Going live

Last night I experienced live poker for the first time. Like most new things that involve, er, real people, this was seriously scary for me. It was a weekly $10 buy-in tournament at the Cambridge Hotel pub. One bloke looked like he was running the show; I asked him if he was the poker guy. "What does it look like?" OK, be like that. He took my ten bucks and gave me a card which they stamp each time you buy a drink; each stamp was exchangeable for 500 chips. I just had two beers - hopefully they would relax me.

You could sit down at any table in front of any 6000-chip stack. Everybody seemed scary to some degree; I tried to pick the least scary table. The tournament started; cards and chips were flying around and it was all a bit intimidating. I quickly let the rest of the table know that I'd never played live before. I knew about burn cards but had no idea about cutting the cards before each deal or that funny yellow plastic card which stops people from seeing the bottom card in the deck. And as for that fancy shuffling, forget it. I made every mistake imaginable - forgetting to post the blinds, not knowing when it was my turn to act, dealing cards too high up (so people's eyeballs are a centimetre from the table when the cards are dealt?), trying to deal more than two cards to each player (perhaps wishing it was badugi), forgetting to burn, and plenty more besides. The chips were effectively foreign currency to me (what's black again?) and sometimes I put in the wrong amount. I had to concentrate so hard on the mechanics of the game that I was glad to be dealt mostly crap in the early stages.

I won my first pot when I flopped a flush draw with AQs and semibluffed the turn. Then just before the first break I got sucked in with KTs, calling off a fair portion of my stack before folding to a smallish river bet in a sizeable pot. He showed his rivered full house; I hadn't even got a pair. I was short and soon after the break I got all in with QJo, half-hoping I could just go home. My shove was called and I was heading home until a jack came on the river. Being unaware of poker etiquette I apologised profusely for my suckout.

I managed to accumulate chips after that. On one hand I got a free look in the big blind with (I think) Kd 6d. We went four-handed (at least) to the flop which came out all diamonds, including the ace, giving me the nut flush. I just checked, as did everyone else. The turn was basically a blank. Again I checked, this time there was a bet and a call, and I went all in. They folded but it was still a useful pot. People seemed to drop like flies and by the second break I found myself at the final table.

I still got pulled up for one or two things. The blinds were 800 and 1600 when I pushed out four 1000s followed by four 100s and announced "four-four". But no, I had to take back my 100s and only raise to 4000. It seems I tried to make a "string bet" (when a player uses more than one forward motion to put chips in for a raise without verbally declaring the raise first) but I wasn't to know. With maybe six players left and the blinds at 3000 and 6000, I had only 20,000 or so. I was in the big blind with Th 9d and nobody raised. The flop came 9-4-3, all hearts. I just checked, the (pretty good, I thought) woman opposite me went all in and had me covered. I had no real choice but to call with my pair and flush draw. She flipped over 4-3 for two small pair, the turn was a nine and I survived once more. I guessed I was slight underdog, maybe 55-45, but Twodimes actually makes me a 51-49 favourite. There can't be many times in hold 'em that the worst hand on the flop is actually the favourite. Soon afterwards she got short and shoved J2o; I happened to have KK and she was out.

They didn't have a payout structure; everything depended on deals. With five left we agreed that everyone would get $10 back from the $350 pool; with three left we decided to split the remainder $175-$75-$50. I thought I was likely to finish second because I had a good stack but heads-up isn't my forte, so I didn't like that split much but hey. When we got heads-up I had the chip lead. A few people stuck around to watch and one woman (who was particularly cowgirl-like) wanted to know my online handle. She was also desperate to know whether I had a jack on a particular hand in which I went all in. We swapped the chip lead three times, he survived with KK against my A8 on an eight-high flop, then I hung on with my pocket eights against two overcards but the end came for me with he rivered a nine to beat my K2s. The nerve-wracking tournament (the nerves had nothing to do with winning or losing) lasted a little over four hours.