Canterberry Poker League · The 2015-16 Season
The Year Everybody Started Knocking People Out
Four nights of nine knockouts or more, after seven years in which eight had never been beaten. And a champion who had never won a tournament before June.
For seven seasons the most anybody had knocked out in one Canterberry Poker League night was eight. This season it happened four times, and once it reached ten. Paul Coffman is the 2015-16 League Champion on 109 points from eight appearances — a man who had never won a league tournament in his life until the opening night of it.
How it went
Paul opened the season by knocking out nine of the thirteen players who had to go, then needed thirty-nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds to finish Steve McLean heads-up — the longest finish this league has ever played. Mac made no knockouts at all that night and took second.
The scoring had been rebuilt again. A win now paid around 25 points where last season it paid 50, and the standings counted a player’s best five scores rather than the best eight. Two good nights went a long way; turning up ten times was worth less than it had ever been.
Josh Reel won July for his ninth and October for his tenth — nobody had reached ten before. Scott Dishong took August out of a twenty-man field with nine knockouts of his own, and Greg Howell won September in the second league tournament he had ever entered.
November was Mac’s. He knocked out ten of the eighteen, the second-highest total the league has recorded, and the first of them went out after thirty-two minutes and twenty-nine seconds — the quickest anybody has ever left a table here, a record Mac had held himself since 2012.
Rick Mickaliger won January, forty-seven months after his previous win and the longest wait between two that this league has seen. Eric Denny won February with nine knockouts. Paul won March with seven, which put him top with one to play.
Lee Ugarte closed the season by ending a forty-three-month wait of his own, in a thirty-nine-minute heads-up match that was the third-longest on record — and the second-longest of this season alone.
The season, tournament by tournament
| Date | Field | Winner | KOs | First prize | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| #71 | Jun 19 | 14 | Paul Coffman | 9 | $85 |
| #72 | Jul 18 | 15 | Josh Reel | 4 | $75 |
| #73 | Aug 14 | 20 | Scott Dishong | 9 | $105 |
| #74 | Sep 18 | 19 | Greg Howell | 6 | $95 |
| #75 | Oct 9 | 15 | Josh Reel | 2 | $70 |
| #76 | Nov 20 | 19 | Steve McLean | 10 | $90 |
| #77 | Jan 8 | 15 | Rick Mickaliger | 6 | $90 |
| #78 | Feb 12 | 17 | Eric Denny | 9 | $85 |
| #79 | Mar 11 | 15 | Paul Coffman | 7 | $75 |
| #80 | Apr 8 | 16 | Lee Ugarte | 5 | $75 |
League Champion
Paul Coffman takes the title and the trophy on 109 points from eight starts — two fewer than either man behind him. His five counting scores were two wins, two runner-up finishes and an eleventh; the three nights the cap threw away were a fourteenth, a tenth and a twelfth.
He is the seventh different champion in eight seasons. Before June he had played thirteen league tournaments across two years and won none of them.
Josh Reel was second on 107 and Steve McLean third on 101, both from all ten. Mike McEvoy finished eighth having reached the final two in each of the last two tournaments of the season — twenty-nine tournaments now, seven cashes, no wins.
| League standings — final, 2015-16 | Points | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Paul Coffman | 109 |
| 2 | Josh Reel | 107 |
| 3 | Steve McLean | 101 |
| 4 | Eric Denny | 87 |
| 5 | David Doole | 87 |
| 6 | Andrew Shier | 81 |
| 7 | Rick Mazza | 77 |
| 8 | Mike McEvoy | 76 |
| 9 | Charlie Drotar | 72 |
| 10 | Lee Ugarte | 70 |
The Annual
Three weeks after the finale, twenty players sat down for the 10th Annual Denny Poker Tournament and played for $2,520 — nearly two and a half times the largest pool this event had ever put up. Joe Johnson won it in nine hours and twelve minutes for $955, his third Annual and the first time anyone has won three.
Paul was second for $580, three weeks after taking the league. That is two years running the newly crowned champion has reached the final two here, after five seasons in which the champion managed one cash between them. Eric Denny was third with six knockouts, more than anyone in the room.
The verdict
Something changed about how these tournaments end. Across the league’s first seven seasons nobody had knocked out more than eight players in a night; in the thirteen months to February, five different men beat that mark. The longest heads-up match in league history was played this season and the third-longest ten months later, and the fastest exit came in between them.
And the champion is the season in miniature. Paul Coffman turned up eight times, won twice, made sixteen knockouts across those two nights, and finished twelfth in the tournament that confirmed him.
2015-16 Canterberry Poker League — ten tournaments from June 19, 2015 to April 8, 2016. 31 players took a seat during the season. League standings count each player’s best five scores.