There were a host of tournaments over Easter weekend and Blue Blood players were out in force. Blue Blood are generously sponsored by Coral Poker and the Coral-logoed blue hoodies were on display up and down the country as Blue Blood used some funds to put players into £100 tournaments in exchange for 25% of winnings.
Several Blue Blood players ventured out in the Grosvenor Casinos’ Easter Beast: five day ones of a £100 + £10 NLHE played over six levels during the week before Easter, with all the survivors going to a combined day two on Easter Monday. We had players in them all over the country but the stand out achievement was in the Midlands when Steve Ball fought his way from a short stack in Walsall on Saturday afternoon to a workable stack by the end of play, finally getting through over 500 players to get to the final table in Coventry early on Tuesday morning – eventually chopping four ways for £7985. Great effort and well deserved. And by my maths that’s £2k back to the club too!
Dawne Cooke wins at WCOAP The World Championships of Amateur Poker (WCOAP) were held over 10 days before Easter at Aspers Casino just next to Olympic Park in Stratford, London. Blue Blood’s very own Dawn Cooke played 6 events in all, and she managed to take down the very first of them: the £50+5 MixMax tournament for an APAT gold medal and a winner’s bracelet and the not-inconsequential £1035! MixMax is a tricky variant that involves starting full ring, then the last 36 players playing 6-max and then heads-up for the last 18, and finally back to a full ring final table, so it requires a constant adjustment of tactics. She lost a good chunk of her stack in the very first level but then ground it back, moving up through the leaderboard during the 6-max to be 2nd at the start of the heads up. The final table was quite deep stacked but she won her flips when she needed to and by the final three she was in a good position. She unfortunately doubled up Tom Clark who is a dangerous opponent to level things out, but to win a tourney you have to get lucky and she did that, hitting a four-outer to take a decent chip lead. The heads-up battle with Simon Brooke lasted an hour and a half before the final hand saw her call a shove with A9 vs QJ, only for the flop to come KKJ – but an ace on the turn was enough to take it down. Great to see Dawn back at the tables and winning again.
Tim Wright is at it again: he played the £66 entry deepstack tournament at his favourite Swindon KC Club. Chopped first again, this time out of 45 runners, for £790. He says it wasn’t easy: he had to get there with a flush draw against a flopped set and a straight draw early for big treble up, and admits to another healthy dose of luck too: calling from the small blind with JcJs the flop was KQT all spades. They 4 bet got it in on the flop, and, nightmare, the other guy had AsKc for a higher flush draw. Nut flush for the other guy on the turn … one outer 9c on the river for a straight flush for Tim to take down a massive pot. Must be nice. Tim’s having a monster year.
David Trigg has been travelling – I’m not quite sure how this works, but he’s English, went to Dublin, and played the Norwegian Championships. No, me neither. Anyway, it was a €150 + 20 championship and he finished as top non-Norwegian in 14th from 191 starters for €365. And got an Irish Hendon Mob flag along the way too. As soon as he got home he started grinding the online games and managed 3rd from 1224 in a $5 hyper-turbo for $590, and then won a $27 progressive knock-out for $833. A good month all round.
Di Farrell has been busy: she played an online $5.50 satellite and won a seat into a $22 satellite and won a seat into a $109 satellite at DTD (still with me?) then won that too – her prize was an opportunity to play live cash with $1500 (around £1000) at Dusk Till Dawn in Nottingham. She didn’t fancy the big-money live stream table, saying her cash game isn’t strong enough (I think she’s selling herself short, personally), and elected to sit down with her £1000 off camera on the £1-£2-£4 table. The rules stated she had to play for a minimum of three hours. She tells me that this is a big game with a lot of very experienced and aggressive cash game players on it, and nearly every pot was being opened for £15. She ran her nut flush into a rivered full house for a £400 loss early on, but then, her words ‘pulled up my big girl pants’ and cashed out on the dot of the three hours with £835. Which is a nice return on five dollars.
