The Fall Pot of Gold is over and by all accounts it was a big success. For myself, I won two events and made three other final tables. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to play the main event. I was Mr. Mom for the weekend and my sitter for Saturday cancelled at 11 am. Ouch. Oh well. After taking a few days to catch my breath, I was off to Vegas to play a few of the Venetian Deep Stack Extravaganza tourneys.

The regular poker room at the Venetian is, in my opinion, the best in Vegas, in Nevada, in the west, in the northern hemisphere . . . well you get the picture. The seats are comfy and the room is smoke free and quiet, especially the two back rooms where the larger cash games are held. The staff is very proficient. You get a very good choice of games. You can find limit hold ‘em from $2-$4 to $8-$16 as well as Omaha and a variety of mix games (usually spread at $8-$16). There is also more no limit than you can shake a stick at. On any given day you will probably see 10 or more $1-$2 NLH, five or more $2-$5 NLH and two $5-$10 NLH games being spread. One late night there our table got down to four-handed and we were even allowed to play Chinese poker for free for an hour while we waited for more players. Who doesn’t love that?

When it comes to tournaments though, the Venetian really drops the ball. First off, the chairs are lumpy and hard metal fare, a far cry from the luxurious seats in the cash game area. Second, there is a constant parade of casino patrons going through the tourney area. While that’s great for people watching (and with the Tao night club just up the escalator, there is a lot to watch), it sucks when every other person in the parade seems to be smoking. Also, while the Venetian really pioneered the deep stack movement, their structure is an example of “stack inflation,” (basically they give you more chips, but then eliminate the first level and let the blinds run wild after that.) I will give them credit though; they have reined in the tendency for the blinds to explode in later levels. For instance, they used to go from 2k/4k to 4k/8k. Unfortunately, of the five tourneys I played, I bubbled two on day one, two on day two and flamed out of one so early I didn’t really get a feel for how the blinds advanced really late in the tourney when it matters most. Thank God for cash games and single-table satellites (which they do a great job of running constantly). The large fields at the Venetian are really the saving grace of the Deep Stack Extravaganza. For the $350 events the field was well over 300 people. When the buy-ins jumped up to $1,000 the fields dropped to under one hundred.

On a side note, if you like watching girls dress as slutty as the law will allow, Halloween in Vegas is the place for you.

So after a week in Vegas it was time to come back to Reno and dip my toe in the Peppermill’s Fall Poker Classic. The Peppermill is holding the tourney up in a ballroom on the second floor, so the space is very quiet and smoke-free. The chairs are also comfy, but prone to breaking if you lean them back on two legs. Like my mom used to say: “keep four on the floor.” I would also have to rate the staff as top notch. The only complaint I have about the Peppermill tourneys is their take on “deep stacks.” Basically the Peppermill is where the Venetian was three years ago. What that means is that the average stack starts out deep but quickly evaporates. Historically it hasn’t been unusual for the average stack at the final table to be less than five big blinds when the table is nine-handed and for the big stack to have fewer than twenty big blinds. This is simply unacceptable in any serious tournament. If the Peppermill can’t get this under control, I’m going to have to cross their tourneys off my schedule. The good news here is the field size. It seems to be up over the fields at mid-week events over the Grand Sierra’s Pot of Gold, so I guess I will play a few more events this week before heading back to the Venetian and then on to LA for the Commerce Casino’s LA Poker Open. Hopefully I’ll have some better luck to report. Until then, stay cool.