Event #3 of the March Power Weekend, the Deepstack Turbo, was a great success that drew a large and diverse field. The Deepstack Turbo featured a $5,000.00 guarantee, but it was easily surpassed as 91 players made their way into the high-paced fray. The robust turnout generated a prize pool of nearly $8,000.00 to be divided between the top 12 finishers. The story of this event falls into two main themes: the pace of play and the deals. As a turbo tournament, the 15-minute blind levels make it more of a sprint than a marathon. And the play on display showed that the runners were racing to stay out ahead of the blinds. Particularly in the early levels, it seemed like most hands wound up with one or more players going all-in before the river for either maximum value or to steal as many chips as possible. Deal-making is a common […]
Playground
33 bags
After 14 levels of play, Day 1A’s 170 entries funneled to just 33 players. 33 stacks are sent to Sunday’s Day 2, and will soon join the 15 online qualifiers that have been waiting for the party since March 18th. The list of combined qualifiers can be found here, in the results section. Jerry Joseph Jaber finished in the lead, with 316,000 chips, having won a huge pot about an orbit before the end. Anderson Frank-Graham follows, with 293,000 chips. After his huge score with , he kept heading in that direction and added another stack of reds to his riches. Join these players on the Day 2 qualifiers’ list by playing Day 1B (Friday 7:00pm) and/or Day 1C (Saturday 11:00am). The Power Weekend resumes tomorrow at noon with the $90 + $10 NL Hold’em Deepstack Turbo, and we will be there to bring you the updates! The post 33 bags […]
March Power Weekend Event #1 champion: Jean-Philippe Lehoux
Jean-Philippe Lehoux has just been crowned champion of the first event of the March Power Weekend, the $70 + $10 Mix Max. Lehoux bested a field of 71 players, in an event that brought the players through a range of formats; the day began 10-handed before quickly moving to 8-handed play. Once the field had been reduced to less than 60, the tables were re-adjusted and play continued 6-handed. The tables were adjusted once again when the field stood at 24 players as they played 4-handed. The 4-handed format soon gave way to a 5-handed final table where the five finalists agreed to an ICM chop of the remaining prize pool. The turning point in Lehoux’s tournament occurred during 4-handed play. In a heads-up pot, Lehoux tried to take his opponent off his hand on the flop by moving all-in with two over cards and an open-ended straight draw. His […]
WPT DeepStacks comes to the World Cup of Cards!
Montreal will soon welcome a new high-profile poker tour to the area as WPT DeepStacks has announced the second half of their Season V schedule, which will get started with the $1,650 WPT DeepStacks Montreal. This is the first event to officially be announced for the 2018 World Cup of Cards! The WCC has picked up traction over the past two years as a series featuring high value tournaments at accessible buy-ins, and the WPT DeepStacks will fit in perfectly. “We are thrilled to increase the WPTDeepStacks schedule for Season V [including] the tour’s first-ever trips to Montreal and Texas,” said WPTDeepStacks Executive Director Chris Torina. “Together with our incredible casino partners, we look forward to providing the premier mid-major offering that poker players want and deserve.” The new stop at Playground Poker Club will increase the tour’s profile in Canada, which already hosts an annual event in Edmonton plus […]
Hassan Salha takes down the Playground 200
After 2 full days of poker, almost 3 hours of final table action and a little over 10 minutes of heads-up play, Hassan Salha was crowned Champion of the Playground 200, a natural outcome that resulted from unbelievable play. Salha was hands down the fiercest competitor. Since early in Day 2, his well-calculated aggressiveness served him extremely well. This type of play got him a lot of free pots, and also a lot of value from players who just could not bring themselves to believe him anymore. The Playground 200 attracted 607 players spread on 4 Day 1s – 1 online and 3 live. 126 players managed to send a stack to Day 2. On that Day, Hassan Salha was either 1st or 2nd in chips on ALL leaderboards, a very rare thing. He also had a partypoker LIVE patch on him, and as the Champion, he was incidentally the […]
Playground Poker & the 4th American Poker Awards
The 4th Annual American Poker Awards nominees were announced today, and Playground Poker Club figures prominently among the 54 total awards and nominees. The American Poker Awards will be presented on Thursday, February 22nd in Los Angeles. Our most prominent nomination is in the Event of the Year category. The four final nominees include the partypoker MILLION North America – the only nominated event that was held outside of Las Vegas. This tournament ran from May 5th to 10th, 2017 and was a $5,300 NL Hold’em event that generated a total prize pool of $5,709,750.00 and included both Online (on partypoker) and Live elements in an innovative tournament format. Playground Poker Club was also the site of one of the 4 nominations for Poker Moment of the Year: “Ema Zajmovic becomes the first female player to win an open event on the World Poker Tour.” This occurred in the WPT […]
New Year, New Rules, Bigger Prizes!
