Its Alive........ Game

So it took me until I bumped into an old friend of mine on the street yesterday to realise I really should pull my finger out and update this.

We could be in to this for the long term (on the basis of the results in the poker anyway) so I suspect updates may well be once a month unless someone wants to pay me millions to produce this as some fascinating documentary for Skys awful poker channel, in which case I will happily update this with any random made up rubbish more frequently :-)

Something else I have noticed recently is that being single I now seem to play less poker than I did when I was seeing A. I`d like to say its because of my wonderously busy social life, but I blame it on decorating and Bioshock.

Well having played for over a year online I have finally ventured into the real game. With actual people.... looking at me..... and spotting the obvious tell of me rolling my eyes when I don`t get the cards I want. I`d like to say my cherry was taken by a casino room in the Bellagio or something like that. No it was taken by a rough looking pub in Moorgate. Sounds much like my virginity, but hey that a different story.

Due to the restrictions on gambling this is an interesting little set up. You pay a miserly £5 to help run the club and for that you then get to play in a tournament, the winner of which takes home a rather classy 4 inch tall trophy. Whether you get to keep it, or have to give it back for the week after I don`t know (which sort of blows the tension out on whether I won I will admit).

So I decide to use underhand tactics and decide to bring my friend M along. Now M has never played poker before in her life, but she is tall, pretty, intelligent and loud, so I was hoping she would dazzle all the other guys whilst I nicked all their chips.

The first hour M and I sat aside and I gave her a crash course on playing Texas Hold 'Em, and I have to say she picked up in an hour things it had taken me 6 months to learn. Was this because of my amazing teaching styles (meaning I should quit my job and earn millions off of online tutorials) or whether she is just quicker on the uptake than I am I just couldn`t say.

The tourney (thats poker speak for tournament by the way :-) ) kicked off with a draw for tables. We have around 18 people playing, varying from an old woman who i swear was knitting whilst she was playing, through to a guy who clearly had no social interaction with anyone any other time of the week so had to tell someone all of the information he had been thinking about that week in the space of half an hour. It wasn`t until we sat and played that you got to see some pretty surprising game play.

The draw led to a good table. For one M was drawn on my table, and she managed to draw a seat sitting opposite the guy I was convinced was going to be the best player at the table. M hadn`t worn the low cut top I had pleaded with her to, so I`d just have to hope her feminine ways would work instead.

A beginner is always told that when you start playing a tourney you play very tight in the beginning (and no this doesn`t have some sexual reference, but that you only play very premium hands AA, KK, QQ, AK etc) and then as the game goes on you loosen up a bit as more people are knocked out. Well thats the theory anyway. Unless you have been watching too much poker on TV which seemed to be the case for one young guy on our table who just decided to chuck his chips in with any set of cards.

Now funnily enough, £5 for a nights entertainment doesn`t pay for three dealers for the night so shuffling and dealing had to be done by each of us in turn. I was more nervous about this that the hands I was playing, and duly managed to drop cards, miscut the pack, and all sorts of other misdemeanours, but the other players were generous in their patience and let me get on with it. Now if only someone could make a buzzer sound when it was my turn to put a small or big blind into the pot I would have felt a lot more at home!

I`ll be honest and say I didn`t play particularly well, getting through without looking like an idiot was more important to me, but there were three hands that were of revelance to the night. Now I won`t bore you with the details, but the funny thing for me is that in all the time I have played online I could never understand people who could remember specific hands how they dealt and bet. I can barely remember a hand I played 2 minutes ago, but then thats ADHD for you :-)

In the first major hand I actually went up against M. After a couple of rounds of betting I put her on a far better hand than me (mine was only marginal anyway), and I folded, with her taking my chips. She later told me it was a bluff. Bugger! Is there not respect for your elders nowadays!

The second was when we had gone down to only two tables left. I had had such bad cards and was running out of chips that I put all my remaining chips in with 9 and 8 of diamonds. With three people calling me I really had no chance. Then, two more 9`s and another 8 came on the board. Wahey! Sod skill I`ll take pure luck every time.

It was enough to get me to the final 5 players. I had not had a proper hand all night, and was just holding on. It got to the point of playing kamikazee - throwing my money in with educated but not great hands, and I did manage to claw my way back up again.

What was to cripple me was a hand where I matched an early raise with K 10 and saw a flop. 6, 10 Q came out on the flop, giving me a pair of tens. My opponent raised hard again, and stupidly I called the raise again. A nothing card came out next and my opponent pushed in for all his chips. I was so short stacked I should have put all the rest of my chips in and called it a night.... thats what poker theory says you do. Instead I folded. He turned over a pair of 7`s. I was gutted. Now normally water off a ducks back when I play online, but that hand annoyed me for the following two days. Its not a play I would do again. I went out in 5th place but thoroughly enjoyed the evening and both I and M will be returning.

Mental note to myself though. Either go out in around 6th place, or hang around until about 3rd place. It means you don`t narrowly miss your train and have to wait another hour for the next one.

Thats me done for now.


Pot total: $378 (yes it has gone down over the month, if you don`t tell anyone I won`t either)