Fame and Fortune

I hope everyone saw me on television last night.

Just in case someone out there missed it ...

Found out yesterday that Sky Poker (http://www.skypoker.com) have started doing a nightly poker tournament ("The Open") at 9:00 that they follow live on channel 846 (sky) with a guaranteed prize fund of £2,500. Wasn't sure quite what to make of that, but I made a last minute decision to enter last night's tournament and found myself among the 219 entrants who had flung their hats, or at least their ten hard earned pounds, into the ring.

Things started on a bad foot though, when Sky Poker wouldn't let me have my underscore when registering for their site. That really annoyed me. For Pete's sake, it is my name. GRRRR. Also I had to spend the first 10 minutes (well, actually minutes 3-13 once I'd finished the sprouts I was having for dinner) messing around with firewall and port settings before I could even see the table I was on.

Anyway, I'd only lost a few chips through not joining in at the start so I calmed down and played some sensible poker in the gaps between the interesting action/opportunities in the Middlesboro-Bristol City cup match. Poker, especially Texas Hold'em, is quite simple in many ways, but thankfully a lot of people fail to realise that basically if you put your chips in when you have a winning hand and don't when you have a losing hand then you are likely to do rather well. So I managed to move up the leaderboard a bit and when they went through the top 15 players the words "pasta rogue from London" were uttered for the first time on "national" television.

I felt my anger welling up again next time I was mentioned, I would have thought pastarogue was difficult to mispronounce, when the amateurish anchor seemed to introduce an r into the word pasta maybe under the misapprehension that it sounded fancier. "paaarsta" Twit.

There were 3 guest players yesterday evening, one professional player (well, "professional player and part-time taxi driver" was the precise introduction, which was rather odd), Eric "Crafty Cockney" Bristow and Barry "1st round at Wimbledon" Cowan. Unsurprisingly Eric and Barry left the tournament pretty early, despite "I'm aiming for the top 10" from Eric when already down to a quarter of his starting chipstack. Is beating Eric Bristow worth a mention on my CV? The taxi driver put up more of a fight and was unlucky to leave in about 50th I think.

The other host, the one who could pronounce pasta correctly, had 3 (worthless) player points prizes to give out for good/creative play. A little later I was given one of these when they featured a hand on my table, and, slightly oddly, I won the prize due to a good fold. I was dealt two 8s but once two other players had gone all-in I realised that they were very unlikely to be ahead so I made my prize winning fold. To be fair it did turn out to be a good decision once I saw that those other two players had pocket 9s and pocket kings.

I made it through to the final table (final 6) and then lost almost all of my then fairly meagre chipstack when the shortstack went all-in with Q,6 (lol) and I called with A,J only to get robbed on the river when a queen appeared. With virtually no chips left i soon left the tournament in 6th place, winning £150 which is my biggest poker win so far and moves my poker career safely into profit.

The heads-up final was decided when a dodgy pre-flop call with 10,2 was rewarded with an astonishing flop of 10,10,10. The winner's name was, appropriately, Jammyjimbo or something similar.

Rather odd to see the online poker tournament that you are playing being discussed seriously on television, but it was rather fun.

Make sure you watch the repeats today at 12:30pm and 4:30pm.