Going Live

      Today I might be mad,
      Tomorrow I'll be glad,
      I've got Friday on my mind.      The Easybeats

   As mentioned in my previous post, I've discovered a weekly live Texas Holdem tournament. This tourney is on a Friday night, and costs $20 to enter. My wife and I found out about this in late June and we've played five weeks in a row since then, although we're probably going to give it a miss this week as we have a pool competition on Saturday that starts quite early. If you make the money in this tourney (usually the top five) you're probably going to get home close to midnight. Typically there are 20 to 25 players involved, which means a total prize pool of around $500. So far I've finished 18th, 7th, 3rd, 6th and 5th, leaving me $20 down overall. I'm reasonably happy with this result although I think I need to work on my endgame a bit to get a better payout when I make the money.
   I'm impressed with the professional way in which this tourney is run. Firstly, it invariably starts on time, at 7pm. When I used to play in a tournament at a pub a couple of years ago, their 7pm start time usually became 8pm or later. The current tourney organisers also use tournament management software, displaying all the relative information on a big screen for everyone to see. It's good to be able to look up and see when the next break is, when the blinds go up next and by how much, how many players are left in, what the average stack size is and so on. Also, they usually manage to find someone to do the dealing once the numbers get down to the last three or four. I discovered last week that ten percent comes out of the prize pool for a charitable donation. This is a requirement under New Zealand's gaming laws, and is not much different from the standard ten percent game fee of most online tournaments. So overall, a very good event to be involved with.
  After playing online for so long, I didn't realise how much I missed playing live poker until I started up with this game. There's just nothing like sitting around a table with real live people, peeking at your hole cards and stacking up your chips. Although it's taken me awhile to get used to the duties of live play. You have to remember to post the blinds, not to act out of turn, to announce your raise, not make string bets and to refrain from commenting on the cards while the they are still in play, among other things. Unlike playing on a computer, you've got to do it all yourself.
   The people who play in this tournament are a pretty good bunch, all very friendly and have welcomed us into their game without reservation (even though my wife and I are not even members of their club - yet). Many of them have been playing for a while and know each others' play quite well. But I haven't come across anyone with a particularly intimidating playing style. Play is generally pretty loose and passive, especially in the early stages. For most of the players, it's all about the draw. Of course, being a club, there is a fair bit of drinking going on by some of the players, myself included. It's not beyond the realms of possibility that my lack of top two finishes has something to do with the cumulative effects of alcohol consumption, so I guess I'd better cut back a bit.
   Apart from this weekly tourney, we got involved in a monthly Texas Holdem tournament that involves a number of different clubs. This is a teams competition that is played once a month on a Sunday. Each club puts up an eight player team and they all play in a $20 entry tourney. Each person plays individually, in the usual way, but they also get points for their team, based on the position they finish in. Apparently some of the prize money goes into a separate pool that is paid out to the highest-scoring teams at the end of the year. As individual, non-team players can also participate, my wife and I both entered and played in this game. Oddly enough, it was held at our home club. It turns out that the poker players from our home club had been entering teams in this competition for some time, but this was the first time we'd ever heard about it. Anyway, my wife and I both went deeper into this tourney than any of our RSA team players managed, and I ended up making the top three out of a total of 59 players. We three split the prize pool and I walked away with $200. Nice.
   Despite this success, I'm not sure if I'll play in this monthly game again. A big chunk of the prize pool goes into the end-of-year pool, which amounts to a pretty big rake unless you are in a team and play in every tourney. Even then, any end-of-year payout would depend on how well your team-mates did. I just don't see poker as a team sport.
   But I will definitely be turning up at the Workingman's Club most Friday nights for the weekly poker tourney. My immediate goal is to take out first place and get a decent payout. But regardless of the results, even if I come up with a string of poor results, I think my Friday nights are booked for quite a while.