No Budweiser for me

Well, got a little boot to the groin last night at the free poker night. The APL had Budweiser sponsoring a 6 week tournament where the top 100 players from each region qualify for a bigger tournament. Basically, they accumulated your points over the 6 week period and if you were in the top 100, you qualify to play against the others, with the top 5 finishers in the big tourney getting a trip to Vegas in February. There are 10 regions so there will be 50 players in Vegas in that tourney, with the top 2 players winning a trip the next week LA to play in the WPT Celebrity Invitational tourney.

I missed the first week because I was away on business so, when I looked and saw that our region consisted of Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New York, I figured I was dead already. Turns out that the only places that the APL is really played right now is in Massachusetts anyway, out of those states. Also, turns out that by my town, there are 3 bars that host these free tourneys so there were some opportunities for me still.

In the first week, I got some points so I started to think of the possibilities of playing a little more during the six weeks so I might qualify. There were people playing like 4 nights a week to accumulate points, but as they started to post the results online, I had a hope. They started hosting the game a new bar that was even closer to my house while this was going on, so I decided to go to that one to. To be honest, I had heard that there were fewer players, so getting in the points would be a lot easier. The first night I went, there were only 24 people and the top 16 get points. So for 3 weeks, I played both Sunday and Monday nights to try and qualify and ended up doing ok.

As I saw my name rise in the leader board, I started to look into the rules more closely. Basically, the six week phase, which was level one, ended on December 24th. After all the points were tallied up, the top 100 would play in the level two tourney at a TBA venue with a TBA date, between January 7 and January 27. Uh, oh. Going to see Mickey with the family from January 21-January 28. That's ok, I probably won't make the cut anyway, and plus, what are the chances it will be at the end anyway right?

Well, of course, the next week, I won the damn Sunday night tourney at the new dive. There were something like 25-30 people and I won what was the monthly venue championship. Woohoo, that gets me a lot of points. I end up 33rd on the list while a few of my buddies are also qualified. Just have to wait now for the date to be announced for the level two tourney.

January 21st!!! 8:00pm. No Bud tourney for me. The real kicker though, was what I got in the mail. I saw a Bally's Las Vegas envelope one night last week. Opened it up and it was an offer for a poker tourney January 24-January 27. $99 for an entry into the tourney and 3 FREE NIGHTS HOTEL at Bally's. Dammit, the kids better have fun with Mickey that week. Oh well, hopefully when I go to Vegas in June, I can get an offer like that one.