Chips, Chips, Chips
by Court on 10.10.08, 2:21 pm
“I’m not used to having so many chips,” Annette Obrestad said, referring to both the large starting stacks and the way the chips are broken down denomination wise. Usually players start with a couple large denomination chips of 5k to keep the total number of actual chips they have down to a reasonably small amount.
At the North American Poker Championship the starting stacks come with chip denominations of 1k, 500, 100 and 25, meaning there are a lot of the orange 1k chips in the room. Later in the tournament there will be color ups and larger denomination chips will be brought into play, but for now full stacks of the 1k chips are a common sight around the room, an unusual thing for this early in a tournament.
Kofi “redsoxsox” Farkye (left) made a final table appearance here last year, but if he has any hope of making it back to back he is going to have to go on an impressive heater in the near future. After some preflop raising an aggressive Farkye made it 3,500 to go and was called. On the T
75
flop Farkye check called a 6,500 bet and the pot grew to an increasingly large size with over 20k in the middle.
On the Q turn the rest of the chips went in and Farkye was up against a turned set of queens with his opponent holding the Q
Q
and Farkye with the overpair and the flush draw with the KK. Once the chips were counted Kofi had to match the 17,550 his opponent had remaining, leaving himself with just over 3k if he lost the hand. The 9 on the river left the set of queens standing tall and Farkye on the short stack as the first level of play for the day neared an end.
A glance around the room showed these players among those in day 1a action: Tim “Tmay420″ West, Christian “charder” Harder, Luke “IWEARGOGGLES” Staudenmaier, Randal “RandALLin” Flowers, Peter “Mr. Motown” Valente, Isaac “mr. menlo” Baron, Matt “Ch0ppy” Kay, Annette “Annette_15″ Obrestad, Shaun Deeb, Ryan “gotskillz” Fisler, and Joe Sebok.
