The Worst Winner

PKR has a strong community focus and for the last year people have been arranging local unofficial poker games through the forum. I've always wanted to go to one but they've always been too far away to justify taking part in to justify my curiousity. I spent far too much money trying to qualify for the PKR Live event last year so when I heard even an unofficial meet-up was being organised for Edinburgh, well hell yeah, I’m there!  The weekend's schedule looked something like this: Friday - meet up for drinks and a £10 rebuy tourney at a local casino Saturday - a few PKR only games in the afternoon, followed by a £30 double chance freezeout back at the casino at night Sunday - £20 rebuy tourney. Friday Seeing as I've been working some ridiculous (and at times illegal) number of hours at work recently I was able to finish early on the Friday to head through from Glasgow to Edinburgh in time for some pre-tourney drinks before the first tournament of the weekend. After gett...

I was at my local casino and as I sat down, the guy sitting next to me calls over to his friend at another table, leaning back on his chair said “see the batman film?” and nodding “secretively” at the direction of our table, says “the joker”. I only saw him out the side of my eye, but was that directed towards me? There was only 4 of us at the table, and I didn’t note anyone else who would even remotely fitted that description. Now I'm not saying  I look like the joker but I do have a similar hairline, pale complexion and dark eyes, so maybe I don't not look like the joker. And which joker did he mean? I've googled a few pictures since, and you know, maybe. On one hand, I don’t want people to think I look like the joker, but on the other hand, what a cool poker nickname that would be. There was also a poker regular at my table, I had previously made the mistake of equating “poker regular” to “good player”, well he must be, he’s here all the time, or so I thought. Having onl...

Four time WSOP bracelet winner Bobby Baldwin once said "The mark of a top player is not how much he wins when he is winning but how he handles his losses". But bankroll management is boring. It's been 3 years since I started playing poker and when I started out I didn’t even know what bankroll management was. If you had told me what it was before I started I still wouldn’t have done it, but I wish I had. I started playing after watching a fair amount of poker on TV and thinking, “I’d be good at that”. So I stuck $100 into the biggest and most advertised poker site at the time and got to work being a total fish. I understood that I wasn’t going to make money straight away and that for the first while I would lose money, but I had plenty of disposable income, so that wasn't an issue. There's a lot of platers interviewed on TV saying they’ve been playing for a few years, so although I was not expecting to make it onto TV, I did think that it wasn't unreasonable t...

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. G iven 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.  ...

The Foreigner stalks the floor of the Fallsview Casino in Niagra Falls. N ot quite convinced by his identification, h e almost never made it past security, he was questioned at length before finally being allowed on to the gaming floor. He floats from one table game to next, observing only. He follows the action, reviews the betting, watches the players, follows the cards. Onto the next table, he follows the action, reviews the betting, watches the players, follows the cards. Onto the next table and the next. After some time, he settles behind the empty seat of a Caribbean Poker table, continuing to observe.  When the time is right, he sits down with just enough money for one bet. The  young foreigner wins his first hand, plays another, wins another, he continues this pattern until  he catches the attention of a suited man representing the casino.  The Suit asks The F oreigner  where he is from but it's nowhere he's heard of before.  The Suit asks Th...