Reading Series of Poker Weekend! Fun Times!

Hey,

Reading really impressed me. Such a nice town and seemingly nice people. After coming back from a 15 hour day in London at 12am, then leaving for Reading at 8am the following day I thought I'd be really tired and have a bit of crap weekend. How wrong I was!

After we found our hotel and the casino the play started. Suprising for £55 it was an amazing structure (despite being self dealt) with 12,500 chips and a 1 hour clock with a good blind structure. It was a scheduled 2 day event with plenty of play for your money. And I was genuinely suprised at the quality of play. I guess now the poker booms gone and that there weren't any rich business men/drunk degen gamblers the amount of dead money in the tourny decreases alot. I think for the typical home game player who might be much less skills £55 is a bit too much money. On the other hand, it was really fun playing skilled opponents and continuously levelling each other and trying to outplay each other (which seemed to happen alot). In the end on the second day, one of the Nottingham lads we were with, Farid Daim took 2nd for £750. His aggressive play was really paying off with a good mixture of 3bet bluffing/folding.

The rest of the weekend was not spend idle either. The tournament finished on Saturday with the remaining players (myself included) taking forward their stacks to day 2. It was about 8pm, so we were all pretty hungry and decided to head into town to grab an all you can eat. Myself, Ant, and the other Nottingham guys found an all-you-can-eat Chinese which went down VERY well. We then hit Reading town to see what it had to offer. The night started off with pints in the Chinese, then onto after-dinner Brandy followed by large volumes of whisky and beer in the clubs. We finished off in some pub place at about 2am doing drinking games with pints, some of which were really funny that I'll have to play again.

The sunday was a late start due to the previous night, but thankfully I didn't actually have that bad of a hangover which is really suprising. Well, nothing that a sausage bap and a cup of tea couldn't solve anyway. Unfortunately, I didn't last long in the tournament loosing a couple of races. And typically after busting a big tournament, I'm not in the best of moods so wanted to get out of the tournament and see some daylight. Luckily there was a golf-course opposite the casino which after Andi arrived from a trip up to London for the day, we hit some golf balls on the course. I havn't played golf in years so was really nice to go out and hit some balls. Ant joined us too and even though my technique was terrible it was actually a really fun afternoon. After we went back to the casino to rail the final table, do some degenerate roulette gambling (which i suprisingly went on a bit of a heater and managed to turn my original £20 to £150 which wasn't too bad ;) ) and played Andi heads up on dealers choice.

We started the heads up with a round of each (NLHE and PLO) but after quickly getting bored turned it into a pretty action packed dealers choice game including some really weird games we made up. My favourite were some of the 2-7 triple draw games which i managed to luckbox the most profit from. After the first hour I was up 3 buyins against Andi, then we raised the stakes and the next 3 hours I really think he outplayed me and pulled back the profits, largely in PLO games. Andi does play very well in these games and I called way too much out of position but it was all fun :).

We then found THE juiciest £1/£2 game I've ever played. I would say 6/9 on the table were COMPLETE fish, and 4/9 were so drunk they were calling pot bets with under cards to the board stating out loud they need runner-runner to improve. I mean some of the pots were so crazy, like player 1 min-raises utg and the whole table calls. The flop came kq3 and there was basically a 3-way all in with AJ, 86 (yes i know) and a muck (who stated he didn't have a king or a queen). It was so so juice. So i sat down as soon as a seat was free with £100 but then realised that wasn't enough and I had to cover the main fish at the table (who played every hand, and just would not ever fold even if he had too under cards to the board!) So I borrowed an extra £100. Unfortunately the table didn't last too long when the two drunk fish decided they'de have more fun on roulette. Luckily i managed to end the short session £55 up so it wasn't a disaster! Every hand I was seriously like please hit this board hard, please hit this board hard lol! I mean if you hit a set, bottom pair would stack off to you with these guys. It was great!

Anyway, it was such a good weekend. I arrived back in Nottingham at 8am Monday morning (woops lectures+tutorials today) pretty nackered. This week I'm playing the £330 GUKPT prelim tommorow, £110 GUKPT prelim on wednesday and a £85 freezeout at DTD to finish the week off. Let's hope I start winning some races and take some serious tournies down! Woop woop :)