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Welcome to stupidly large World Series of Poker satellite night.
On Poker Stars, 150 seats are guaranteed to be given away and on Full Tilt another 100. In fact, between the two sites there’s over $4 million dollars in play – enough for 359 ten thousand dollar seats, and a bit of pocket change to the runners up.
I never even thought of playing one of these until today, yet here I am, battling with nearly 7000 others on Poker Stars in Probably The World’s Largest Satellite Poker Tournament Ever. OK, actually it was ever so slightly bigger last year, but not so much you’d notice.
Let’s rewind a bit.
 Turbo satellites are silly. With the blinds at $1500/$3000, plus a $150 ante, I have little more than one small blind remaining. Click on the thumbnail to see the full table image. For Harrington fans, does the fabric of the universe falls apart when you have an M that has to be expressed as a fraction? It all looks grim, and yet I’m loving it. Believe it or not, I’m in great shape here.
This was an $80+$8 qualifier to the main satellite. The lobby called it a "last chance" tournament, but I will argue that it was actually my first and only chance. One in five got a seat, and it looked like a good way to use up my W$ balance, which has been doing pretty much nothing for as long as I can remember. Sure I could have sold them for 80% of value, but I figured eventually there’d be a more interesting way to spend them. This was going to be it.
With 350 players remaining and 317 getting paid, I’d been fortunate enough to get two successive table breaks that landed me in a good seat, just as I was about to be blinded out. Game of skill my arse. Cards were irrelevant by that point. Almost nobody could survive one round of blinds, so all that mattered was hanging on longer than everybody else. With 38 tables left, 33 players left to be eliminated and the luxury of five free hands before I was forced in on the big blind, I needed 6 or 7 players to go bust for every hand played at my table. No problem. I was all set to fold pocket aces.
Two hands later, you could probably hear my woohoos. I’d got a result in the turbo poker lottery, which from start to finish took just 75 minutes to eliminate 80% of the field.
The main satellite will be somewhat slower, however. 30 minute levels and 6702 players to money. Could be a late one.
After realising that the money I’d been putting aside to play in the Orleans Open this year was going to fall a little short, I’ve decided to look for backers to bump up my bankroll for this event. It’s not actually as daft as it sounds. Who’d want to stake me, you say? Hah… I’ll show you how wrong you are.
I realised many months ago that the second half of this series of tournaments would coincide with our Summer O’ Vegas, and decided that I wanted to try to find a way to play three No Limit Hold’em events and also, for some reason that I really can’t explain, the Limit Hold’em Championship.
The total entry fee for this little lot is a cool $2460. With this falling on the first week of our trip, playing these tournaments could make or break my bankroll, and so could also make or break the holiday. If it’s a total disaster, I don’t fancy the idea of spending the next three weeks chasing two and a half grand. Conversely, if I manage to win enough coinflips to go deep in one event, the payday could be much more than I’d ever consider letting myself take to Vegas. Treating week one’s poker separately to the rest of the trip seems like a very wise thing to do.
So I’ve been putting money away for this the past few months, separate to my bankroll for "normal" poker and other Vegas vices. After next payday, I’ll just about have reached $2000. No small achievement given my track record for saving (it’s been the best motivation to save I ever had) but it still leaves me $500 short.
I could always skip the $540 Limit tournament, but why would I do something as sensible as that?
I’m selling off 20% of myself across all four tournaments to raise the extra $500, and (although I’m bound to say this) I’m doing a great deal! So good in fact that, already, I only have 10% left to sell. Paul Sandells knows value when he sees it. He’s in for $250, so hurry up if you want a piece of the action!
Of the $2500 I want to take to Vegas, $2460 is buyins. I’ll spend the other $40 on essential expenses, like tips for the coffee ladies, or cookies from the vending machine. All poker rooms should have vending machines with cookies, but the Orleans is the only one I’ve ever come across. As the Orleans Open actually takes place in a room upstairs, there may be some critical route planning to be done for the breaks. But still, this is only a very small deduction from the investment – and you deny me coffee at your peril.
So I don’t have a spectacular tournament history, and I don’t play that frequently. But I think I can hold my own and I do have some documented solid performances if you’d care to dig through the blog archives. Or if you can’t be bothered, I put a few links in this forum thread. The fact I’m still putting up 80% of the money myself should show that I’m comfortable playing at that level, and not just taking a shot at a big prize with someone else’s money.
It’s a modest start, but you never know, with a good performance this could open the door to more staking deals in future, and the opportunity for me to play bigger tournaments.
