First Live Tournament
I won the first live poker tournament I ever played.
I think I had been playing online for just over a year, with wildly erratic success/failure before I finally ventured outwith the safe confines of home to play poker in a live environment. My friends and I had numerous home games, but that was never going to prepare me for the shark infested waters real life casino tournaments. One of the guys from our home game, Brentos, joined me for what was, for both of us, our first live poker tournament.
You'll have to forgive me for the hazy recollection of the event, a combination of nervous excitement and alcohol means my memory of the details is a bit foggy. Given the prize up top and the tournament length, it was a relatively small tournament but it was a big deal to me. I think I bought in for about £20 and there was roughly 30 runners. Re-buys were available but at that time I didn't have the knowledge or confidence to get involved with whatever that was.
Keen to learn and keen avoid looking like a total newbie fish, I watched everything and everyone, how things were done, what happened when, who done what. Over the years, playing more and more, it's easy to get lazy and go on autopilot at the table, something I know I am frequently guilty of but I always try to remind myself of that first live tournament, and how well it served me back then and how much free information is being offered to a keen eye.
On my journey to the final table, the stand out hand for me came when I flopped a set of 10s. Preflop was pretty standard, there was a raise, and a call, I flatted with pocket tens. Flop came down something along the line of Q 10 7 rainbow. As I pondered how best to get paid, the preflop raiser went kinda crazy and went all in, total overbet, for no real reason as far as I could see. I called, he tabled QJ, I doubled up, easy game.
With no real idea of how long the tournament would last, Brentos and I had given no thought to pacing ourselves when it came to beers, as a result, the final table passed in a blur. Brentos had made the final table too but bust short of the money. With the top 4 or 5 paid, I was fortunate enough to have a big enough stack that the bubble didn't even trouble me.
Down to the last three players, there was a brief talk of a deal, although I wasn't really involved in the conversation, partly because I didn't know what this "deal" concept was, partly because I was very very drunk, but also I got the impression my two opponents wanted the drunken donk out the way and then they would come to some arrangement after that. But that never happened.
In my mind, my two opponents were the image of cool and cunning sharks, smelling blood and circling their prey. In reality, they were probably just two normal guys at the casino. I was at the stage of intoxication where I was struggling with my cards, and was repeatedly warned about lifting the cards up away from the table, but it was all I could do to see them properly.
Three-handed, I found myself in the same dream scenario I had experienced earlier. I called a raise preflop with a pocket pair, flopped a set, was wondering just how on earth I was going to get paid, when my opponent shoved all in light.
And it happened again heads-up.
Live poker was easy! I was new, nervous and by the end very drunk, and yet had still won hundreds of pounds from these FISH! Ah yes... a future of live poker supremacy lay ahead of me.
I didn't cash again for over a year.
I think I had been playing online for just over a year, with wildly erratic success/failure before I finally ventured outwith the safe confines of home to play poker in a live environment. My friends and I had numerous home games, but that was never going to prepare me for the shark infested waters real life casino tournaments. One of the guys from our home game, Brentos, joined me for what was, for both of us, our first live poker tournament.
You'll have to forgive me for the hazy recollection of the event, a combination of nervous excitement and alcohol means my memory of the details is a bit foggy. Given the prize up top and the tournament length, it was a relatively small tournament but it was a big deal to me. I think I bought in for about £20 and there was roughly 30 runners. Re-buys were available but at that time I didn't have the knowledge or confidence to get involved with whatever that was.
Keen to learn and keen avoid looking like a total newbie fish, I watched everything and everyone, how things were done, what happened when, who done what. Over the years, playing more and more, it's easy to get lazy and go on autopilot at the table, something I know I am frequently guilty of but I always try to remind myself of that first live tournament, and how well it served me back then and how much free information is being offered to a keen eye.
On my journey to the final table, the stand out hand for me came when I flopped a set of 10s. Preflop was pretty standard, there was a raise, and a call, I flatted with pocket tens. Flop came down something along the line of Q 10 7 rainbow. As I pondered how best to get paid, the preflop raiser went kinda crazy and went all in, total overbet, for no real reason as far as I could see. I called, he tabled QJ, I doubled up, easy game.
With no real idea of how long the tournament would last, Brentos and I had given no thought to pacing ourselves when it came to beers, as a result, the final table passed in a blur. Brentos had made the final table too but bust short of the money. With the top 4 or 5 paid, I was fortunate enough to have a big enough stack that the bubble didn't even trouble me.
Down to the last three players, there was a brief talk of a deal, although I wasn't really involved in the conversation, partly because I didn't know what this "deal" concept was, partly because I was very very drunk, but also I got the impression my two opponents wanted the drunken donk out the way and then they would come to some arrangement after that. But that never happened.
In my mind, my two opponents were the image of cool and cunning sharks, smelling blood and circling their prey. In reality, they were probably just two normal guys at the casino. I was at the stage of intoxication where I was struggling with my cards, and was repeatedly warned about lifting the cards up away from the table, but it was all I could do to see them properly.
Three-handed, I found myself in the same dream scenario I had experienced earlier. I called a raise preflop with a pocket pair, flopped a set, was wondering just how on earth I was going to get paid, when my opponent shoved all in light.
And it happened again heads-up.
Live poker was easy! I was new, nervous and by the end very drunk, and yet had still won hundreds of pounds from these FISH! Ah yes... a future of live poker supremacy lay ahead of me.
I didn't cash again for over a year.
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