DTD Grand-Prix tournament report

Oxygen atoms sharing electrons yesterday

So now then with just a few hours to go before I get to either meet God or meet a fiery sort of earth quakey death, I better leave my experiences at DTD on Thursday to posterity should poker not exist in the new life.

If you're in a hurry, it was a bit shit. If you're not I'll elaborate.

I hadn't played anything resembling proper poker for some time, six months at least. Who knows what the young whipper snappers had done to the game in that time?

Imagine being a parent and leaving your teenage progeny at home for six months while you go on holiday. The sort of state your house would be in when you returned was how I imaged the poker landscape to have changed. A whole new lexicon of silly poker terms, all manner of ridiculous bet sizing and appalling headwear.

In fact it was OK. I had been blessed initially with a very soft table to ease myself back into the game and was up to 15k from a 10k starting stack within about five minutes. Some proper players then joined the table and it toughened up a bit, but I had found my sea legs by then and was doing OK.

It was a nice table too, very pleasant chatty and cordial. All the reasons why I started playing the game in the first place. Unfortunately our table then broke and I joined another one populated by the kind of petty wankers who make me not want to play the game.

My chips started bleeding away as a guy sat two to my right was playing every hand and this prevented me from really opening any pots with the usual junk I like to mess about with and I had no hands to speak of for many many levels to play back at him.

By the time this table broke I was down to about 7-8K having found no answers to the conundrums set by 'playing every hand' guy and my enthusiasm for the event had long since departed.

At my new table, I was immediately charged with the Big Blind. It's an age old excuse and a silly one, but after a raise and a re-raise, I decided the pocket tens in my possession were good enough for an all-in manoeuvre as it was the best hand I'd seen for hours.

Initial raiser guy folded, re-raiser guy called with Jacks and I slumped off for a flat and unpalatable bacon sammich. Good game me.

As a sub-plot to this I had of course meant this to be an occasion to begin getting used to wearing O2 in public. I failed. I couldn't manage it and consequently I was unable to play cash with some pissed blokes who appeared to need their money taking off them as I was knackered.

Speaking of O2, to further my feeling of inadequacy from not having any answers to the various poker questions posed of me, Alan then completely randomly without any warning bombarded me with pissed physics questions I couldn't answer either and which made my face hurt.

He'd already asked me on the journey up to Nottingham why O2 was called O2 and not just O, on which I drew a blank. And now at 1am he was asking me to explain what the universe was expanding into and whether a Casio wrist watch sent into space would, according to theory of relativity, be a few minutes slower when it returned. How we didn't crash is a miracle.

I don't fucking know

What I did learn however, was that I need a certain measure of alcohol to be competitive at the poker tables and to make stuff up when people ask me things I don't know. Not blind drunk, not BANZAI! drunk, just nicely 'don't give a monkey's' drunk. Somewhere between three and four pints of German beer.

If the Rapture people have miscalculated again and the world in fact does not come to an end tomorrow, I may venture over to the Londons with Alan again next weekend to the Fox pokering establishment for whatever's going on there, but only if I've got time in the intervening days to learn everything so I can at least answer Alan's questions if I fail again to answer the pokering ones.