Obviously I’ll gratefully take the money however it comes, but I’m kinda hoping for ten more backers at 1% each. At least then I know I’ll have 11 regular blog readers for a whole week…!
Even a 1% stake, costing $25, could net a four figure return. If I get exceptionally lucky. Don’t be shy now.
On tonight’s show, Derren Brown went to Las Vegas and brainwashed an American lady into thinking that red was black. The effect was dramatic. She was pretty freaked out to see that her red car had apparently been resprayed whilst she enjoyed an evening at the Peppermill. But what the cameras didn’t show is the complete meltdown, possibly followed by night in jail, she must have had trying to play roulette shortly afterwards.
In the Trick or Treat feature, he apparently taught a 75 year old granny to play poker. For this show victims are asked to choose from two cards to pick whether they’ll get something nice or something nasty. I have to admit I thought the whole series would be manipulated so it was always a trick, but tonight’s sweet old lady got a treat.
There’s no psychology involved in forcing the choice: both cards are identical, with a cunning and overly elaborate typeface used so that it reads "trick" when held one way up and "treat" when flipped over. I confess: I had to pause the show using Sky+ and turn my head right round to check this out, and had to use Google to find out that the word I didn’t know I was looking for is "ambigram".
Super Gran is given a crash course in Texas Hold’em and then dropped into a tournament situation with five professionals. Probably not ones you’d have heard of. Derren has taught her superlative reading skills, which is apparently enough to ensure that she will win a made-for-TV crapshoot poker-style tournament. They said it lasted a 90 minutes start to finish, fast even for a six-handed tournament. We only got to see three hands.
She called an all-in bet with a king-high flush draw. Perhaps she learned to recognise weakness from the bettor, but depending on stack sizes and money in the pot this could be a pretty standard call anyway. They didn’t say. We don’t know how much she’d learned about playing draws. Perhaps it looked like the nuts against a player with a twitch, but with one overcard and a draw you’re rarely a favourite. Except the few times you come up against a smaller unpaired flush draw. Which she did.
Facing an all-in preflop with K9s, Derren’s horse makes the call. The other player has T7o. Given the emphasis on how good these other players all are, we have to assume that he made an automatic push with a short stack, so this was probably an automatic call.
With AQ on a flop of A88, our hero decides that her hand is good. Maybe I still have a lot to learn, but I’m going broke here every time the other guy has AK or any hand with an 8.
She came second. A one in six chance to win, and she still missed the glory by one.
A similarly close-but-still-busto result in Derren’s Russian Roulette stunt would have been much more interesting.
The current UK series is available for free catch-up on 4oD. Apparently a new six-part series is being made for US television by Sci-Fi channel to air in July. Perfect timing!
I decided to try something different while I contemplated my retirement from Gutshot’s cash game with a perfect record. So I went to The Vic instead. Sitting proud on top of Argos – among all the retail space in Las Vegas, I can’t think of a one casino that is connected to a catalogue store – The Vic boasts that it is "open from 11am to play on the slots". If you need to gamble earlier in the morning – maybe to try to win enough to buy breakfast – a motorway service station is about your only option still.
38 players. It was a quiet night with a travelling contingent of regulars apparently in Manchester for the GUKPTK. 9 spots paid. Yes, they really did pay 23% of the field. 9 get paid here whether there’s 38 or 72 players. At least it goes some way to offsetting the variance in this crapshoot of a tournament that you get for £50.
The blinds double every 20 minutes right up to 200/400, before finally slowing down a little but by the time it’s at 300/600 it doesn’t really matter. The average stack for this level was only about 4000.
So I had to get lucky, and the way I got lucky was to somehow survive to the final two tables without really seeing any cards worth noting, having much of the garbage I threw away making monsters and dumping marginal hands that appeared to be way behind but in fact were winners.
6 limp, and only I fold with my 23o. Of course it would have made a full house on a 3342 board, with plenty of action from pocket tens and a J7 who hung around long enough to catch top pair on the river. Later, my 88 looked like nothing on a K9x board with a bet and a call ahead of me, but not only was I in front (against ace-high and a flush draw) but the turn brought another 8 and the river gave me what would have been quads. You would think the crappy hands in that pot would never pay me off, but I just can’t be sure.
 Down to two tables with still not many more chips than I started with, I picked up two decent pots by moving all in against a raiser and apparently having just enough to take it down uncontested both times. Then I just blinked a couple of times while nine other players busted very quickly. I’d only showed one hand (AK all in against another AK) the whole game right up to when I went out – obviously I didn’t win, or I’d have said by now!
