Affiliate Marketing Blog by James Little

Last night I attended the second game of the ANPL (Amateur National Poker League) in my local bar and won for the second time in a row.

It was an excellent game - certainly the most exciting live tournament that I’ve played, even if there were only 14 people taking part.

The game started off at quite a slow pace - you are given 3,000 chips and the blinds are 50/25 - it all kicks off about 8pm and there is one break at around 9-9.30pm.  At the break everyone is given another 3,000 chips, even if you have already gone out.

So back to the game - I ended up one of the two people who were out by the break - I don’t think I had more than one pair for the entire first half and I suffered with the blinds increasing.

I came back into the game in the second half and was obviously in last place, I was a man possessed and within a relatively short period of time had started to increase my stack dramatically - it may have been a change in my style of play or maybe lady luck had started shining, but either way I was on fire.  Within 30 minutes two people were gone and I was the chip leader.   Play continued and after a few more exists the two tables were merged and into a final table.   I was the chip leader and was trying to play quite aggressively whilst everyone else was playing pretty safe.

Then I lost it bad - I had a pretty good hand - an A K suited.  The flop showed another A K so I had two good pairs.   I went ahead and forced someone all-in who seemed quite reluctant.  Cards were turned and they had a pair of 7’s so the odds were on my side.   A 7 was the last card to come out and I lost a stack of chips and was no longer leading.  At that stage of the game if I had won the hand I could have finished the others off pretty quickly.

Anyhow, play continued and then the opposite happened - again I went all in with a pretty crap hand - trying to bluff and pick up what was on the table.  Calling my bluff another person at the table went all in - turned out they had a pair of A’s (one from the deal, one from the flop) and I had bugger all.   I ended up getting a flush and pushing them out of the game.   I went on from there and all was quite quiet until there was just two of us left.   I was the chip leader and the blinds were now 8,000 and 4,000.   The other guy was the big blind and it was now 11.30pm.   I went all in without even looking at my cards.   He looked at his and did the same, fancying his luck with a pair of 8’s.

I ended up winning with a pair of 10’s (one from the deal and one from the flop) and I am now on 272 points from two games, ranking me about 3rd in the country in the ANPL league.

Was a really good night out - it’s the only time I really go out in the evening in the week and a few beers and game of poker go down well.

NB.  I also dragged Ste along, who also ended up on the final table in his first live game.  You should not however let this fact make it sound like all the players were crap and this is certainly not the reason I won!

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 18th, 2007 at 1:41 pm and is filed under Poker, Personal Stuff . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.