Five Hours and a Duffel Bag Later …

Posted by Cynical Sarah on November 8, 2007

It’s 5 p.m. on Sunday and I’m sitting here in pajama pants, a sweatshirt and slippers – one step up from my actual pajamas. I hadn’t really planned to end up this way, even though it was supposed to be a nice lazy Sunday no matter what I ended up doing.

What happened was that I got up and lazed around for a while in my actual pajamas. Had some breakfast, registered for my blogger poker tournament at PokerStars and suddenly it was almost noon and time to start playing.

Not expecting to actually stay in all that long since I don’t have a lot of actual playing experience, I hurriedly threw on something warmer and sat down to play.

The reason I signed up to play is because I pretty much live and breathe poker through my job but never really participate in the actual game much. I know how to play. There’s pretty much a poker game at every family function on my Dad’s side of the family, plus I’m sure I come by some poker talent naturally from my Mom’s family as well.

My poker experience has been in the family games, though, and not much else that I would call “serious” poker. So I’ve got all the poker knowledge just soaking into my brain as I read about poker, edit articles about poker, write about poker and hear lots of talk about poker at work.

Today, I put that knowledge to the test in against 1,336 other bloggers in the World Blogger Championship of Online Poker. It was free, but at least there were prizes being given away so that people would play seriously, unlike in the play money games where even if you are playing your cards well, it’s hard to judge since not many other people are even trying.

My goal initially was just to try to put what I’ve learned to the test. I was just hoping not to be the first person knocked out at my table. Then when that didn’t happen, I wanted to still be in it when the field got down under 1,000.

Miraculously, and I use that word quite seriously, I was still in it at that point. I was about average in the chip count when it happened, so I decided my new goal was to make it to the halfway mark of the playing field.
With the help of a suck-out jack on the river (sorry to all my readers who don’t know Texas Hold’em, there will be some “technical” terms thrown in) and a lucky split pot, I kept surviving and even thriving at points to stay about average.

Then it happened – I actually made it into the first level of prizes. That’s where I made my foolish mistake. I said, “Please, poker gods, just let me get past this first level of prizes into the iPods. That’s all I want.”
So of course, that’s when my first multi-table tournament life ended. I was severely short stacked and picked up pocket jacks in late position. It was as good a hand to take a stand on as any so I pushed all-in.

The big blind called with ace-king – big slick as we in the biz like to call it. That’s when the poker gods determined that I wasn’t good enough to move up from a duffel bag and pack of playing cards to iPod range. My opponent flopped another ace and two more kings to give him a full house, and I was dead in the water.

I will say, though, 67th place out of 1,337 people is way better than ever expected to do. Not to mention I was pretty impressed with myself with some of the decisions I made to play hands and how to play them. However, after five hours of sitting in a computer chair staring at a computer screen, I’m not sure a duffel bag and pack of playing cards was worth the effort.

- Sarah L. Polson

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Tags: humor, poker

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