Hideaway Fall Classic

One of my disappointments in the local poker scene is the lack of reasonably priced deep stack events -- tournaments where you actually play some poker before you get to the stage where everyone is shoving all-in every hand.  Either you have daily $30-60 tournaments that are fast with little or no skill or $500+ special events like Tulalip's 10-10-10 $1010 event.  So I was excited when I saw The Hideaway was having a Fall Classic with a series of reasonably priced events $60-120 and $240 for the main event with a lot of chips to start with and 20-minute rounds.

I played in a few of these.  The first was a $60 buy-in tournament starting with 30K chips (100-200 blinds) and 20-minute levels -- their normal tournament but twice as much play.  I didn't play very well and went out early.  The second event was an interesting twist on a team tournament.  Normally in a team tournament, the teammates switch who's playing every level (15 - 30 minutes).  In this tournament each team member was part of a pool of 20 players.  Each pool played its own tournament with the top 3 getting paid.  Then the top team, based on the ranks of its team members, wins 25% of the total prize pool.  I finished 4th in my pool and Meier got 3rd in his pool, which made us the top team.  We'll take it but we both feel like we could/should have won our individual pools as well.  Meier in particular got unlucky on his last two hands or could have been heads up with 2/3 of the chips.

I had a Mariners conflict and missed the Omaha/8 tournament which I wanted to play.  I played the NL bounty tournament Friday AM and finished with two bounties and go unlucky and busted at the final table.

Then I played the HORSE tournament on Saturday.  HORSE is a mixed game where you play Hold 'em, Omaha/8, Razz, Stud, and stud/Eight.  (Yeh, the "E" is kind of a stretch.)  Anyway, the tournament sucked and everyone who played in it thought so too.  Basically they started with too many chips for everyone given it's a fixed limit structure and raised the blinds too slowly.  I played 6 hours before busting at which point they got to the final table of 8 from 24 who started.  A tournament of this nature shouldn't take 6 hours to complete much less to just get to the final table. We spent 3 hours just passing chips back and forth when the blinds were tiny.  Then played some poker for a couple hours, then hit a shove fest where it came down to who caught cards.  Oh well.  Was fun to play HORSE for real and I'd probably go back for their cash game.  But I'd never play a structure like that again.

For the series, I think I wound up slightly ahead -- cashing once in the team tournament to pay for my four entry fees and having the bounties as profit.

No poker as I'm busy at work.  Played a silly social game Sunday night.  I'm not even sure you could call it poker.  Looking to play on Friday when the card room max jumps from $40 to $100 and there's going to be 1/3 "no limit" at the Hideaway.