One of my favorite things about PCF is being able to see all of the great home games out there in the world!!! Each one is unique and has its own aura and vibes. It is awesome that we can all come together to share our love of poker chips and everything else poker related!!! Along those lines, I thought it was a good time to start this thread to share pictures, stories, and all other happenings of our Inner Circle Poker home game and league.
In the beginning...
I'm sure our story begins in a similar way to a lot of members on this site. @TravNasty and myself had been playing together for a number of years before Inner Circle Poker was actually formed. Our games were small and very unorganized back in those days. We were happy if we could just get a group of 4 or 5 guys together back then. I don't think we ever had a full table back then. Speaking of tables, my first table that we used was an old octagon table that used to be my grandpa's way back in the day. It was hard to pick the cards up off the table because it had a vinyl playing surface with no padding. Here is one of the earliest pics we have of the pre Inner Circle Poker group playing on my first table.
@TravNasty pictured on the left.
This was one card away from a royal flush. I guess I had to settle for just a king high straight flush that time.
You can also see the awesome dice chips. We played $5 buy in tournaments mostly. White chips were worth 10 and black chips were worth 20. We got 30 white chips and 10 black chips to start with. Usually, it was unlimited rebuys with no stop to when you could buy in. The blinds would raise whenever we thought it was a good time to raise them basically. Not very organized at all!!! The cards we used were just cheap free ones that came with the dice chip sets.The next upgrade to find its way to our games was a new oval table. Kind of like a Barrington but a little bit more heavy duty. Emphasis on the heavy!
We continued to play small (and not very well organized) tournaments for another year before we started the league.
June of 2022
I had just gotten back from my first trip to Vegas, and I was pretty fired up to play a lot more poker. @TravNasty and I also play in a fantasy football league together and had been wondering if we could put together some kind of similar league but for poker. We did some research on the internet and came across some awesome videos for running tournaments by @Chris Manzoni which eventually led us here to PCF. After finding our way to PCF, we discovered all of the other awesome poker leagues out there and realized that is what we were looking for!
In our tournaments, we have league members and non-league members playing together. Only the league members will score points depending on how they finish. Our scoring system came from homepokertourney.org and works like this:
Points will be awarded after each tournament based off an algorithm that takes into account a number of factors including the number of participants in the tournament, the buy-in cost for the tournament, the individual player's total expense (buy-in + rebuys), and the individual player's finish.
score = SQRT (n * b * b / e) / (f + 1.0)
SQRT = the square root of
n = the number of participants in the tournament
b = the buy-in cost ($) for the tournament
e = the individual player's total expense (buy-in + add-ons + rebuys)
f = the individual player's finish
Each players top 5 highest scores will be counted in determining the season overall winner.
Our First tournament
Our first official tournament was held on June 11th of 2022. We were able to get 8 players for that opening tournament. It was a lot of fun. We used my ceramic Turbo chips from ThePokerStore.com. They are a huge upgrade from the old dice chips that we were all used to playing with.
We started using the Blinds are Up! app for Android. This was a gamechanger for our tournaments. It kept the game running smoothly and I was able to upload some custom backgrounds into the app with our logo to make things look and feel a little bit cooler.
We also started using T25 base tournaments with 10000 chips starting stacks. We used all of @Chris Manzoni 's recommendations and started using cut cards and shuffling behind and all the other little things that would make our games feel more professional.
We also ordered some custom dealer buttons from BRProPoker.com. They actually arrived ahead of schedule and we got to use them in our first tournament!
The Rest of the Season
Like I said earlier, the first tournament was a success. We had fun and things moved along smoothly with the Blinds are Up! app. Now onto our second tournament which we call the Untamed Tournament. It takes place each year after our fantasy football draft for the Untamed Fantasy Football League. We have always played poker after we drafted so we thought, "Why not make this one of our biggest poker events of the year?" We also planned to give away a custom championship bracelet also at this tournament.
August came and the Untamed Tournament was an even bigger success!!! We had managed to get a record number of players, 13!!! This was the first time we had enough for more than one table. This was awesome! The league was doing well, and our tournaments were growing! This is what we had been hoping for when we created the league!
Throughout the rest of the season our tournaments averaged around 13 to 16 players. We also added a few table toppers from @rjdev7 into the mix.
Then we started making flyers for our events.
And at some point along the way, I got tired of paper decks getting ruined so easily. If one drink spills on some cards and they are done. I think the quickest we saw a deck get retired was in 3 hands one night. A drink hit the table and the deck was a goner! I then switched to plastic decks after that. Copag, Faded Spade, Desjgn, and KEM were some that we used throughout the season.
It seems like decks of cards will always be a personal preference. It is hard to please everyone. The KEM's didn't get into play until late in the season but everyone seemed to enjoy them I think.
One cool thing that we added at the beginning of the season was the Wall of Champions. It is a plaque that we made with the name of every winner from each tournament. If you take first place, then your name will be forever added to the Wall of Champions until the end of eternity!!!!!!!!
Above are the final results with all the winners from season 1.
Our Main Event Championship winner is listed in gold because gold is the most championy color there is!!!
As the season went on, everyone was competing for first, second, and third place in the season overall rankings. This would earn a free or partial buy in into the Main Event Championship Tournament. First place also won the title of Shark of the Year, got a free buy in to the M.E. tournament, and a first-place trophy created by @TravNasty himself.
Second place received a free buy in the M.E. Tourney and a 2nd place trophy. And third place got half their buy in covered to the M.E. and a 3rd place trophy.
I ended up in first place for the season, @Bfow0804 took second place, and our non-PCF member Brad (on the right in the very first photo) took third. Another non-PCF member, Steve ended up taking home the victory in our Main Event Championship Tournament. Here is Steve with the coveted hardware. The Main Event Championship bracelet!!!!
Season 1 was awesome, and it went better than we could have ever hoped for! The growth in play from our first tournament compared to the play at the Main Event was amazing! At the beginning of the season, you would see lots of limped pots and passive play. As the season continued, the play got stronger and stronger. Most of the Main Event was raising and reraising pre flop with few limps. It was really fun because everyone brought their A game!!!! We are looking forward to Season 2 starting later this month!
Thanks for checking out our Inner Circle Poker league!
