Heartland Poker Tour at Sea

Heartland Poker Cruise at Sea

It’s the end of day five of the Heartland Poker Cruise hosted by Card Player Cruises. The week has gone by so quickly that I just realized I haven’t blogged about it yet.

Maria Ho is here and has been seen in a variety of live games besides hosting the HPT event. We have about 300 poker players in our group this time. The poker room is located in the Freedom of the Sea’s conference room. We’ve had lots of live games all week, but during the first two days of the cruise, the tournaments were mainly super-satellites or sit’n gos focused on getting players into the HPT main event. Orel Hersheiser (read about his illustrious career here) is one of our passengers and he has been hosting some wild no-limit games that go until the sun is coming up.

As I write this, we are down to the final table of the main event. The two most well-known players still in are Kenna James and Mark Gregorich. Zach Lawmaster has done a great job as tournament director and his assistant Randi Levenbaum, has proven that she’s not just a great poker player, but also a big help in the cardroom. We’ve also had a table of beginners who took lessons on Monday and have been playing all week. The beginners always seem to have the most fun! We had an $80 Survivor tournament today as well as a $340 no-limit tournament.

This cruise left Port Canaveral on Jan. 12. Our ports this week are in St. Maarten, St. Thomas, and Coco Cay (Royal Caribbean’s private island). In St. Maarten, I rented a car and drove around the island stopping at lots of my favorite spots. Today in St. Thomas, 60 of our passengers joined me for a trip to Secret Harbour where we enjoyed a beautiful beach and some good food and drinks. Mark Tenner gave a complimentary Omaha/8 seminar this afternoon, so we had some new players in the Omaha game today. Tomorrow is a sea day. We will be running three consecutive tournaments with a variety of buy-ins as well as lots of live games and sit n gos.

Our passengers have been enjoying life at sea. There’s a Las Vegas-style show every night and lots of things like trivia, movies, lectures, and other activities to keep them busy when they aren’t playing poker.

We have eight cruises in 2014. If you’ve never been on a poker cruise, you don’t know what you are missing. Come sail with me! Itineraries and other information can be found at www.cardplayercruises.com. Stay tuned…

Linda Johnson
Card Player Cruises