Surfergeeks

Wow, today’s (well, technically yesterday) been a Poker Roller Coaster Ride.

I played in a tournament earlier @ UltimateBet where the winner of the tournament would win their entry into the $1,000,000 Stone Cold Nuts II tournament in January. First prize walks away with their entry into the ’06 WSOP PLUS $225,000 (USD). The entry is $530. The way this tournament was structured is that is a $5.00+$0.50 buyin. There are also rebuys and one addon allowed. For the first hour of the tourney, whenever your chip stack drops below 1500 you can fork over another $5 to get 1500 more chips. Then, at the end of 1 hour, each player, regardless of chip stack, is allowed to pay $5 for an additional 1500 chips. I actually played fairly well and never needed to rebuy. (I saw one guy at my table rebuy 9 times!) Then, come the end of hour 1, I opted not to rebuy. I didn’t feel that adding 1500 chips to my stack would benefit me that much. Plus, I wanted to see how far I could make it by only spending $5.50.

Well, I made it to the final two! It ended up being heads-up action between me and one other player. Unfortunately, by this point, I was at a severe chip disadvantage. I had ~40-45K in chips and he had up around 120K. I caught AKo so I moved all-in. He called and turned over J9s. I was a slight odds favourite. My odds went up when the flop came AJK. That gave me two pair, aces and kings, to his pair of jacks. My odds then dropped significantly when the turn showed us another jack. The river, where I needed another A or K to appear to win, or a Q to split, denied me my opportunity to double up.

Still I finished in 2nd! So 1st place gets an entry worth $530 so 2nd place has got to pay out something sweet, right? Well, it paid me $30 – better than nothing.

Which leads us to tonight…one of the poker forums that Nikki & I take part in, talkingpoker.com, held a $10+1 private tourney for members. We both played in it. Nikki went out 11th. At one point, I was doing fairly well, actually holding chip lead briefly. Unfortunately, that was earlier on and I ended up going out 10th.

Not to be discouraged, Nikki pointed out that Wil Wheaton (yeah, the Star Trek guy) was holding a private tourney tonight as well. Well, since I wouldn’t need to be focusing on the Talking Poker tourney, I dropped down my $11 for it. Again, I started off fairly well but had a couple bad beats and made a couple poor plays. In that one I busted out in 11th.

So, for those keeping track at home – today I was up a whopping $2.50!!! Woot!

So for about 6 hours of entertainment I got paid $2.50. It’s like being paid to sit through the first two LotR movies!