blonde poker forum

Press Release

New Year, New Tour!  GUKPT Leg 1 Hits the Ground Running in Manchester

The Grosvenor UK Poker Tour 2011 is about to get underway.  The first tournament cards will hit the felt on Monday as the GUKPT crowns its first Champions at the opening festival of the year.  After the Christmas hibernation, the poker community of Manchester will be the first to welcome the Tour to G Casino, Bury New Road, with a full week of live events running until the very end of this month.  The £1,000 Main Event will be split into two start days (Thursday 27th and Friday 28th) unlike most of this year’s twin flights which will take place on the same day.

The regular double flight is just one of many changes that have been made to this year’s tour, with the individual post-festival Champion of Champions events representing the best added value around, played online at gcasino.com while the sweet taste of victory is still fresh after each leg.  Manchester’s Champion of Champions £10,000 freeroll will take place on Wednesday 2nd February, and is open to winners of all side events, including the online 10% Series tournament.

For those who fancy taking on the GUKPT Leaderboard, the slate is as clean as a whistle – perhaps a new set of names may grace the Rankings this year after a thrilling chase awarded David Johnson the 2010 top prize of £20,000.  With £65,000 in total to play for, the chance to start afresh on the road to the top is not to be missed.

We are pleased to present an all-new site http://www.grosvenorukpokertour.com/ - here you will find full schedule and qualification details for the whole year, an up-to-date Leaderboard, links to the Tour’s Galleries, Reports, and Facebook page - the full gamut of online information in a brand new format.

Full Schedule for GUKPT Leg 1: Manchester

Monday 24th January:  NLH Freeze Out £100 +£10 7.30pm (1 day)
Tuesday 25th January:  NLH Freeze Out £500 +£50 7.30pm (2 days)
Wednesday 26th January:  Omaha Double Chance Freeze Out £250 +£25 6pm (1 day)
Wednesday 26th January:  NLH Super Satellite Freeze Out £150 +£15 8.30pm (1 day)
Thursday 27th January:  Main Event Flight 1A £1,000 +£70 12pm (4 days)
Thursday 27th January:  NLH Short Handed Freeze Out £200 +£20 7.30pm (1 day)
Friday 28th January:  Main Event Flight 1B £1,000 +£70 12pm (4 days)
Friday 28th January:  NLH Freeze Out £100 +£10 7.30pm (1 day)
Saturday 29th January:  NLH Freeze Out Re-Entry* £250 +£25 6pm (2 days)
Sunday 30th January:  Bounty Booster £100 +£10 5pm (1 day)
Monday 31st January:  Online 10% Series £100 +£10 NLH Freeze Out on gcasino.com/bluesq.com poker rooms 8pm

If this Sunday’s (23rd January) 7:30pm Ten-Seat-Guaranteed £30 Re-buy Super Satellite into the first Main Event of the year doesn’t secure a seat, there are afternoon chances to qualify live at the venue planned for this and all Main Tour legs at 2pm on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.  The buy-in for these Re-buy satellites will be either £30 or £50.

blonde Poker will be live updating the Main Event from Thursday to Sunday

I will be there Thursday, and most of Friday's play

A new mystery updater has volunteered to do all four days. This mystery updater has a post-graduate in journalism. This mystery updater is a character. I am trying not to think about it too much.

In all seriousness though, the live update is having to be done out of necessity as cheaply as possible, so it would be great if everyone supported it next week

The aim is to do more through the year, whether we will I am not sure yet. All donations gratefully received, PM if you would like to help

Good stuff - I've always wanted to read an update done by Barry Neville.

I would have gladly volunteered to assist but on earlies all week. 

thanks

All help welcome, through the year.

do we know what time day 2 of the £500 tuesday will commence?

almost always 2.30pm for Day 2 s

Ring to make sure though

I love a mystery :)

Just to answer your question, all our 2 day events have a 2pm restart the following day.
Also worth mentioning is our afternoon satellites have 1 seat guaranteed providing we have a minimum of ten players..
This, alongside the Sunday 10 seat guaranteed and our freezeout satellite means hopefully plenty of chances for you all to save a bit of money and grab yourselves a seat!

