The Annual · 6th Denny Poker Tournament

Tom Buzbee Takes the Big One

Seventeen players, eight hours, and a fifth different winner in six years.

Seventeen players and eight hours and fourteen minutes, and it came down to a six-and-a-half-minute heads-up match. Tom Buzbee won it for $340 — three knockouts, and the trophy at his sixth attempt.

He arrives off the best league season of his career: a win, a second and two thirds in the Canterberry Poker League, and third place in the final standings. He had cashed at the Annual once before, fifth in 2009.

Mandy Denny was second for $200, which gives her a run at this tournament nobody else can match — across the last three Annuals she has finished first, third and second.

Warren Mervin took third and $120 with three knockouts. Rick Mazza was fourth for $80, also with three, and Josh Reel completed the money in fifth for $60 — six seconds behind Rick Mazza after nearly eight hours at the table.

Where the money went

The undercard

Rick Mickaliger bubbled in sixth, twelve seconds off the money. Lee Ugarte was seventh with three knockouts, as many as anybody in the room and the most by a player who did not cash. Duane Barone was the first man out after an hour and fifty minutes — on an eight-hour day, a very long way from the rest of it.

The bigger picture

Six Annuals, five different winners, and only Joe Johnson has taken it twice.

The Canterberry Poker League season was settled five weeks ago and went to David Doole on 128 points, nineteen clear of Charlie Drotar. Doole came here and finished fifteenth of seventeen. In the four Annuals since 2009 the newly crowned champion has finished eleventh, fifth, twentieth and now fifteenth — and only one of those, Eric Denny’s fifth in 2010, was worth anything. Whatever this tournament rewards, a strong league season is not it.

The 6th Annual Denny Poker Tournament — Saturday, May 19, 2012. 17 entrants, no rebuys, five paid from an $800 prize pool.