tomandzoe.com - live from the northside

It could be time to quit science and take up my true calling as a professional poker player As you may know from my previous posts, each week it’s a $10 buy-in at 8pm. This gets you $1100 worth of chips. If you lose all your chips before 9:30pm, you’re able to re-buy - so you’re not sitting around being bored. The thing is, if players aren’t going too well in the 10 minutes or so leading up to the cut-off, they’ll try to ‘dump’ their remaining chips. This leads to some annoying play and is less about poker and more about chips, people start going all-in with nothing in a bid to lose. The problem is, sometimes when you’re doing this, you win. Inevitably you end up with less than $1100 in chips, but because you have chips at all, you can’t re-buy. This is what happened to me - luckily I went all in with my $500 and then won, not with $75 like others have in the past. I passed the 9:30pm deadline with about $1200.

The second half of the game begins at 9:30pm and, although it’s not really separate and the rules are the same, the flavour is a little different. A few people have been kicked off the table, a couple have re-buyed and are desperate to win; everyone has their eye on the prize. Unfortunately, this week there were only six players, and one re-buy - $50 for first, $20 for second. Having seen about one high card in the first hour and a half of play, my luck slowly started to change. I began getting the odd pair and managed to fold what would have been good hands, a straight (e.g. 8-9-10-J-Q) and a full house (a pair and a three-of-a-kind) - of course you don’t know that they’re good hands at the time.

Then it started to get a bit embarrassing. On an all in call I managed to win with the cards on the table and a King, even though my opponent had three pairs (only the top five cards count). Later, there were some other crazy wins and some very close calls - 8s v. 9s like last week. In the end I won the $50. Next week, there’s talk of a bounty. The person who takes out the guy on the streak (in this case me), although I’m not sure if two wins qualifies as a streak, gets $10 from the kitty.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 30th, 2006 at 9:15 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.