Welcome

Hello there!

My name is John Hare aka Little John and this is my first attempt at blogging so please be gentle! I am a 51 yr old from Blackpool and love my poker. I am going to try and blog my experiences of playing this wonderfully frustrating game.

Four years ago I held the common belief that poker was a quick way of loosing my house, car, all my wages and savings on the turn of a card. One evening I was bored and was channel hopping when I found a programme called Poker Night Live (PNL) and out of boredom I started to watch. PNL ran hands from internet tournaments and these hands were summarized and discussed by studio experts. On this first visit I was bombarded with terms such as ‘position’ pot odds, ‘outdraws’, ‘bad beats’… the list seemed endless however there was something that appealed to me. The next evening I watched again and after this I became a regular viewer.

One evening, many months later, after a few days away I switched on only to find a blank screen, PNL was no more! In desperation I surfed the channels and found skypoker, to my surprise most of the ‘experts’ from PNL were there and the format was a similar one to PNL. I continued to watch, still not daring to take the plunge and open an online account. I did find however that my knowledge of poker was improving and I was able to read the boards and start to understand the importance of position and how it affected starting hand requirements.

I knew it was time to take the next step, I logged on and opened an account with skypoker, went to the lobby and found a single table sit and go for the princely sum of £1.15. With trembling hand I watched as the table opened and there I was playing poker. It seemed to be over in a flash, 40 minutes had passed and I came second, a profit on my first event. I felt like I’d won the WSOP!

I played online for the next couple of months but I knew I was missing out, I longed to play live, the face to face contact with other people, no protection of anonymity sat behind the pc. I enquired at the Castle Casino in Blackpool and found there were games played on several evenings of the week so I entered an event blindly, it was the Thursday evening crap shoot (£5 pot limit re-buy). Firstly I was sat with 9 other players, I’d never sat at a full ring table before. The dealer shuffled up and we were off, first cards dealt, I looked, phew, a pile of junk Q, 6 off suit, in the muck! The hand ended with 3 players ‘all in’ and a right bag of spanners won! Hang on I thought, where were the pot odds? How could these players call with rubbish? God they are all maniacs! I took a deep breath and thought, ‘Ok just play the game to your principles and see’. 30 minutes of folding my chips being eroded by the blinds but I still had 600 out of the starting stack of 1000, I’ve got the button and look down and find the daddy of starting hands ‘A,A’… happy days! Now we can play a hand of poker, my mind was racing, ok A,A what are the odds? Yes, its all there, ok so now lest get it heads up against one player, by the time Its me to act 4 players are ‘all in’. I knew my A,A could be a dog against multiple players but I had not played a hand so in the chips went. My hand held and the dealer pushed what seemed a big pile of chips in my direction to comments of ‘nice hand’. I smiled lamely and reached down to ‘stack’ the chips, damm! my hands would not work, I was shaking so much from adrenalin I could not physically stack the chips! Welcome to live poker! I finished 15th out of a field of 47, not a bad first live game. That was 2 ½ years ago and I like to think since then my game has improved.

I have cashed in the Castle poker league in the last 2 seasons, the Winter League via a 30 seat play off and the last Summer one by finishing 4th overall.