Saturday night. A perfect night for poker with the guys. You know the type of night: Have a few drinks, play a little poker, and have fun. If I look at Saturday night’s NLHE tourney at my neighbor’s house with that point of view, then I can say it was a good night.
On the other hand, if I look at it poker-wise, then I am severely disappointed.
This was the first tourney this guy has staged. Add to the fact that I don’t think he’s really played all that much and evidently definitely not in a decently run tourney, and the whole thing was kind of a mish-mash of rules.
The structure was $50 buyin. $40 of that went to the prize pool, and $10 was your “black chip”, ie. a bounty chip. If you got knocked out you handed your black chip to the person who busted you and it was good for $10 cash. Kind of a nice touch, I had no problems with that. Fourteen people showed up, a couple fewer than anticipated. We started out with T700 which was a little low for my tastes, it reminded me of a Party SNG. The redeeming value of starting with such a low stack was that the first level (5/10) was an hour long. This was decided by committee as was the time when the rebuy period would end.
That’s right, the host didn’t have these details determinied ahead of time. For me, this was frustrating. I pretty much took charge at my table in terms of rules. After the 18th string bet and 18th comment that “we know what he means, it’s no big deal” I just decided to let it go. I thought there were two people at my table who had some clue, but when I brought up “cards speak” they both looked at me with blank stares. Oy boy. Thankfully not too many strange points came up. The biggest one was when somebody busted out from the small blind and we had a disagreement on where the button should go. I let it go again as in the grand scheme of things it wasn’t that big a deal. I was, however, frustrated at the lack of rules enforcement, but that just stemmed from the fact that people were ignorant of the rules in general.
Tight Chris sat down and dealt for the button. I proceeded to not really get many cards for a while. There was the typical bad play such as somebody pushing all in when the pot was T50 or so. My first decent hand was the Hilton Sisters. I was UTG and raised it 3x the BB and was called in four places. Yikes. Flop came down AKx and I knew I was screwed and had to bail to a big bet.
I started to get blinded away and after watching in horror as somebody went all in with K6o that was unimproved, and won. When I got KK in LP I popped it 3x again and got called in three places. I ended up winning the pot to bring me back to a decent, but still short, stack.
The blinds were finally raised enough that my stack was disproportionately small. I looked down to see TT on the button and smooth called. The flop came down all low cards and I pushed abd was called by everybody in Ramsey County. This included the also SB going all in and the BB calling us both. Ruh roh. I flipped up my tens, SB flipped over 86o (!) and the BB flipped over slow played rockets. Damn, I’m drawing to a T or runner runner straight, neither of which materialized and I’m out in 10th.
I wait around a little bit and the people who were out decided to start a $20 buy in tourney (which now consists of 7 people). This was an even worse setup and I almost backed out. It was $20 for 40 chips, all chips were equal. It was interesting. By this time most people had at least 4 beers, and in some cases more. Play was even worse than before, which of course meant that it was even more of a crapshoot than normal. One hand, the drunk BB holds up his cards (pre-flop) and shows everybody his “69″ and say, “Oh yeah, I win!!!”. Then proceeded to play that hand even though everybody knew what he had. Needless to say I busted out shortly thereafter and decided to go home $70 to the bad.
Overall it wasn’t quite what I wanted, although in reality it was pretty much what I expected. Little “official” organization, low quality play and while rules infractions were not done on purpose (ie. they weren’t angle shooting), it was still kind of frustrating. That being said, if you wanted to have a few beers and have a social night out, it was definitely a good time.
In the end, it was a fun night. I didn’t know anybody there, so it wasn’t as much fun as it was for the people who knew each other. I also took it more seriously than most, and may have been the only one who cared about the rules, and watched more terrible play than I ever have seen on Party, so that probably tainted my outlook. I guess it all comes down to what you want to get out of the night. Since they weren’t my friends, I was looking more at the poker aspect whereas most of the others were looking for the social aspect and that’s totally acceptable. Everybody seemed to be having fun and in the end, that’s all that matters.
Needless to say, it was a brutal night. Ritualistic suicide was being discussed, it was that bad