Imagine a city where there was never any rake, a tournament started every couple of hours and you could get a seat in a $1/$2 cash game at multiple venues. That's been the situation in Portland, Oregon's poker clubs for the past several years.
Players have been honing their chops and building up bankrolls only to take off to play in Las Vegas, Los Angeles and elsewhere across the country. Lisa Meredith, a regular in one of the local pub games, came in third in this year's WSOP Millionaire Maker for $500,000.
One club had a weekly schedule of guaranteed tournaments that added up to a third of the Venetian’s weekly guarantees and three different clubs in town had $100,000 guarantee tournaments in the weeks leading up to the WSOP.