The Worst Winner

The newest stop on the Irish Poker Tour is... Glasgow? Perhaps my geography isn't as good as it once was. Or perhaps they've just taken a leaf out of the EPT's book and added a glamorous overseas locale to the tour. Either way, I'm here for it. With a week of tournaments to choose from, me and some friends settled on Friday for a big day of poker, with the option to carry on into the weekend depending on our potential successes. For many many years, I longed for some live omaha tournaments and would bang on about it no end but they have always been few and far between. So while there's a fair old range of tournaments on offer, I felt obliged to take part in the omaha events.  Alas, the Omaha Championship is a £500 buyin and that goes well beyond my bankroll, so my first taste of the Irish Poker Tour was to be the £70 PLO satellite.  Obligatory chipstack photo showing THE WORST designed chips I've ever seen. "The Monster" design looks like they've b...

I visited the self proclaimed "Home of UK Poker" for the first time this week. If you are unfamiliar, Dusk Till Dawn (DTD) is a poker venue in Nottingham created by Rob Yong, it's like a casino but the focus is on poker and not your typical casino games.  Situated in the midst of an industrial estate, Dusk Till Dawn elevates itself from the other grey boxes with a four grand red doric columns framing the entrance. Inside, there's a small entrance lobby and sign in desk, before you move into the cardroom itself. As you enter the main space, there's a bar area to the right, cash desk to the left and in front of you tiered levels of tables creating an amphitheatre centred around the feature table, but more on that later. Having embraced the hermit lifestyle COVID foisted upon us, I have played just one live game of poker since 2019, so sitting down in such a busy venue was fairly overwhelming. We were tightly packed in, and I was seated right in the middle of almost ...

Long before the demise of PKR (RIP) there have been community organised meet-ups far and wide. The PKR community spirit has outlived the ghost of PKR and continues even now. One such weekend of punts and pints took place at the Manchester 235 Casino, where I made many mistakes. Mistake #1 After making the now long standing mistake of drinking far too much on the Friday night and suffering the effects the following day, the £50 buy-in Main Event was scheduled to start Saturday lunchtime. Or at least it was supposed to but there were not enough dealers on hand for our 60+ strong contingent. We were offered a small discount on food and drink to compensate us as we waited for over an hour before the casino staff finally readied themselves but that gesture was quickly forgotten when the tournament director changed the blind structure to reduce the tournament length to offset the time lost. Suffice to say people weren’t happy, the general consensus was it was bad and no-one wanted this...

"Oh my god, what's wrong?" b ooms a beautiful bubbly blonde.  Confused by the grim scene she finds in front of her.  She turns to her friend but he doesn't know either, so she approaches the poker table. "What's wrong?" she asks.  Her question is met with silent stares. "I just saw your face as I came in, you look really angry." she says to me.  Bemused, I shrug, not sure what to say, I manage to raise a little smile in her direction.   "Oh my god,  why does everyone look so serious?" I look around me, and she's right. After a night of solid poker, we're one player away from making the final table an yet we look more like we belong in the dentists waiting room.  "You all look pretty sad" I laugh. No-one else joins in though.   "Why does no-one look happy?" Her effervescence is failing to spread.  The line of questioning isn't doing much to lighten the mood.  She watches on, tr...

I love PartyPoker's Grand Prix Poker Tour format. $109 buy-in, multiple live and online Day 1s, decent prizepools and just generally very well run. As the main tour travelled around various UK cities, there were also a series of 'mini' GPPT events, which followed the exact same format, just with smaller guarantees and less razzle dazzle. I will happily make these events the primary focus of my poker playing.  Double With the smaller guarantee and resulting smaller field, making it to Day 2 didn't mean locking up a cash like the main GPPT event, I think roughly 50 players made it to Day 2 and we had to lose 20 or so before making the money. That being said, it was surprisingly plain sailing into the money but I lost a flip shortly after the bubble and headed to the cash desk for a nice little payday of a couple of hundred dollars. As part of the GPPT schtick, any cash includes a $109 ticket that can be used either online at PartyPoker or for a side event taking place ...

I read this blog by Kat "the Poker Baffer" Arnsby and it completely changed my outlook on satelliting into big events. What I took from it was that small stakes players such as myself would be better off trying to win their way to smaller, more local poker events, in my case UK tours, rather than the international big buy-in WSOP/WPT/EPT type events. It makes sense, get a few £200-500 events under your belt before you try to win a million against the best in the world. Despite how much sense that makes to me now, previously my mind was firmly set on the idea that if you could just be lucky enough to run like god in one of those events, you'd be set. The reality is, with a small stakes bankroll, you need to run like god just to get to that big tournament in the first place. With this new approach, I had a bit of a look around to see what the upcoming events where taking place in Scotland and found that PartyPoker were conducting the Grand Prix Poker Tour (GPPT), wi...

I decided to give up playing poker. I was in Leeds with a couple of friends for a PKR community meetup. There had been a lot of drinking on the Friday night, which led to me being pretty tired and hungover from the previous night's reveling, but I forced myself to the casino in order to play a rare omaha tournament which was starting at lunchtime. I enjoyed the tournament for the most part, it had been a lot tougher than I had hoped but I made it to the final table nonetheless. Unfortunately, I lost a flip and bubbled.   There was just enough time to grab something to eat before the casinos' big monthly tournament started. I don't recall the numbers exactly but it was something like a £30 buy-in, plus rebuys and while there were only enough seats for 150 players, there was literally a queue to the door with players waiting for spots when someone bust. I got sat down at a pretty chatty and friendly table, lots of players seemed to know each other and play regular...