PDX Poker Club

07/15/2016

The letter we've received from City of Portland. Rule change is effective immediately.. We were given zero choice.

07/14/2016

06/08/2016

About our $5,000 Noon Challenge. The rules are simple - Finish in Top 3 in our Noon tournaments (any noon) 7 times within any 30 day period and win $5,000! If you are playing our Noon tournaments, this will be additional incentive! Yes, it's not easy to reach or it won't be a challenge but it's not impossible either. It's actually quite possible, according to our players statistics, we've had guys who played our noon 7 times and finished in top 3 three times, 16 times and finished in top 3 five times and many other examples like this. All within 30 days. So, it's totally possible and we will definitely be giving away $5K. Would it be you? :) Our weekday noon tournament fields are 25-30 players on average, so it's not as hard as say finishing in top 3 in 150 player fields. We will be giving away two (2) $5,000 prizes total and this promo will end on December 31, 2016!

06/01/2016

$500 added really boosts the prize pool. We'll add $500 Wednesday, Thursday and Friday to the noon as well.

05/28/2016

$20,000 Guarantee special tonight, Friday, May 27 at 8pm. $80 Buy-in, 1 Rebuy, $40 Add-on(10k chips), 15K starting stack, 25min rounds.

05/17/2016

Looking good!

05/15/2016

$20K Guarantee special tonight. Pretty good value for $80 Buy-in.

05/13/2016

About Portland Poker Market. It's a bit counter intuitive but we should want more poker clubs on the market not less. Good analogy would be Las Vegas. Would they have nearly as many visitors as they have if there were just 3 dilapidated casinos - Sahara, New Frontier and Circus Circus? Not really. All of the new entities are being embraced by the existing operators with open arms because they add value and increase overall attractiveness of the market which translates into massive flow of visitors. Same reason why Atlantic city has gone down in flames. It's just not as attractive with its 7 casinos. Same goes with Portland poker market. Every club on a market spends ad dollars, promotes and recruits new customers for the whole market which makes it bigger for the benefit of everyone because this new customer is now plugged in and goes around and checks out other clubs and tells a bunch of his friends about his awesome discovery. You get the picture. We constantly lose customers due to them relocating, getting married (number 1 reason of our losing the customer :), getting divorced (number 1 reason they come back LOL). So we constantly need to recruit fresh blood so to speak and all of us add to this plan. In other words, we need sustainable eco-system. We want market to grow, not shrink.

Having said that, congrats to Brian Sarchi who is well known in poker community. I know him personally, he is excellent guy and very savvy business operator. I am happy for him to move up.

05/04/2016

So, I think you may have heard by now that we have to rebrand from Encore Club to PDX Poker Club due to trademark ownership issues. The guy named Steve Wynn owns trademark to the name Encore (oops). Needless to say, we can't do much about it but to tap out. Changing the name is far from ideal, of course, but at the same time, it's not going to affect us much, we aren't a chain of poker clubs and you still know where to find us.

When I was picking the name, I wanted something that would subtly resemble the pull of Las Vegas and I thought Encore is pretty nice and the domain name was available as well for not too much money :) Obviously, this not entirely well thought out strategy has backfired.

Another perspective on this is that it doesn't matter if you are going to change the name, if there is no underlying substance behind it, nothing is going to change, really. Which is not our case. In our case, the veil is being lifted and what's revealed is what we truly are - PDX Poker Club - Portlander's absolute favorite poker venue!

Having said all of that, we will remain Encore in the hearts and minds of our regulars and old timers forever. For all new comers, we will simply be PDX Poker Club.

Thank you guys for the memories, good times, crazy bad beats and insane suck outs LOL.