Face In The Crowd

I made my way down to the Vic last night to have a look at the refitted card room and play the £250 tournament. The new room is nice, very busy last night and the lack of smoking in the whole place makes a huge positive difference. The much-anticipated mural is actually very cool. What it is, you have to see it really, but it's a sort of montage of the London skyline, with a certain amount of artistic license in that Big Ben and the London Eye are on the same side of the river and Windsor Castle seems to have been relocated to Central London. But the cool thing is that when you get up close, it's made up of half-inch square "pixels" which are headshots (boom ! headshot) of various players, all shaded different colours to make up the overall picture when seen from a few feet away.

The tournament itself was a total donkfest. It's nice to be reminded how unbelievably badly people are capable of playing in these tournaments if they put their minds to it. It made the WSOP look like an elite gathering of the world's top players in the showpiece tournament series of the year. Wait a minute. No, really it confirmed my handy rule of thumb that in general the standard of play in a live tournament is equivalent to the standard in an online tournament with one tenth the buyin (exception : WSOP main event which compares to one hundredth the buyin online). So I was quite enjoying the regular sight of two people butchering a hand appallingly and the loser stomping off muttering to himself about how bad the other guy was. Unfortunately, although I like a fast tournament, an average stack of M5 with 20 players left is a little bit too fast and I succumbed around 15th, in one of two ways depending on how well you understand tournaments :

1) With AK against AQ god I'm so unlucky it was sick, or
2) My pushing with M4, being called by a hand that was miles ahead of my pushing range and losing.

Fortunately just in time to buy in for the £1000 in Luton and catch the last tube home. Thanks to Dr Channing for using his undoubted charm to persuade Sylvia to secure a Friday Day 1 for me and a Thursday for himself. Neil also promised to add me to the betting in this tournament, I wonder how he will price me up !?

Finally today I also signed up to Facebook which seems to be a slightly more grown-up version of Myspace. If you're on there, don't hesitate to hook me up and make it look like I have more friends, which seems to be the main purpose of the exercise :-)