Pirates And Ninja

Well the North American Poker Championship is under way in Niagara Falls Canada.  Here is an email I received this morning.

From: Negreanu, Daniel

Sent: Thursday, October 26, 2006 10:59 AM

To: Croft, Mike

Subject: NAPC

What up dogg? I don’t see you down here at the big event. I figured someone with such mad poker skillz would be here scooping giant pots and counting dollars. Are you not going to ‘rep your hood’?

Peace (Two Fingers) - DN

Thanks for the nice words sir, but by my math I am about $9958.27 short on the buy-in.  I would like to make a trip out to Niagara just to see what is going on (rub elbows with other poker greats etc) but I don’t really have that kind of time anymore.  Perhaps Travis and I will make a trip on Saturday while Heidi is at work.  Hopefully she doesn’t read this entry before then, she will likely try to stop us.

Mostly due to the reduced gambling age in Canada (19 opposed to 21 in the US) there are quite a lot of entrants.  They expect somewhere between 550 - 600 which may be a WPT record (it will definitely be near the top anyway).  But because of this number they have had to split up the field into 2 day 1’s. 

Yesterday, Day 1a played.  With 119 players left poker beat-stick John Juanda is on top with 171K in chips.  John is easily one of the top 10 hold’em tournament players out there so this should be bad news for the other players.  Canadian Doug Lee was the first person to bust out.  Doug won a WSOP Circuit event last year and made the final table of another.  He got some pretty decent camera time at an event at this years WSOP as well.  I am not a fan of his work so I can’t say I was unhappy to see him go out first.  (Warning: Toronto Area MTG reference coming … welcome to Magic Week on Pirates and Ninja) To me he is the poker version of Nick Chen. 

(Nick Chen was a Toronto area Magic player who had some very good results.  The problem with this was I never thought he was very good at the game.  Anytime I would watch him play it seemed like he would do everything he could not to win, but still came out on top.  This became such a common occurrence we actually created a term to describe his style of play … ‘Ooops, I won’.)

Day 1b is just getting started as I am typing this.  The two players I would like to see take this event are both playing today … Gavin Smith and Daniel Negreanu.  These are two of my favourite players and both happen to be Canadian.  Seems fitting for the first WPT in Canada.

If you want to follow the event I recommend you look to a friend of ours.  Another ex-Magic player turned Magic Columnist turned Poker Historian/Journalist - Gary Wise.  I consider Gary a friend.  Going out to diner with Gary and the other Toronto players was a big part of playing in Magic Tournaments for me.  He used to come to my basement poker game (when they were bigger and a little more frequent) just for the atmosphere (playing in this particular game was probably ’slumming it’ for Gary, as far as the money went). 

Gary has 2 big qualities … networking and talking.  No one can (or likes to) tell a story like Mr. Wise and he knows absolutely everybody (recently in his writing he has mentioned getting calls from Liz Lieu and going out for diner with Sabina Gadecki so it isn’t all sweaty card playing men either).  He has taken these two abilities and turned it into a career.  He is the official blogger for the WPT and I couldn’t be happier.  You can catch his recaps on their website here.  You can also follow his other work on his own site Wise Hand Poker.  Congrats Gary, it is nice to see someone doing something they are so passionate about.