Also in March she continued her success in Omaha Hi-Lo, bubbling one €10 final table on Coral for €70 and then going one better to hit the last nine for €160. Coral has a decent pool of O8 players so this is a good set of results and with just a little more luck Di will take one of these down.
Apparently not content with a cool ten large last month, Matthew Wood has been straight back to the tables at his local Genting Sheffield. He’s managed a 7th from 64 in a £35 6-max event for £130 and 3rd out of 47 in a £30 full ring NLHE for £290. He took his winnings straight to the cash tables to play £1/£1 NLHE. I hear he got a cheeky one through along the way: dealt ten-five of spades in the big blind, he completed 3 way for four quid. The flop was queen-queen-deuce with 2 spades, he check called £6 three way and saw the 6 of hearts on the turn. He checked again – nothing but a ten high flush draw at this point, mind – the early position player made it £25 to go, the middle position called – making the pot £91 – and our Matt stuck in a cheeky check-raise semi-bluff to £77. His opponents both folded, both showing ace-queen for top pair top kicker. Nice move sir, nice move. His comment, apparently? “Ha ha, easy game.”
Matt did then manage to fire four bullets at the Easter Beast in the north-west, and despite finally getting to Day 2 with 103k chips (50 big blinds at the start of day 2) he got it in with A8 suited against KJ on AJ8. His friend helpfully told him that he’d folded a jack too, so the case jack coming on the river to cripple his stack was particularly unlucky.
John Burberry has been busy at Genting Luton. The £30 entry dealer’s choice game is a minefield for the unwary, with specialists at poker variants like SuperStud to cope with. John’s favourite game is also your correspondent’s non-hold’em game of choice, the split pot variant 6 card Omaha Hi-Low. I always end up getting quartered chasing low hands with no high but John is obviously much more skilled: 30 runners started the game and John lost all his chips with just half an hour to go before the end of the re-entry period. He fired another bullet anyway at the break, and by the time they had fought their way down to three players he had so many chips that the final deal was just to give John all the £312 first prize and chop second and third places. Nice work sir.
Rob Williams isn’t having any time to get out and play lately but did manage a few sessions on 888 poker as well as Coral, and is consistently getting deep, bubbling final tables several times this month. A big result is just round the corner.
Steve Redfern was delighted when the WCOAP announced an 8-game championship, so down to London from Worcestershire he went. He really thought he’d have a chance as the standard in these mixed game tournaments is often not great – many people are taking a bit of a punt with proper knowledge of how to play only three or four of the variants. He ran really card dead in the early rounds of limit games and then managed to bluff off most of his stack in no-limit and the end was nigh. A few drinks later he took to the cash tables (never a great combination …) and inevitably lost a couple of stacks there too. He cut his stay in London short and instead went into Birmingham for the Grosvenor Hill Street’s £55 buy-in pot-limit Omaha 456 event, which also looked like having an overlay, starting with just 36 runners. It looked like his week was going from bad to worse when his 50,000 starting stack became just 9,000 but Steve’s been playing for too long to panic. He went into jam mode to survive, being unlucky to flop the nut straight and then find out that 2 other players had too. The £25 add-on at the break gave him a working stack, and was rewarded when very first hand back he woke up with AKKQJT triple suited (for the uninitiated, this is an absolute monster) and his 40,000 were suddenly 190,000. He hit the final table second in chips and despite a big bump in the road when he lost 530k of his 600k stack, he kept aggressive, winning lots of pots uncontested before winning a monster three-handed to go into heads-up slightly ahead. He had the chutzpah to decline a deal and then binked the lot for £1100. Poker taketh away, poker giveth. That is the crazy nature of our game, right there. Well played indeed, and congratulations particularly for remaining level-headed despite a nasty run of cards. We all know how hard that can be.
Phil Stein is normally a cash game player who says that Hold Em is his worst game. That didn’t stop him making a last minute decision to enter the Genting Dunstable super slow structure £110 NLHE event. He had no premium pairs – in fact no hand better than pocket 9s save AKo once – all tournament, but managed to get his 3- and 4-bets through to finally chop first place from 140 runners for £2000.
