In a rambling order, here’s what I’ve heard and seen so far:

Sleeplessness: “I couldn’t sleep last night. I kept seeing cards in my head and wondering what I should do if I have a pair of aces. Should I bet big?”

Dealers: In chatting with a few of the dealers before the tourney starts they noted that this will really be a unique final table because unlike other tourneys with larger chip value, the person winning the final hand will likely have almost a table full of chips. To put that in perspective … because of the number of players and the starting chips for each player ($50,000 worth representing 50,000 miles) there’s more than $12,000,000 of poker chips just sitting here right now – all in lower values. But the funniest thing I heard from the dealers is that they will know who the players are from the very first hand. Not by their bets and who wins, but how they handle their chips!

A couple of surprises for the tournament: There will be “bounties” the the players/members who with their hand knock another player out. Each winner who knocks a player out of the tournament will get to pick one of five different envelopes, each containing a prize ranging from a free premium drink on CO to 25,021 bonus miles.

And for the those who are knocked out of the tourney early, they will be put into a pool to be sponsored ($500) into the hotel’s Crazy 8s Blackjack tournament the next day. Losers become winners.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 7th, 2008 at 12:35 pm and is filed under The Poker Tourney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.