At the final table, three big stacks almost had enough to see flops and stuff. Nobody managed to catch up, so these are the prizes I was actually playing for.
9th £60
8th £80
7th £100
6th £110
5th £150
4th £190
Only £10 more for 6th place than 7th, even though the bottom three prizes go up by £20 a time? Obviously, once I’d spotted that 6th place was getting stiffed, my fate was sealed.
The perceived greatness of king-jack offsuit was all I needed to see to take a gamble after being whittled down to my last 2000. I ended up in about as good shape as I could hope for, drawing live against A2 and AQ with an added bonus of 1200 in dead money from the big blind.
I’d not helped myself by making a super-weak fold with A8s when I should have pushed with 9 players left, simply because one of the short stacks would be forced all in next hand. In fact he doubled up, and the ghost of Dan Harrington lingered as I walked home. He was waving a little flag that said "first in vigorish" and kept asking what my M was. I wanted to punch him, but he was a ghost. Also a ghost of somebody who isn’t actually dead.
£110 wasn’t all I won tonight though… must be on a roll.
Not yet anyway 🙂
I played a satellite last night at Gutshot for the Party Poker World Open, one of those six handed made-for-TV efforts that wishes it was Late Night Poker. I lost one race out of one, my AK not getting there against 77 and that was that. 9th out of 20.
The signs weren’t good for this one anyway. It was Friday the 13th and I was 13th to sign up. Yes, there was a player called Jason. No, he didn’t have a mask. (Edit: Jason came 2nd; it was Saturday 14th by then though). It started at 11pm, and the fact that these numbers even got me thinking about that awful Jim Carrey movie is a very bad thing: 11pm is 23:00. But wait, there’s more. 23 is 13 plus 10, and ten is the number of players starting at each table. The televised heat starts on the 27th of April: 27/4, and twenty seven minus four is twenty sodding three. We started with 3000 chips, the levels were 25 minutes long and my coffee cost £1.50 and tasted like bleach. What was my point?
As it was a late start, I spent the first part of the evening playing the £25-£50 pot limit game, and I’m now eight for eight in winning sessions and, on average, up £60 per session. I may consider retiring with my perfect record. It’s only about a month until I’m finished working in London on a regular basis, and I’ll probably have to work in the evening the next few times I come down anyway, so I can easily walk away undefeated.
On the other hand, Vegas is T-99. And I know nobody will get this, but what the hell…
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Double digits now, but it’s still over three months away. What am I going to do meantime? I’m still running hot at Gutshot. A good chunk of my £54 profit last night came from my AK top pair not losing to a massive 62s flush draw. I think he’d paired the 2 as well, so it’s obviously impossible to fold in that spot. Yes, I did raise pre-flop. How can I quit a game like that, even if I do owe it money?
Just time for a quick quiz for wannabe poker dealers:
Q: At showdown, the board reads 444Q2 and there’s no flush possibility. Two players flip over K9 and K6 respectively. Do you:
a) Push the pot towards K9. The board didn’t help either hand, so the best hand pre-flop must be the winner.
b) Stare at the board until someone says either "nine plays" or "split pot". It’s their money: they’re paying attention so you don’t have to.
c) Anticipate the possibility of a split from the texture of the board. Read the damn hands like you’re meant to and chop up the pot before anyone gets chance to tell you how to do your job.
If you answered (c) please apply for work at Gutshot.
Seriously. I saw split pots with three of a kind or two pair on board pushed to the wrong person by three different dealers. Fortunately there were always plenty of nits who weren’t involved in the hand to have a contest to see who could yell "split pot" first.
So I tried and just couldn’t do it. I started writing up my play-by-play for the GBPT Teesside £200 Freezeout and sent myself to sleep before I’d got half way.
 So, believe it or not, this is the very short version – minus many of those pesky bet amounts and without most of the minor details about who was in the pot and from what position. Doesn’t really matter, does it?
I nearly got in a mess early on with pocket queens. I had one caller pre-flop and took it down with a re-raise on a J33 flop. I bet, he raised, I thought and eventually managed to raise without moving all in. The pot was getting far too big, far too quickly for my liking and even though I suspected the usual overplayed KJ, I didn’t like my hand that much I didn’t like the thought of being pot committed with that hand.
From the small blind, I raised six limpers with ace-king and five of them called – seven times the big blind! Then I didn’t really know what to do on the ace high flop, out of position. It got checked around on the flop, I bet the turn and check-called a small river bet. He had jack high and I wasn’t quite sure where all my chips had come from.
