The Grand Series at the Nugget--Awesome

Now that the WSOP is in town, many other poker rooms are offering ‘special’ tournaments, I assume, to capture the influx of players. The buy-ins for the WSOP are prohibitive for many, though this year there are several $1,000 tournaments. Still a grand is too much, so it is nice to see that there are tournaments catering to the lower limit players, but still offering excellent structures and chip stacks.

There is hardly a paucity of tournaments to play year round, but for the lower limit player, these 40, 50, 60 dollar buy-ins offer terrible structures--usually 20 minute blinds and starting stacks of 3,000 to 4,000. Those games don’t allow any ‘play.’ After an hour the blinds have increase three-fold and one need to start pushing all-in.

This past Saturday, I played in a tournament that offered terrific blind structures and starting chip stacks: 40 minutes and 12,000 chips, respectively. These types of tournament are usually more expensive to play year-round, but not this time of year.

The Grand Series of Poker at the Golden Nugget offered the above tournament for $135. Truly awesome. It even received a ‘good luck’ and ‘hello’ from Phil Hulmuth, in person. The series continues through July with buy-ins ranging from 135 to 235 to 500 and the most expensive, 1,000. Every day there is one going on and most of the time two. The tournaments don’t just offer No Limit. There’s stud hi-low, Omaha, pot limit, HORSE, etc.

So when I played the room had two games going—stud high-low and no limit hold ‘em. The stud tournament had 119 players and the no limit had 372 players. As I was playing no limit, I really did not pay too much attention to the stud game, but did note how many players entered. The hold ‘em tournament paid out 37 places with 1st place offer $8,700—not too bad for 135 bucks.

I started playing at noon and busted out about 3:30 with still well over 260 players left—it’s a grind. My poker run is still going terribly wrong, and this tournament proved no exception as did the subsequent games I played over the weekend. What’s new there? Nothing. However, stupid is as stupid does and thus stupid will enter in another tournament. The Nugget is not the only place offering these ‘special’ tournaments, but it’s the best one for the price that I have found.