, you say, you told us you didn't win one of your home game satellites, what up?
Well, I didn't win a live satty, this is true. But online, I managed to squeak out a spot at the big dance after all.
But Chris, you say, everyone knows that the online pokerz are finished in the USA, surely you must be on drugs!
Well, my friends from up north (and a few down here as well) have been playing online for years - rake free. We keep track of the money ourselves and play with play chips, through Poker Stars Home Games on Poker Stars dot net. (As an aside, if this sounds like your kind of racket, be sure to mention it to me the next time we see each other.)
So this spring we had an 18 tournament series, every Monday night for over three months, to choose a representative to play in the World Series of Poker, and yours truly managed to ship it.
So now it will be me, Allen Q. and Eric T. who will be gambooling it up with the best in the world come this weekend.
Also joining us from Pepper Street will be Dog, Jason H., Noah P. and very possibly Marc! Allen R. has also indicated that he might be about. If you have any opportunity to come along, you really should - the World Series is a blast, even if you don't play in it. There are also lower buy in non-bracelet events to play in as well, starting at $235 and going down to $135, I plan to partake at 2pm on Friday, Dog and Jason I believe will be splashing around in the 2pm on Saturday.
But even if you can't come along for the gambling madness, you can keep up with our adventures via' the magic of Twitter!
See what happens with me, Eric, Dog and Allen respectively by following @PepperStChrisM, @PepperStEricT, @PepperStDog and @PepperStAllenQ. Jason for some reason has decided to call his twitter account @PepperStPiquant, so be sure to enter that to find him. I'll also be harassing Noah P soon to create a twitter account which presumably will be found @PepperStNoahP when he gets around to it.
If all this seems like too many people to keep track of, you can simply do a search for #pepperstpoker, which we will be including in all of our updates. This search will bring you all the most recent events - which will include our statuses, chip counts, and even pictures! It's the next best thing to being there!
Allen is very optimistic about his chances, as for me - let's just say I'm more of a glass half empty kind of guy when it comes to tournament poker. The good news is for me, after I bust out, I plan to play a heck of a lot more poker, including tournaments at the Venetian and Binion's, so there'll still be lots to follow even after I exit my big event.
Speaking of big events, our next Pepper Street tournament won't be until Saturday, July 9th at 7pm. So if you don't follow our tweets, you'll have to hear about it first hand, which could take awhile!