We have our Grosvenor Uk poker tour fan page set up on facebook, I'll be part of the team keeping an eye on it and I'd love everyone to get involved.
In addition I now have a new facebook profile set up so feel free to add me on there and any queries or questions I'll aim to sort as quickly as I can.

Hope to see you all soon, Dena

Can't believe I'm a newbie after all the years I've been a member of blonde!

Newbie on blonde, newbie on life. Unlucky

Sigh.. Thanks for that Dave

I'm gonna guess CC.

Which Blonde's are playing this?

No one read Caroline's blog.

Thanks

Defo playing the £100 side on friday, hopefully playing the £200 6max on the thur, gl any blondes playing

Is that an observation or an instruction?

Bit late, i've got a link to it on my blog

A request

How is a man meant to spend the week building up suspense, if the object of that suspense blabs four days early?

p.s PL is unable to play GUKPTs.

FFS If you'd said an ability to hold your own water was part of the job description, I would never have considered it!

Anyway Pleno gave the game away with his subtle guess - oohh CC, lemme think..Is it Captain Caveman?

Anyway, I'm still waiting for someone to answer my question - is the Plinton allowed in the G?

As above, the object of your desire cannot play in GUKPTs

Thought you were refering to Pleno lol.

Ah well, I'm sure Barry Neville will be there.

Pleno has school on Thursday.

Ooooooh!

A subtle & shrewd observation Mr P.

Last I heard, he was teaching Evilpie how to chat up girls. Case rests, I guess.

My first interaction with Tikay on Blonde. And he attempts some humour? This could get messy.

Your memory fails you. Badly! Unless, of course, you exempt PM's.........

Of course I mean to the public eye. There are two Peeleno1's the nice one usually found by PM/facebook/msn/skype who is trying to hide from his alterego pleno1, the keyboard warrior found usually on Blonde and various other UK poker forums getting up to mischeif.

Yup, I''ll deffo buy that. The one who wrote to me was, I thought, a most pleasant & well-mannered young man. I liked him, a lot.

I'm also in your comma club and was actually an employee of yours once. We are practically bezzies.

Now you've got me, as I don't recall that. But I would not employ anyone unless they were decent, deferential, & well-mannered. So that fits.

Shall we teach Mondy the art of, shall we say, comma-isation?

I did a deepstack event avec Tighty. As you are the closest thing that Blonde has to a gaffer, I therefore worked for you.  ;tightend;

And yes, we shall.

what was the cash action like last night?

My comma-isation is coming on a treat thank you very much.

FYP.

I meant the leaving of a space not the actual correct use of them. One step at a time.

Live Update thread here for tomorrow

http://blondepoker.com/forum/index.php?topic=51664.0

Please support the update, thanks

Or I kill you.

Be afraid. I mean, really.

McAdams Bests Dan-gerous Final Table to Win £58,100 and GUKPT Manchester Title

Peter McAdams has beaten a field of 207 at Manchester’s G Casino to become the first GUKPT champion of 2011 and take down the top prize of £58,100.  Among the tough competitors gracing the felt over four days of unremitting poker action were bracelet-winners Steve Jelinek and Lawrence Gosney, EPT champion Will Fry, double GUKPT trophy-hoister Priyan de Mel and several others well qualified in the live arena such as Marty Smyth, Julian Gardner, Karl Mahrenholz and Jeff Kimber.

The final featured an appearance by Kuljinder Sidhu, who won last year’s GUKPT Main Event here at Bury New Road and put in an impressive bid to make it a double, but fell at a late hurdle leaving the door open for a new champion.  Unusually for this year’s Tour, the starting flights were split into two separate days, the second flight bringing 138 of the total 207 to the felt.  After watching Carl McCarthy, Allan McLean and Andrew Wright top the Day 1A chip counts with over 80,000 each, the second, larger batch of players brought an even higher pace of action and left three players with six-figure stacks in front of the pack as a whole going into Day 2: Dan Brown, Michalis Michael and Michael Leedham.

The sting of being the first out of a Main Event in either flight is mitigated this year by the fact that the first eliminated receives Wild Card entry into each leg’s Champion of Champions’ event – the first being a £10,000 freeroll on the 2nd February for all winners of Manchester’s side and Main Events (including the Online 10% Series) held online on gcasino and bluesq cardrooms (https://www.gcasino.com/poker).

