A Visit to the Bay 101 and the WPT

Last week I drove to San Jose to check out the Bay 101 Casino. The final table of the World Poker Tour was to begin Friday afternoon, so I made sure to drop in to check it out. After leaving the Bay 1o1 I drove across town to the Garden City Casino and watched a final table there from a daily tournament.

The Bay 101 is a nice enough place, and certainly one of the larger card rooms you will see in California. The WPT Shooting Stars tournament was wrapping up that evening with the taping of the the final table for the GSN Network. Kathy Liebert was the only name I recognized on the final table list of players, so I decided it was not worth hanging around to see the taping. I'm glad I didn't stay. It turned out to be one of the longest final table matches in WPT history...I would have been there all night. Instead I walked around for a bit and then left. Kathy finished second, by the way, but still took home a nice $550,000.

The Garden City Casino is located in a retail shopping area of north San Jose. The building itself looks like it was built in the 1980s. Inside the decor was right out of 1985, heavily paneled with wood, comfortable soft lighting placed throughout. I was thinking it looked like a steak house that had been converted into a gaming establishment. A tournament was finishing up when I arrived, with three players left at the final table. I watched the match for a few minutes, then it quickly ended when the low stack went all in, the other two players called, and the low stack sucked out a win. Since this put all three players relatively even in chips, they decided to chop the prize. They each received about $3,000. I later read that professional Gabriel Thaler cut his chops there before moving on to Los Angeles, then Las Vegas.

On my way back to Monterey I stopped off at Mortimer's Card Room in Marina. I was disappointed. The room was very small, only four to six tables. Two tables were running spread games and the rest of the room was cluttered and messy. The room is actually a backroom attached to Mortimer's Bar. The neighborhood is old downtown Marina, a little scary, and probably not the safest place to be at midnight on a Saturday.