Canterberry Poker League · The 2009-10 Season
Four Wins, and a Champion Who Had Never Won Anything
Eric Denny went into September with thirteen league tournaments and no victories. He finished the season with the title, the record score, and more wins than anyone has managed in a year.
The second Canterberry Poker League season belonged to a man who spent the whole of the first one losing. Eric Denny is the 2009-10 League Champion on 139 points — the highest total the league has recorded — from four wins in the last seven tournaments.
How it went
It opened with two men getting theirs at last. Lee Ugarte won June having played eight tournaments the previous season without once reaching the money, and the shortest tournament the league has run — under three hours — was the one that gave it to him. Josh Reel took July, beating Tom Buzbee heads-up despite Tom putting out five of the ten.
August produced the night of the season: Rick Mazza eliminated seven of the thirteen who went home, a league record, and beat Mike McEvoy — who had reached the final two without a single knockout. The two of them are the neatest illustration this league has offered that eliminating people and surviving are different skills.
Then Eric started. He won September with five knockouts, October with seven, and after the December break he won January too, in the biggest field the league had assembled to that point. Three wins in four, from nothing.
February belonged to Dawn Buzbee, who became the first woman to win a Canterberry Poker League tournament in eighteen attempts, and March to Mike Short, who had been second twice, third once and fourth three times across two seasons before finally taking one — with seven knockouts, in a twenty-man field, for the biggest first prize the league had paid.
Eric won the finale as well, which nobody needed him to do.
The season, tournament by tournament
| Date | Field | Winner | First prize | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #11 | Jun 6 | 11 | Lee Ugarte | $105 |
| #12 | Jul 17 | 11 | Josh Reel | $105 |
| #13 | Aug 7 | 14 | Rick Mazza | $135 |
| #14 | Sep 18 | 10 | Eric Denny | $90 |
| #15 | Oct 16 | 15 | Eric Denny | $130 |
| #16 | Nov 13 | 13 | Josh Reel | $120 |
| #17 | Jan 15 | 18 | Eric Denny | $160 |
| #18 | Feb 12 | 13 | Dawn Buzbee | $125 |
| #19 | Mar 12 | 20 | Mike Short | $170 |
| #20 | Apr 16 | 16 | Eric Denny | $140 |
League Champion
Eric takes the title and the trophy on 139 points from all ten tournaments — four wins, and the only man in either season to win more than three. He led the standings from October to the end.
Josh was second on 113 with two wins of his own, and Warren Mervin, the first champion, third on 105 without winning a tournament all year. Charlie Drotar is the season’s quiet story in fourth: he played his first league night in July and finished the year with four money finishes from his last six.
| League standings — final, 2009-10 | Points | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Eric Denny | 139 |
| 2 | Josh Reel | 113 |
| 3 | Warren Mervin | 105 |
| 4 | Charlie Drotar | 95 |
| 5 | Tom Buzbee | 92 |
| 6 | Mike Short | 91 |
| 7 | Rick Mazza | 78 |
| 8 | Lee Ugarte | 75 |
| 9 | Mike Conner | 70 |
| 10 | Rick Mickaliger | 68 |
The Annual
Three weeks after the finale came the 4th Annual Denny Poker Tournament: eighteen players, a $900 pool and eight hours and fifty-one minutes of poker, six minutes short of the previous year’s marathon.
Mandy Denny won it for $380, the biggest first prize the Annual has offered, and became the first woman to take that trophy — three months after Dawn had done the same thing in the league. Dan Myers was second again. Eric came fifth, with more knockouts than anybody in the room and nothing better to show for them, which makes it two seasons running that the newly crowned champion has arrived in May and gone home without the trophy.
The verdict
Six winners from ten tournaments, down from eight last season, and the reason is one man taking four of them. The fields grew again — twenty in March, where the first season peaked at eighteen — and the buy-in never moved off twenty dollars.
Two firsts worth keeping: a woman won a league tournament, and then a woman won the Annual. Neither had happened in the thirteen tournaments — ten league nights and three Annuals — that the group had played before this season.
2009-10 Canterberry Poker League — ten tournaments from June 6, 2009 to April 16, 2010. 26 players took a seat during the season. League standings are the sum of every score a player recorded.