I’m discovering an awful lot of people read this thing. The guys at the Asian place down the street where I often eat lunch called me Fox when I walked in the other day, as did the guy at the gas station, and I get a lot of emails about the blog lately. I wish I had more time for this blog and pocket fives in general, it’s a lot of fun but I’ve been really busy lately, especially this weekend. <readmore>

I’ve had three paying gigs this week writing poker articles, two of them for print magazines which is a first for me, and all the big overlays lately have kept me busy playing tourneys. The deck hasn’t been running me over the last week or two so I’m glad that the writing gigs and a few students have kept my income fairly steady.

I did get to witness what I believe to be the biggest single table tournament in history on Party this week. The “Step” tournaments on party have intrigued me lately, especially since they introduced a few new levels. Check out Troll’s blog for a good introduction to the steps and how they work, and then take the buy in up a few levels to get a picture of the “Step Higher” tournaments they introduced recently. It took awhile after they started running them for a level five table to fill up but I kept my eyes open whenever I happened to be playing and I was lucky enough to be watching when it finally happened.

You can buy in directly to any of the steps, and the buy in for this monster was $15,000+$500 if you wanted to take that route. I assume most if not all of these people won their way in through the lower steps. The usual Party SNG structure was in force so the whole contest was a bit of a crapshoot and the whole thing lasted less than 40 minutes. Adam was watching as well and his comment was along the lines of “I would never play for that much money with that structure”. I agree with him completely, but it was a lot of fun to watch. $150,000 decided in 45 minutes and the guy who goes out in 4th place gets nothing for his trouble.

The payouts were 1st- $100,000 - 2nd $30,000 – 3rd $20,000. When they got down to three, I wondered to myself if the 4th place guy was now the biggest bubble guy in history. Some of the WPT events may have had people miss bigger prizes than that by one place, I’m not really sure. Call the Guinness people I guess. No not the World Record people, I mean the Guinness Brewing Company. If anybody needs a beer right now it’s Mr. 4th place…

See you at the final table, Fox

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