I faced off against three short stacks before the blinds became silly: My AK beating AT; QQ losing to A6; KK actually dominating KQ.
I check-raised all in with a flush draw against an agressive player who had minimum-raised from first position. I’d called on the button with AQ, the flop was three small spades and I held the ace of spades. He thought for about a week before showing one card that made an inside straight flush draw.
I laid down A9s to an all-in re-raise preflop getting about 2.5-1 on the call. I’d called with worse the night before, but this time I figured the chips I already had were more valuable given the speed the game was moving, but I thought about it for too long and as a result the big blind went up just seconds before it reached me. By now, an average stack was less than ten big blinds, and I now had an average sized stack.
There was an early position raise and a short stack moved all in for less. I found AK in the big blinds and re-raised all in. The raiser folded so I got some change when I lost to pocket aces. The short stack said he’d only looked at one card. I said bullshit. He said no really. I said nice hand.
In the big blind for 4000 I had to call a push for 6100 more. My Q9 lost to a mighty 94. Racing off garbage like this is what poker is all about.
I moved all in with A6s and got called by AT. The board brought K244… I called for another 2 or 4, but a jack was just as good, and I was the only person in the room who realised it was a split pot. The dealer fumbled a bit but I got my money back.
It was folded to the small blind who moved all in and I found ATs on my big blind. Instacall. I lost to QT and went home via the late night garage for a consolation flapjack.
The most interesting thing I saw this weekend by a mile, but that’s not saying much. The brick train sculpture in Darlington, marking the location of Britain’s first railway line. Now the site of a Morrisons supermarket.
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I’m still due some luck then. Today it wasn’t a case of being crippled because I couldn’t win 50/50s, it was that I couldn’t win the hands where I dominated. I finished 19th from 100, lasting long enough to collect the goody bag they gave out to the final three tables, but not long enough to collect any cash. Still, I’m now the proud owner of a GBPT swimming bag which came preloaded with a t-shirt (size L, and not good enough to motivate me to lose that much weight), a pen, a chip, a keyring, a pin badge and a card protector which is actually rather nice. Oh, and the obligatory pack of cards, but the guy next to me spoke for everyone when he said "like I need another one of those".
I’ll probably post some pictures of the freebies when I get home, along with as much as I managed to photograph of the local places of interest. They’re not all that interesting at all – I was bored after not much more than an hour of driving round trying to find stuff. I’d seen a sculpture of a train made out of brick, which "pushed at the boundaries of brick technology" – boy was I impressed – and a transporter bridge, apparently the world’s longest but so much less useful than a road bridge that you could cross at any time without stopping, instead of at fifteen minute intervals during the day and not at all at night.
Yes, it’s grim up north. This far north anyway. This is up beyond Yorkshire, where you have a city with rich Roman and Viking history in York, the fastest growing city in the country in Leeds and a lot of picturesque moors, which have only been spoiled by the occasional serial killer. Up here in Cleveland, the world is stuck in a timewarp, and not in an endeering way. Parts of the towns I explored could very easily have been the set for any period drama based in the 1970s. It may well already have been used for that, I just can’t be bothered to check. Getting back just now I filled my car up using a petrol pump that had a mechanical seven-segment display, none of your newfangled liquid crystal that’s becoming so popular with the rise of the pocket calculator. Not quaint, just crap.
I also wondered if we were stuck in the 1970s after an indicent at the poker table. One player had raised pre-flop and got one caller. The board was queen high, the raiser bet and the caller called. The turn brought another queen, the raiser bet again and the caller moved all in. The raiser must have had kings or aces and eventually folded and the caller – a dark skinned fellow, seemingly of Indian origin but a Teesside local through and through – showed his king queen. Disgusted, the raiser shouted across the table, "Why don’t you go back where you came from?". For a brief moment, if felt like things might be about to get ugly. "Whadeeya mean, like?", he asked. "Back to that other table", came the reply. Oh right, he hadn’t long been moved here. False alarm then, probably.
I’m not writing a match report tonight, but I probably will. I have to be in Hanley tomorrow afternoon for an eye test, and so sleeping before the three hour drive (Autoroute said 2h15 but I don’t believe it) is a good idea. I have notes from all my key hands and this time there were a few interesting confrontations. However, for at least the last hour I was there, the tournament structure left a person with an average stack less than ten big blinds, so there was no poker left to be played. Short stacks had to move all-in with any old garbage and big stacks had to call them with not much better, and everything just went a bit random. In the midst of that, I couldn’t get lucky enough to capitalize on the strong position I’d got myself into during the first four hours.
