I knew I could fit two tables in my living room, one in my fireplace room, one in my media room, and another at the kitchen table.  That's five tables; but I needed a sixth table to max out at 54 players.  I always envisioned putting the 6th table at my dining room table -- but it's a VERY expensive dining room table, and my wife put the kabosh on that idea...real quick.  Luckily my living room is large enough that I am able to fit a third table in there without any problem.

Usually I have one or two people signed up on-line at www.cadillacpoker.com before I start making phone calls.  This month, I already had a dozen signed up.  After making my first set of phone calls on Thursday night, I had 24 people signed up.  This again, is quite an unusually high number.  If I have 24 people signed up by game day, that usually means 36 people will show up.  Now, less than 1/2 way through making my phone calls, I already have 24 people signed up.  By Friday night, I had 41 people signed up -- already larger than my largest tournament.  Then by Saturday afternoon, I had about 6 more people sign-up online, and others calling to say they were bringing a friend or two to the tournament.

By game time, we had 53 players; so now the test is about to begin.  If the tournament isn't run smoothly, then all kinds of havoc will be obvious; if the blind structure isn't right, then the tournament will last all night long.  I was also giving out $1,000 bonus chips (per buy-in) to people who showed up early.  This not only encouraged people to show up early, but also encouraged them to start the tournament double-stacked with $2,000 extra chips.  Almost everybody who showed up early, took the offer -- and this puts more $$$money$$$ in the prize pool; but it also adds more chips in play, thus possibly lengthening the tournament.

A Massive Prize Pool

In any of my re-buy/add-on tournaments, the average prize pool is 3 times the number of players -- meaning $50 x 3 per person.  With 53 players, the projected prize pool would be $7,950.  But we had more.  At the end of the re-buy/add-on period, we had a whopping $8,300 prize pool.  That's 166 buy-ins/re-buys/add-ons for the tournament -- enough to pay 10 places.

My personal tournament didn't go very well.  I went broke, was forced to re-buy, and eventually went out midway at 32nd place.

In the end, the tournament went very smoothly.  Knowing the tournament would be huge, I bought 15 Tri-Tip steaks, and that was the perfect amount of food.  The program I wrote to calculate the payouts worked perfectly.  The extra chips I put in play, was perfect as well.  We even had a chance to use my new $25,000 chips for the first time during tournament play.  With the added ante in round 6, the tournament ended exactly by 1:30AM -- which is exactly where I wanted it to end.  Things couldn't have been better; the tournament was a huge success.

Bounties and Jackpots:

The high hand of the night was Quad Queens (QQQQK).  The money went unclaimed, and I collected it as a tip on the tournament.  The bad beat jackpot wasn't hit, and the $170 collected during this tournament will be added to last month's $3665 to set next month's bad beat jackpot at $5255. The $50 prize on aces cracked was awarded early in the night to Rob Linden; and Joel Wright won the $50 bounty on last month's winner: Scott Kuusinen (that's two bounties in a row for Joel!).

The players finished in this order:

Congratulations to everybody who made it to the money.