The Worst Winner

“Win a luxury holiday to the Bahamas for you and your friends!” You know those competitions for amazing all expenses paid five star holiday? You probably never hear of anyone winning one, you might even wonder if anyone actually does win them, I used to wonder that, until I won one, but I am the  worst  winner. Prostate Cancer UK ran a fundraising campaign called ‘Lad's Night In’. Similar in vein to things like 'Movember' or the 'Ice Bucket Challenge', the idea was to get people to do something fun, in this case play poker, raising money and awareness to help fight prostate cancer. My dad is living with prostate cancer and I play poker, so I got involved.  Pokerstars were sponsoring the campaign, bringing two things to the table: - a home game poker pack, including cards and dealer button - a holiday in the Bahamas for 5, including flights, accommodation, spending money and entry to a side event at the Pokerstars Caribbean Adventure (PCA) to be...

PartyPoker’s 2016 Grand Prix Poker Tour made me happy. Barring a big score, it was my perfect pokering scenario, I wrote a bit about here . In summary it was a $109 buy in tournament with multiple Day 1s (live and online) culminating in a big live Day 2. My bankroll typically extends to playing £/$20 buyins and having Baby Mack to work around means my free time is mainly restricted to evenings and parts of the weekend, so with the online aspect I could satellite into a Day 1 through a $22 satellite and play the Day 1 (a couple if required) from the comfort of my couch after Baby Mack’s bed time routine. Then I need only show up for one Sunday afternoon of poker, which I have mostly already secured a decent cash for, with the potential for a big win on the cards. Perfect. Since then PartyPoker’s live events really started taking off, transforming into some kind of EPT replacement and long gone are my ideal mini/GPPT events as a result. A few months ago, a new local venture seemed s...

Aahh, the MicroMillions. The MicroMillions series of events is a conundrum and a  dilemma, and, for me,  the epitome of tournament poker on Pokerstars. There are a couple of things to note about the MicroMillions events, for a buy-in of just a few dollars you can win you a five figure prize but in order to do that you must first best a gazillion players.   For a recreational player who mostly likes to play some poker in the evening, the large player pool of Pokerstars is actually a problem. I can't be playing against a few thousand players until the wee small hours when I need to get up for work at 7am. No where is it more evident than the MicroMillions events. N onetheless, there are HUGE prizes to be won, at very little cost and somebody is going to win them, so why not me?  As an experiment I have decided to play as many of the events as is reasonably possible, and see where that gets me. A late night will be worth it for $10,000! It might also act as som...

PartyPoker were giving away two $109 tickets for tonight's MILLIONS satellite on Twitter earlier.  I won! But by the time I got in from work, put the baby to bed, grabbed something to eat, I had missed registration...  There goes $109.  And it wasn't just me who lost out, I deprived some other poor bugger on Twitter from winning a ticket.  I am the worst winner. 

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...