The Grande Series from ACE Casino Airport is now complete with 11 games over 12 days from Dec 4 – 15, 2024. This was the final major series in 2024 for the Alberta region and, for someone who spends much of the rest of the year with a notebook in hand watching the action in other local series, marked the final chance for me to get in some time at the felt.
I was at the series for two events with chips in play, including the Main Event, and managed to cap my 2024 with a decent run in one of them. Nick Peterson took down the top spot in the Main to close out the series, joining a few other players like Lapchi Duong, Kim Pham, Tyler Panas, and Don McCall with wins in the series.
While the numbers for this series likely weren’t what organizers were hoping for with the Main Event paying just 8 places, that wasn’t unique to this series. I’ll be putting together a recap of the 2024 poker season in Canada later in the week, but the major trend for the past year was a cooling of the red-hot live poker market that emerged in Alberta as we moved out of the COVID-19 lockdowns a couple of years ago, and the Grande attendance was just another indicator of that trend. Stay tuned to Poker.Pro for my look at 2024 in the red-hot, but cooling, Canadian live poker scene.
Peterson Takes the Main
The Main Event is generally the most anticipated game on the schedule of any series and generally has the best rewards at the end. For the final Grande of 2024, the Main ran two Day 1 flights starting on Fri, Dec 13, and Day 2 on Sun, Dec 15.
This was one of two games I made it into Calgary for with my stack in play on Friday’s Day 1a. Stay tuned below for a look at my action in the series, but suffice to say that Friday the 13th was not my day, and I busted shortly after late registration for 1a ended.
Nick Peterson, on the other hand, not only made it through his Day 1 flight, but he was the player sitting with all the chips at the end of the game. With more than $220k in lifetime wins on the live felt, Peterson is one of a couple of hot young locals who are threatening to take their game to the next level in the coming year.
This win marks Peterson’s 5th live win and will slot into 3rd position on his lifetime scores but he’s one of those players whose results may not yet reflect his actual skills at the felt. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to see Peterson catch fire in 2025, especially with the kindling of this end-of-year win.
McCall, Panas, Pham, Duong Among Other Winners
One of the most unique offerings at the Grande series is Alberta’s only chance to play PLO8, at least in tournament form. The Grande Series almost always features a mixed PLO/PLO8 tournament, and the most recent edition went to Airdrie player Don McCall.
McCall, who is a regular in the local tournament series, grabbed a bit more than $5k for the win and the score will push his lifetime earnings over the $100k mark. Other series winners included Kim Pham, who took down the opening multi-day game, the Mini Grande and is another young local player with the skills to go huge in 2025, while LapChi Duong took down the opening game of the series and Andreas Kesselring bagged the bounty game.
The Mid Grande
The Grande Poker Series generally runs three multi-day events at different price points to cater to different bankrolls. The series kicks off with the lower-priced Mini Grande (which I cashed in August and wrote about the start of this Poker Adventures series) and closes with the high-end Main Event, but in the Goldilocks zone in the middle is the $600 Mid Grande.
I’m normally the kind of player looking for the lowest buy-ins I can find, but for this trip, I decided to play my version of a high roller. I went in for two events, and both had buy-ins significantly higher than I usually consider.
My first event of the series was the Mid Grande, and it was a pretty sweet run for me. After sucking out early on what looked like a mistimed 15BB shove-steal attempt, I took that stack through Day 1b to the 4th place stack for Day 2 on Dec 11.
Seat 1 aside (I drew Set 1 for Day 2), the final table on Day 2 was a pretty stacked affair by local standards with players like Shane Chief (3rd) and Julius Roque (6th) to contend with, not to mention Nick McEwan, Lapchi Doung, Zach Loxterkamp, and Reg Hampton, who is back in the game this year after some time away from the felt facing health battles.
It came down to a battle between heavyweights with Tyler Panas and Mike St. Pierre-Porter squaring off heads up. Panas is on a hot run at Ace this year, booking his first win in the Mini Grande in August (a final table I also shared with him), and a second place in March and he bagged his second Ace win of 2024 over St. Pierre-Porter, who roared onto the local scene in 2024 with 8 cashes including 5 final tables to open his Hendon Mob profile.
My Grande Experience
For my part, the Mid Grande was another amazing time with a solid profit. While I certainly sucked out early to stay alive and double in Day 1a, setting up my deep run, Day 1a was mostly a case of regular poker happening.
For my early suckout, I shoved about 15 big blinds under the gun with king-jack — admittedly a pretty wide shove hand for UTG but registration was still open and I had bullet #2 in my pocket if it all went wrong. Mostly I was looking for a steal to “tread water” through the next blinds.
Instead, I ran into pocket queens — Oops. I was standing up and putting my coat on to head to the rebuy desk when I saw the king come down on the flop and hold for a huge suckout double.
The rest of Day 1b went pretty smoothly for me and I bagged up 236k at the end of the night for fourth place going into Day 2. Nine players returned for the final day of play and while I bowed out one pip below my start-of-day position, I was still pretty happy with the end result.
I pocketed a bit more than $3k for 5th place (well, a bit less than $3k in pocket after I left a nice dealer tip at the cage) which turns out to be my biggest live score, at least in cash. I have two live satellite wins for WPT Montreal Main Events as well, and while I sold one of those for more cash than I won in the Mid Grande, it’s not on Hendon, and it wasn’t a direct tournament cash. The other ticket I played and busted, so it doesn’t even really count here lol.
That bink imbued me with confidence, and I decided to play the biggest game I’ve ever paid full-price cash for. The $600 Mid Grande was already about double my usual buy-in range of $200-$400 but I decided I wanted to take a shot at the $1,100 Main Event. While I did play in the aforementioned $3,500 WPT Main Event for my biggest game to date, I satellited into that one so this $1,100 was the biggest one I ever paid ticket value for.
It didn’t go as well as I’d like, though I had my chances. At least in this event, I didn’t bust either game on a blowup, like I did in my previous Grande adventure.
Even with the Main loss, the Mid score beefed up a fairly healthy profit for me on the live felt in 2024. With all “travel rake” factored in, I had a net ROI for 2024 poker of nearly 30% with my gross ROI up at more than 40% with the difference coming from extra costs like hotels, gas, food, etc. I should note for full clarity that some of my expenses are partially or completely paid for on some of my trips. On this trip, with the exception of some comped food during the Mid Grande, I was on my own tab, but thank you to Weston Pring for buying me Guinness all night, and to Jonathan from Ace for the comped food.
| My 2024 Live Poker Recap | |
| Spent | $4,270.00 |
| Won | $6,070.00 |
| Gross Profit | $1,800.00 |
| Expenses | $580.00 |
| Net Profit | $1,220.00 |
| Gross ROI | 42.15% |
| Net ROI | 28.57% |
