First tournament win at live poker

I won my first tournament since I started playing poker again on Monday, and it came from an unlikely source – live poker. I’ve not really played much casino poker over the years, and on those occasions I’ve been pretty terrible.

The main reason, I believe, is because I often go with other friends and I hate the thought of going out first and having to wait around for them to play. Selfish? Totally. However, this approach usually leads to me being an absolute nit, only playing premium hands in position and slowly blinding myself to oblivion after a couple of hours.

This time though, I played pretty aggressively and it helped me to win first place. Unfortunately, the prize pool wasn’t particularly impressive. The event was a £15 buy-in at the Grosvenor Casino in Manchester, although £5 of each entry went on bounties. If you knocked someone out, you received £5 (or £20 if you knocked out randomly allocated super bounties).

While this makes the game a bit more fun, it also drastically reduces the prizepool for those who place, so I only received £170 for my win (£150 for first and £20 in bounties). What’s even more aggravating is that I missed out on three bounties where I absolutely crippled people during an all-in, but because they had a few more chips they survived only to be knocked out a couple of hands later for someone else to pick up the money, with one being a juicy £20 one.

That aside, there were a number of positives and negatives that I have taken away from the win:

Positives

• I only made one serious mistake all tournament (which, incidentally, nearly knocked me out)
• I felt confident I was one of the best players there
• I managed to maintain aggression despite my usual tendency to clam up in casinos

Negatives

• The mistake I did make was horrific, a bad bluff that was NEVER going to work against the kind of opponents you meet in casinos
• I definitely need to brush up on my poker face and keep a lid on my emotions. Somehow playing in a piddly little tournament had my heart racing like a greyhound on crack. More competitive live experience is required, something you can’t learn online
• I was pretty jammy! I won all my coinflips and no-one outdrew me when I held the best hand. I was all-in three times and I won all three

I did have a fantastic time though and it is far more exhilarating than playing online. I will definitely be looking around for some tournaments in my area to try and boost my live skills, which haven’t really had a workout since I was in first year of university in 2003.

Unfortunately, I got home after the event and realised I hadn’t taken any pictures of my final chip stack or my winning hand (AJos) as a memento of my first live casino win. I appreciate it’s not the WSOP, but I think a photo always breaks up a blog post pretty well! Maybe next time.

I’ll also take a note of any interesting hands I get involved in, as I can barely remember any of the ones from Monday.

Summary

Casino poker profit: £151 (£170 – £15 entry – £4 extortionate tournament fees)