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If i've done well online i like to go and play live whenever i can. The likelihood is that i would do better online but i love live poker and go with the attitude that it will just be an expensive night out and anything else is a bonus.
I cheated last week, i haven't played much recently but just thought sod it i'll go anyway.
Trouble is live poker is obviously rigged! and i was out fairly quickly including rebuy. Flopping a straight and then a set of kings was obviously never going to be good enough.
So i decided to wander off to the cash table and everything i love about 'live' was there in front of me.
For my first ten minutes i had a young chap telling me about other players polarised bets and his 5 bet bluffing range.
Fortunately he decided to go home to grind online as he could never beat bad players!
Then i got talking to a lovely guy who was a retired ladies hairdresser from Italy and someone who said he was playing way too high but needed to win as he was struggling financially. I grimaced but was delighted for him when he got up and left afer he had doubled up.
I ran like god. First time this has really happened for a long time and it felt brilliant. I didn't play well particuly but never had a bluff called and was looked up everytime i 'had it'.
2 weird hands were when after straddling i looked down at KK. it had been raised to £10 in front of me with 2 callers. I popped it up to £60 and was somewhat surprised to see everyone call. Flop A K 3 rainbow.
Hmm, not bad i lead out for 80 and 3 instants folds! aaarrrggghhh..
Then on next straddle it was limped to me and i had 45. I just check my option, flop 2 3 J. It checks all the way to river when an Ace hits. I quite like this and just went for a silly bet thinking an ace might call me. '£40' i announce into the pot of £8.
Although i'm a little drunk by this stage i'm sure i hear a cry of 'all in' I quickly check i haven't misread my cards and call.
He had AA. Said he was trapping me as i always raised the straddle.
Last 3 hands were announced and i looked at my watch. Ten to Six in the morning and had been playing since Seven the previous night. Felt like ten minutes. I thought i had been sensible with my drinking just a pint an hour something like that. No wonder i felt battered, at my age i can't drink like that anymore.
isn't live poker so much more fun than sitting looking at a screen for hours on end.
(* *)
^
dev
i did PM you back.
b4 i joined sky,i used to run a weekly home game with my brother and 3 mates,which ran for a year.
unfortunately 1 player changed his 'taxi' shifts to that night so the game ended right then.
it was so much fun though as 4 of us were 'best mates' if u like since we were kids,so we all knew exactly how far we could go with the jokes and stuff.
we bought the poker chips and a table so it was quite a good set up.
3 yrs ago we had a game on my birthday,i lost something like £120 i think so wasn't happy,obviously.
funny thing was though,this game was during the day,so like a fool we played again later in the evening.
i lost another £100+.
"still,it'll be one to remember" my mate shouts out as he's leaving at 2am the next day lol
he's not wrong there. lol
still...happy days.
(* *)
^
dev
I think you must have deleted it before sending or sent it to someone else!
Much to my disappointmet i've never played any home games. My friends aren't into poker at all.
Shame, as i can imagine they're great fun with plenty of levelling going on etc.
i'll thank you again now then.
"must be old age...
comes to us all. " lol
yeah,they were great nights mate.
i lost £600 in total over that year,but i'd do it all again tomorrow.
night.
(* *)
^
dev
u mean the PM's today don't you.
i've only just seen them.
i've not read them yet mate,just about to.
dev
00.12
ps,just read them and PM'd you back.
cheers
I read this fron to back last night and have thoroughly enjoyed it. You've got some great anecdotes. Love the Tikay stuff and agree with you...how could anyone not like him? I think you've given me a taste for playing liv...just tournaments. Having cash, walking out of a casino in Liverpool is a recipe for disaster methinks!
No i'll just have to cash so that i can afford the taxi home, ha!
There certainly is a different feel to live games, isn't there? No charts for me to look at or working out the csi's properly and then adopting your poker face. I remember my first one. My hands were shaking putting chips in. For some reason i had this idea that if in a pot, so as not to give a tell, i would detach myself by looking at the board and count the letters of each word of the lyrics of a particular song in my mind. Weird eh? Worked a treat....didn't i go and win my first flipping tournament. All downhill from there, i suspect! Cheers Jac, i'll let you know if i get there but if i do youve played a big part in getting me there. Thanks a lot.
PS I remember being heads up with a guy when we were given a break. He asked me how long i'd been playing. I said "oh about eight!"
"Eight years. I'm about the same!"....I didn't like to tell him that it was eight days and i'd just read Harrington volume 1. A great experience though......
Lovely read Jac, you write in a lovely "as spoken" style.
Where was this, if I may ask?
Aah, thought it was.
The Gent you mention is Dave Welch, as you say, he was on several series of LNP, & he later married a young lady, Debbie Berlin, who was also on LNP.
He was a feature of the Live scene from the mid-nineties, & has a Database entry as long as your arm, though nothing for the last 4 or 5 years. Incidentally, his surname is "Welch" not "Welsh".
"controversial"? Umm, just a bit, though not so much "now" as 7 or 8 years ago.
Probably best to leave it at that.
He used to live in St Albans, but I believe he lives in Burton upon Trent these days, but I've not seen him or Debbie for a good few years.
He had the poker nickname of "The Ambassador".
Jeez, you have opened the memory floodgates with that name!
"Derby Genting" used to be "Stanleys Derby", & it was the first Live poker room I ever played in.
