For the last few months, the Memphis Four, led by Shawne “Ravenrage” Child have been working on a secret project, to bring some potential bright stars from the bar leagues of Memphis to the live poker streets of Tunica, Mississippi and beyond. Each week, and sometimes multiple times a week, they would meet for hours at a time, studying a playbook of poker strategies, studying exhaustive hand histories, and sharing strategies in preparation for this upcoming year.
No one knew how this would go down, sure the team was playing some small stakes tournaments online to get their feet wet and get a bit of experience, but how would the last couple months of hard work pay off? After all an entire series of live tournament poker isn’t even a full Sunday session, and lets be honest we have all bricked full Sunday sessions.
Any questions about the potential of this team was put to rest in the last 48 hours. All four pros built big stacks throughout their tournament run, Team Lead Shawne Child had to come back from multiple bad beats yesterday, to spin up huge stacks, and lost a mammoth pot with Queens against Jack Eight suited for what would likely have been a final table stack. Alexandra Loveless, fired three bullets so far this week building up 4-5x starting stacks each time before taking tough beats late in the day. It was clear that they were accumulating with no issue, but just were losing to variance late.
Fortunately variance swung both ways. For Jason Walker and David Frazier, their Tunica series kicked off with the $250 2 day deep stack tournament. Both of them came out of the gate fast, building massive 100bb stacks upwards of 10x starting, before each taking some hits down the stretch to bag 30 bb respectively and a trip to day 2 in the money.
Jason found an opportunity early in Day 2 t oplay for a monster stack when he get a flush draw, over card, and back door straight draw all in against aces, but bricked twice to go out 51st. David was more fortunate spinning his way up to almost a million in chips in day 2 and making the first Team 100k final table. Unfortunately he would lose AK<KQ early in the final table, followed by AK<T9 to go out 7th for just over $3,000.
That would have been enough for success on the day, and even the series, but the story didn’t stop there. Hungry for more, they both jumped in tournaments that same day. Jason again built up a big stack in the 1 day ring event, and was so very close to his first FT, finishing 10th place after losing in a blind vs blind spot, to accomplish the rare feat of cashing 2 live tournaments in the same day. Meanwhile David hopped in the green chip bounty tournament later that evening, and in the wee hours of the night found himself at a second final table, where he finished 8th for $566 and 3 bounties.
While no one managed a ring yet, the ultimate goal in Tunica, it is obvious that the talent is here with the Memphis Four, and they will be in the mix of any tournament series that comes to town in the coming months and years. If there is one thing to be learned her it is this, don’t count the Bar League kids out, and if you don’t believe me, just ask Preston McEwen…