The other initial Wild Card seat (given to the player randomly drawn on Table 5, Seat 5) went to Glenn Hopley, who fell a little later on Day 1B as the unpredictable Lawrence Gosney cracked his preflop Kings with Sixes.  Last year’s GUKPT Leaderboard Winner David Johnson was busted by virtually the same match-up a little later, his Aces falling to the same under-pair, this time held by Terry Mitford.

Chun Man burst a fast-popping bubble, taking the unpaid 23rd spot after just one hand, running some unlucky Queens into the Kings of Allan McLean and leaving before the suggestion of a saver for the bubble had time to come to a vote.  Meanwhile Spencer Lawrence, having spent 17 levels building a big stack saw it suddenly and dramatically destroyed after flopping bottom two pair against Allan McLean, whose broadway draw hit like a tournament-ending hammer and brought Day 2 to a close.  McLean now held almost 1.2 million chips, double that of second-placed stack Daniel Charlton.

Rarely does a final start with the table nearly tipping due to the weight of one player’s stack; Simon Cawley, Lawrence Gosney, Matt Waterfall, Peter Mcadams and Osman Mustanoglu all held around 10% of the leader’s total chips.  Unsurprisingly, a swift flurry of all-in moves attempted to boost the short stacks into contention for the top spots.  Matt Waterfall’s shove with Sevens was unsuccessful (Peter McAdams held Queens), but 2010 Manchester champion Kuljinder Sidhu performed the double-up against McLean, starting a trend which was continued by no fewer than five other short stacks.  McLean, however, was to have his bad-beat revenge on Sidhu, calling his all-in with 3-3 vs. Sidhu’s 7-7.  Despite Sidhu flopping a seven for a set, four hearts gave one of McLean’s threes the flush and a round of applause congratulated Sidhu for his back-to-back final table appearances.

Lawrence Gosney, scourge of the early days, kept a relatively low profile on the final table until his elimination in 8th place.  While he received no action moving in with Aces preflop, his K-T was looked up by Peter McAdams with a suited A-J, making a flush for good measure.   The same hand match-up proved once again how fickle the deck can be as George Geary’s A-J fell to the K-J of Dan Charlton, and we were down to five players by the time the final side event (£100 Bounty Booster) kicked off at 5pm.  In between these twin confrontations, Osman Mustanoglu finished in 7th place (£7,250) after getting it in with top pair vs. second pair on a Queen-high flop, only to see Charlton’s 7-6 hit running sixes on the turn and river.  His misfortune was part of the two Dans’ rise to the lead – in just two levels Dan Charlton had taken the lead and lost it to Dan Brown (AJ to AK) leaving the dynamic for the end game very different from the start of the day.

Charlton’s rollercoaster recovered from its dip at the expense of Simon Cawley whose A-K lost a race against Jacks, leaving him short, and shortly out - in 5th, for £11,400.  Charlton, meanwhile, hit the dinner break running with 1.3 million chips and coming back to the table managed to avoid the post-prandial skirmishes which saw Peter McAdams and a now-shorter Allan McLean both double through leaving Dan Brown in bad shape and out shortly thereafter in 4th place (£15,000).  McAdams now took his turn as a dominant force (all three of the remaining players had now had a turn at the top) and it was Allan McLean who finally dropped from the running after a hard-fought day in 3rd when the pocket threes which had worked so well for him earlier failed to hold against McAdams’ A-9.  Left with less than a big blind, McLean was a check-down away from the rail and took home £25,350 for his performance.

Heads up play between Peter McAdams and Dan Charlton lasted mere minutes, but a crowd of onlookers still managed to gather round for the deciding hand – all in on a nine-high flop with McAdams holding pocket Kings and Charlton 9-8.  The tiny sprinkling of chips left to Charlton was automatically all-in the next hand and followed the majority of his stack into McAdams’ hands, giving him the title, trophy and £58,100 first prize.  After this dramatic burst onto the live scene they may be back, however, for the second leg of the GUKPT to be held in London’s Victoria casino, March 9th-20th; for more details on upcoming schedules, as well as full reports and last year’s archive, please visit http://grosvenorukpokertour.com.