Alicia LaPorte Pachla is on a two-day heater and can't be stopped.
Last night she got the trophy and title after chopping up the prize money in the 2017 WNYPC Event #2 $150 NLHE, earning $2,200.
Tonight, she's running hot in the early levels again. Moments ago she flopped top two against a flush draw, got it in and held. Then, she ended up with the big end of the straight against a player holding the sucker's side. All in again and Pachla walked away with heaps.
Now she's got almost 40,000 in chips and is looking to repeat last night's performance.
We're going to call James Miller the chip leader here in Level 4 and it's not just because he gave us a box of thanks-a-lot Girl Scouts cookies moments ago. The shortbread ones that are dipped in fudge.
It's also not because of that cool hat or semi-sinister scowl he's wearing in the attached photo. In fact, it's mostly due to the fact he picked up an eights-over-deuces boat in the early levels and got paid off. All that other stuff doesn't hurt though.
Sometimes it's such a grind your knuckles get all beaten and bloodied up. Other times you get smacked in the face so hard by the deck you're bleeding from the mouth.
Either way, poker is a tough game, and one short tussle with it can leave you trying to catch your breath in the parking lot like an old man who just walked up 15 flights of stairs.
The upside of this great game is that sometimes it takes your breath away in a different way.
The shock of a bad beat or the exhilaration of winning a key pot at the right time can leave you breathless as well. The adrenaline rushes can make you feel like you were just in a fight.
Of course we fall in love with it. Even if the game sometimes plays the aging Lothario who doesn't understand when it's time to settle down and act its age.
But there's an innate drama in it that we are drawn to. It is as inevitable as the coming confrontation between two old friends with a beef who've had years to stew over it. It's going to boil over at some point. In this game, that drama reveals itself with every flop, turn and river, and there's no way to escape it.
Instead, you learn accept it, like we do one another. You just move on, hoping the love of the game is enough to make the poker gods smile upon us all every once in a while. And hope when they don't, we don't get beat up too badly.
But enough of these pompous pontifications and idiotic inferences. There's no need to read between the lines anymore. The needle has been readily stuck. The veil has been lifted and we're all in on the inside joke.
It's Level 2 of the latest WNYPC $10k Guaranteed and the clock says there are 30 entries already with registration and reentry available for seven more full levels.
PokerNews has activated the My Stack App for this latest event on the 2017 WNYPC schedule, allowing you to directly adjust your chip counts in our live reporting blog using your iPhone or Android phone!
You can download the app for iPhone or Android now to get started. Then, create a new PokerNews account or update your current one to start updating your status immediately. Your followers can see all the live action that you're involved in.
Click here to download the My Stack app for iPhone, or click here to download the My Stack app for Android.
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