tp's table talk

A friend led me towards the Red Hot Poker Tour a month or two back after discovering them running a poker tournament in his local bar. It’s a group that organizes free poker tournaments in bars across Toronto. There is no buy-in and there are no prizes. I have been meaning to make it out to a game for a while, but always found myself with other commitments. I’m running out of excuses though, as there is at least one event running every night of the week somewhere in town. And if you count all the events in nearby cities, the RHPT has 3-4 events a night.

But tonight was a special event. Daniel Negreanu was in town for a few days and was supposed to be appearing at the this evening’s tournament at the Madison downtown. Sign-up was supposed to begin at 6:00pm, but I rightly figured that I should get there early if I wanted a seat. Unfortunately, I was only able to get out of the office at 5pm and my 5:40 arrival left me too far back in line to get into the game. It was only a short time after 6:00, when I was maybe 10 people back from the sign-up table, that we were told that all the seats were filled. The tournament wouldn’t start until 7:00 and the room was packed. The friend who was going to come with me wasn’t able to make it, so, instead of waiting around on the off chance I might see something interesting or get a chance to talk to Daniel, I decided to head back home.

It was unfortunate as I was looking forward to seeing Daniel and maybe getting a chance to congratulate him on his success and compliment him on his Card Player articles, which are usually the first I read with each issue. I was also hoping I might run into Brent “Stacks”, one of the hometown boys behind Card Club on Lord Admiral Radio. I’d contacted both he and “Cinci” Sean about Daniel’s appearance after they mentioned it on their podcast this weekend and Brent said he might show up. Unfortunately, I have no idea what Stacks looks like, so I wasn’t going to hang around without the benefit of a poker game to introduce myself to people. And lastly, I discovered that one of the regulars from my own poker game used to room with Devin Armstrong back in university and actually played in the same band with him for a time. Devin writes for Canadian Poker Player and is frequent poster at Canada’s Poker Forum. My friend mentioned that Devin is usually at the RHPT events and suggest I say hello. At least I would have been able to recognize from his byline picture.

But I will have to get out to one of these events soon. From what I saw, it looks pretty well organized and pretty popular. I could use the live game practice even if there is nothing on the line. And I suppose it’s my responsibility as a blogger to sample the poker scene in my city, as limited as it may be.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 16th, 2005 at 11:06 pm and is filed under Poker. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.