Big changes are coming to the Playground Poker Tournament Leaderboard sponsored by partypoker, on January 1st, 2018. The most significant change is the modification of the prizes for the monthly TLB Freeroll. The First Place finisher in the monthly tournament will now win a seat to the MILLIONS North America – a $5,300 value. This brings the total of all of the prizes to over $16,000 per month! Finishers from 2nd to 10th will each win $1000 on partypoker, and players who finish from 11th to 30th will win a $109USD partypoker tournament ticket. All payouts will continue to be made on partypoker. The other major change is that starting on January 1st, online tournaments will no longer qualify for TLB points. The TLB will return to it’s “classic” formula – rewarding players at Playground Poker for their performance and participation in Live tournaments here at the Club. Be sure […]
The Big Playground Story of 2017
As 2017 comes to a close, it’s fun to look back at the year that was and remember all of the great moments since last January, from Ema Zajmovic’s victory in the WPT Playground all the way through to the 7 Year Anniversary Series. To help us determine the year’s biggest moment, we turned to you. Poker players are full of opinions, and the Story of the Year was no exception. We narrowed it down to 7 choices and let you guys tell us which was the biggest! The results are now in, and the Record-Setting Bad Beat Jackpot was the story of the year! Of the 536 valid responses, this choice received a whopping 35% of the votes. In second place: Ema Zajmovic wins the WPT Playground with 26%. The record-setting $1,210,989 Bad Beat Jackpot (190 votes) Ema Zajmovic wins the WPT Playground, becoming the first woman to win […]
2017 WPT Montreal Champion: Maxime Heroux
The 2017 WPT Montreal has come to a close with Montreal’s own Maxime Heroux emerging as the Champion. Along with a massive $384,150 payout, the title comes with the Playground Poker Fall Classic Champion’s Belt, a spot on the WPT Champion’s Trophy, a US$15,000 seat to the WPT Tournament of Champions, a stunning Hublot watch, and of course poker immortality as a WPT Champion. Past champions in this event have been Mike Sexton (2016), Jared Mahoney (2015), Jonathan Jaffe (2014), Derrick Rosenbarger (2013), and Jonathan Roy (2012), and the event has also seen historic runs by players like Ema Zajmovic (final table 2016), Rainer Kempe (first big tournament score in North America), and Mukul Pahuja (back to back final tables), among others. This WPT Main Tour stop was a $3,500 + $350 NL Hold’em event featuring three Day 1s next-day re-entry and a huge $2,000,000 prize pool guarantee. It featured […]
The Fall Classic is back beginning on Sunday
WPT Montreal starts on November 10th Coming up from October 29th to November 16th is the 2017 Playground Poker Fall Classic including the WPT Montreal. With over $3,300,000 in guaranteed prize pools across 17 events, this year’s edition of the Fall Classic could be the best one yet! The Fall Classic kicks off with the $100,000 Guaranteed $160 Re-entry event, in which the $25 tournament fee goes to the “Strangers in the Night” charity initiative. This is followed by the $200,000 Guaranteed $250 Frenzy, a $225 + $25 Re-entry event. New in this Fall Classic is the daytime Crazy $80, a $70 + $10 Re-entry event. All three tournaments promise Big Event poker for a small buy-in – these are can’t miss tournaments! In addition, the Fall Classic sees the return of the massive $1,100 50/50 Bounty tournament, a $550 PLO event, and the $1,650 Second Chance NL Hold’em event […]
(Re-) Introducing the Button Ante
In the past year, something new has been taking the tournament world by storm – the Button Ante. Playground Poker Club is no exception – we used this format in a few major tournaments during the 2017 World Cup of Cards, and the response from customers was overwhelmingly positive. The concept is simple: instead of asking every player at a tournament table to contribute an ante each hand, the player on the button pays a larger ante once per table orbit. To keep it simple, the amount of the Button Ante is the equivalent of the big blind – as the big blind grows, so does the Button Ante amount. This Button Ante is pulled into the pot before the deal, and the small and big blinds are added as usual by the two players to the left of the button. There are several benefits to the Button Ante format, […]
New Procedures for Satellite Tournaments
For several years now, Thursday and Sunday evenings have been set aside for satellite tournaments that give players the opportunity to play their way into major events for a relatively small buy-in amount. These satellites have been a huge success, and hundreds of seats to major events such as the WPT® Montreal have been awarded via satellite tournaments. Recently, however, some have pointed out that satellites do not start at their advertised time, as many players opt to wait until the end of the late registration period to jump in. Few players buy-in early, but are then forced to wait for 30, 60, or even 90 minutes before the tournament can start. This is due to the fact that we would delay the tourney by up to 2 x 15 minute periods if we did not have the minimum amount of runners present at the scheduled start time (# of […]