The APL National Championship weekend has arrived!

No poker for me last night. I went out for a little while with some of my former coworkers and got home too late to play.

Tomorrow morning, I leave for St. Louis for the big tourney. My flight is at 7am so I will need to leave my house by about 4:45am to pick up my buddy that is also going, and get to the airport in time. It will be a long day I am sure.

We are supposed to get to St. Louis at about 9am, local time and hopefully get checked into the hotel. The plan from there is pretty open. I am sure we will head over to the Ameristar casino to get a couple hours of cards in. I have no idea how long of a wait it might be mid-morning on a Saturday down there though. The registration for the tournament, which is being held in a big restaurant down there called Luigi’s, begins at 1:30pm. The league also arranged tours of the Bud plant down there as a group, but I think we will probably skip that. My buddy actually works for the company that makes Becks, Bass, Stella Artois, etc. so he wasn’t that interested. We figured that some live card action would be a good way to warm up for the tournament anyway.

The actual start time for the tourney is 3pm. Budweiser is a big sponsor and the Bud girls are going to be there to greet everyone. Whatever. Anyway, apparently Chris Moneymaker is supposed to show up around 4:30pm, which I thought was kind of weird. I am sure it will be a distraction in the middle of the tournament. The schedule that they put out has the championship presentations being done around 8:30 or so, so they are expecting the whole thing to last about 5 hours. I am really interested in knowing what the structure is going to be like. The weekly games we play have a certain structure, and I assume, since they haven’t said otherwise, that the structure will be the same. Anything is possible though. With the seat to the main event on the line, hopefully it will make sense. In the weekly games, with only 50-60 people, starting with about 3500 in chips, by the time you get to the final table, it is a luckfest. Usually half the table has an M under 3. I understand they have to do that in the weekly games, to get them done within 2 and a half hours, but hopefully this structure will make the endgame more about the players involved, rather than just the cards.

We’ll see I guess. Send me good vibes/mojo. I will put a post out there on Monday with the results of my weekend. Have a great weekend all.