2010 December 20

I covered the final table of the 2010 WSOP main event, otherwise known as the November Nine, and sat in the orchestra pit with some of the press corps. We were all buzzing with excitement after we witnessed a hand—pocket nines versus A-Q—that conjured up flashbacks of the final table bubble at the 2003 WSOP main event.
 

Best Guaranteed Player Share in Vegas. Get your cards on the table for a share of up to $100,000 at the M poker room. Play every weekend in December from 7 a.m. Friday to 7 a.m. Monday. Lose with four eights or better to win.

If it’s the “most wonderful time of the year,” and the season to be jolly, it must mean it’s time for the Bicycle Casino’s popular Ho-Ho Hold’em tournament series which runs this year from November 18 through December 12 with 21 events scheduled within that time period. And for all but two of them, the price to play is $120 or less, which is well within most players’ holiday budgets.

Kwinsee Khoa Tran, whose favorite places are the poker table and the dinner table, will cart home $178,830, his reward for winning Commerce Casino’s LA Poker Open finale. Tran, a one-time mortgage broker whose career winnings exceed $650,000, has been playing since 2007, but the $178,830 at the LA Poker Open was his largest single payday to date. Tran earned his stripes in smaller events, working his way up into the larger tournaments. Tran bluffed with A-2 early in the tournament to capture a “mountain of chips” which gave him a commanding lead.