The tour hits Nottingham next month, I might get to have another crack.
I don’t get the A1(M). There are motorway parts that are just two lanes and non-motorway parts that are three lanes. Aside from making life difficult for learner drivers, what’s the point? One sign on the way up this afternoon advised me that "narrow lanes remain in place for my safety". Clearly much safer than those pesky wide lanes. And why is Scotch Corner signposted from 40 miles away when all that’s there are two roads and a Travelodge? I was somewhat underwhelmed.
So today begins by two day poker trip to fabulous Teesside. I’m staying near Darlington in a very new looking hotel right off the A1(M). It’s nothing fancy, but it would do just fine for anyone considering the Alan Partridge lifestyle in this part of the country.
Did I know how to use the swipe card to get into the room, the receptionist asked me. "Isn’t it just …?", I asked, accompanied by an obvious action. I started to wonder whether electronic door locks were just too modern for northern England. If training was available, could I get a certificate? But in fact it was me who is behind the times. First time I’ve seen this: you have to put your key card in a slot on the wall to turn on the electricity. Great for the environment I’m sure, but no good when I needed to leave my iPod charging when I went out.
So onward to Stockton I went, and there’s not much to report really. I got about half way, lasting 3.5 hours. I lost two out of two races and that was enough to do me in. No interesting hands. Sorry.
I’m still not sure if the real reason I busted was that I was hungry. I’d arrived at 6.30 for a 7pm start, but there was no food available until after 7. Although I did see someone else order food at the table, I was never really comfortable enough about my chip position to do the same, and glad I didn’t too as it took over an hour for a chicken salad to arrive. I was holding A7s in the big blind and after everyone folded to the small blind, he moved all in for virtually the same chips that I had. 7k to call, blinds at 500/1000 with a 100 ante. Eight handed, 2300 in dead money on a 7000 call wasn’t that great, but his range was that wide that I figured I could be ahead often enough to make it not a dreadful call and to go much further in this tournament now I had to gamble to get ahead. He turned up KQo, the flop brought an ace and a king, and he hit a second pair on the river. With a classy hand clap and a little scream of joy.
I just crunched this through Poker Stove. Getting 9-7 pot odds I needed 44% pot equity for a breakeven. A7s is 43.9% against a range that only includes any pocket pair or any ace. If he would push with any other hand than these – which he surely would, and should – then it’s apparently a +EV call. If he’d push any two cards in this spot, I’m 60.9% to win. Doesn’t make me feel a whole lot better about busting with ace-rag (actually it was the next hand, I had 275 left and forced all in on my small blind) but it turns out that I’ve made worse decisions. Maybe I’m just in denial about my subconscious desire to go broke so I could get a burger though.
For the first two hours I was playing on a table that was so well padded it felt like a bouncy castle. Chips would not stand in stacks of more than five or so unless you used the rail to prop them up, so players just started to gather mounds as they won pots. Three tables were built like this, apparently – someone must like foam.
Whoever chose the chip colours needs to be shot too. I can live with non-standard colours (altough why the hell not just use a tried and tested scheme?) but they need to be better thought out than this. 25s were red and 100s were purple, with the Great British Poker Tour logo taking the majority of the face of the chip so the value numbers were tiny. These two looked virtually identical, even close up. 500s were green and 1000s yellow and with the grey edge spots – the same colour on every chip – being bigger than the amount of chip colour left visible on the edge, it wasn’t exactly easy to see at a glance how many chips another player had. Even the cheap composite bought-off-ebay chips that they poured over Michelle from Liberty X would have been better.
Anyway, back tomorrow. Same structure, more money. And it’ll be my turn to get lucky.
Gutshot’s apparent criminal mastermind, Derek Kelly, was just given the following sentence:
– A conditional discharge for two years, the condition being that Derek Kelly will not contravene the Gaming Act in that period
– No fine
– A payment of £10k towards prosecution costs (thought to be in the region of £25k) – this to be paid in monthly instalments of £500
Hardly even a slap on the wrist, relatively speaking.
With the club carrying on doing much the same as it was but with the term "service charge" simply replaced by "voluntary donation", was it really worth all that fuss in the end?
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Turbo satellites are silly. With the blinds at $1500/$3000, plus a $150 ante, I have little more than one small blind remaining. Click on the thumbnail to see the full table image. For Harrington fans, does the fabric of the universe falls apart when you have an M that has to be expressed as a fraction? It all looks grim, and yet I’m loving it. Believe it or not, I’m in great shape here.
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