Le Batard tourney offers WSOP seat Wednesday; Dania alters bad beat
The stakes are higher in this month's Dan Le Batard Celebrity Poker Tournament at Dania Jai-Alai, but so is the prize payout.
The winner goes to the World Series of Poker main event.
The cards fly at 8 p.m. Wednesday. Buy-in is usually $50 for the monthly tournament hosted by the crew of the Dan Le Batard Show on 790 The Ticket. This time it'll be $79. (Good thing they don't have, say, 1590 as the frequency.)
The structure is always pretty quick at the Le Batard tournament, and this Wednesday will be even faster: 15-minute levels, with 4,000 starting units. Officials, though, are talking of extending the re-entry from the usual 30 minutes to an hour (but check before the tournament starts).
Meanwhile, the poker room is altering its bad beat setup. Right now, it's at about $65,000 and will be frozen. (But still eligible to be won.)
From midnight to 2 a.m. July 1 (the late hours of the Le Batard), they'll pay $1,000 to the high hand. Then $500 every two hours, only in the cash games (which is fair because only the cash games have money pulled for the jackpot).
The idea is to then start a new bad beat that includes both cash and tournament play, assistant GM Marty Fleischman said.
NICK SORTAL began playing 3-card "gut" and "Indian poker" on high school band trips, moved on to "night baseball" and "pass the trash" during a Dr. Pepper-infused midnight game in the 1980s at the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, and now play in a regular neighborhood Hold 'Em game in Plantation. I have been given the assignment of writing about the gambling life in South Florida casinos for the Sun-Sentinel...which means sitting around watching poker on TV now counts as research.