It was very atmospheric, up a set of stairs, dimly lit, very smoky (you could smoke in cardrooms in those days), & you've never seen such a set of characters in one room in your life.
Devilfish was a regular there, as was Peter Costa & his brother, Kim Constantiou. The locals were a really mixed bunch, & I still see & chat with a lot of them regularly, Taff, Ash, Ali Bag of whatsits, Jez, Big Micky Jones, Phil the Power, Ali Mallu, Micky Wernick, Rob Yong, Qualif, Assif, strewth, so many.
It was there that I first realised that in Live Tournaments, especially rebuys, (& most Live Tourneys were rebuys back then) it was always imperative to know EXACTLY, allowing for colouring up, how many chips were in play.
I made a final one night & I have always had a peculiar mental "tic" of calculating numbers in my head, & I suddenly realised that there were nearly 30% too many chips in play. I sat there for a moment, & wondered why, & then the penny dropped - a lot of the rebuy money had gone into someone's pocket, so the amount of chips did not tally with the prize pool.
I refused to allow play to start until they sorted it out, & it all got a bity messy & shouty-wouty, & so I never went there again.
This would be in around 2000 & I gather they "cleaned the place up" by 2002 or 2003. Once computers arrived, of course, fiddling the rebuys was not so easy, but it was a common occurence in Cardrooms everywhere in those days, & I can think of 4 rooms off the top of my head where it was prevelant. Recently, of course, Rich Wootton took over as TD & Cardroom Manager, Rich is as straight as a die, there won't be any funny business whilst he is captain of the ship. Give him my best regards please. We used to have professional differences of opinion over APAT, but we are super cool now.
Sorry to invade your thread, but you touch so many memories for me.
Keep the stories coming please.
Many years previously, it had been a magnificent, & very plush, Snooker Hall.
All the Derby County & Notts Forest footballers used to gather there every afternoon, & I played Kenny Burns many a time. He was with Forest at the time, so it must have been around 1980 or '81.
I played a lot of snooker then, mainly in Nottingham, this was the first hall I ever frequented in Derby, & it was different gravy, very plush. I could write a hundred stories about the characters in that place.
Membership was £10 a year (most clubs were free), which sounds cheap, but it was a goodly sum in those days.
Then they introduced "Life Membership" for £25, what a bargain! So I decided I would buy Life Membership of that Snooker Club for all my snooker buddies, or at least 10 of them, it struck me as a pretty neat gift, as it would last forever.
Come Christmas, & I gave them all their Life Memberships, effective from 1st January, which was the annual renewal date.
I turned up for a few frames one afternoon in the first week of January, & there was a big sign on the door.
Like profman nerves got the better of me playing live. My first live tourney was SPT Blackpool. First couple of hands I played I was shaking like a leaf! But my first live game at G Casino Bolton was very strange. Although it was a FR I felt more nervous probably because they were all strangers. I can't handle chips very well cos of Arthritis so a bit of handshake but if I won a pot and i was gathering in the chips it got worse! I was sure I would send them flying all over the table while trying to stack them. But one advantage of shaky hands is your oppos find it harder to tell when you have a good hand.
Keep them coming Paul.
The Pink Coconut, wow, the first (& I believe last) nightclub I ever went in. It was next door to the Casino, in Colyer Street.
If you turned right at the Pink Coconut & walked 100 yards along that road, there was THE weirdest "mix & match" Shop I think I have ever seen in the UK.
It was (is?) called (wait for it....)......
"Chris - Gentlemens Hairdresser & Railway Book Shop".
Can't make this stuff up.
Must be like dying & waking up heaven in there - waiting your turn whilst reading railway books? Incred.
(click to enlarge photos)
I'm often curious about how the players who were playing bricks and mortar poker long before internet poker view the new breed of poker players.
Anyone young just used to be dismissed as 'an internet player' meaning the were no good.
This wasn't really the case but certainly younger players were often quite intimidated by the older guys.
Now though the young 'internet players' are very often highly intelligent people, who have probably played more hands lifetime than these guys and have access to all manner of learning tools and are extremely good at the game.
Have the tables turned?
Do the older guys get intimidated by the lad in the hoody who sits down?
I'm kind of in the middle age wise and so i just get intimidated by both!
Edit: Tikay, if you read this i apologise for the 'old' player stuff, i know you hate it. ( At least i didn't mention the rubbish French players! )
I'm not saying it doesn't happen but i just think it may be a lot less than people think.
Sky to its credit is a site that actively encourages and seeks players new to the game.
They provide many low stake games and my personal opinion is that rather than any form of collusion players are just making new player mistakes.
I was playing a DYM the other night. A player had lost a big hand and was left with 350 chips.
He went all in next hand and the big blind who had posted 300 passed.
Collusion?
I doubt it. I had sharkscoped him as i do any new player i don't have notes on and saw that he was playing his 5th game.
This may have been his 5th game of poker ever.
He may have looked at his cards and seen, lets say 8 2 and thought thats no good and passed. As a new player he maybe didn't realise that it would be correct to call with any 2 there.
Maybe this is a poor example but i was amused to see the 2 other players left in the game instantly start typing 'Collusion' in the chat box.
Frustrating - extremely, colluding - doubtful
ran badly, played badly for most off it, mainly played badly but 6 on the bounce at the end meant a huge £20 profit on the evening!
Still a lot better than the £70 or so i was down early on.
Good to run into Pat Walsh for the first time in a while, good banter as ever
Pat