blonde poker forum

I've been thinking how far poker has come in the last fifteen years or so in the UK and have a feeling that some of the young players today might not realise quite how lucky they are to be playing tournament poker under present day conditions.

I thought it might be fun to list a few pet hates from how tournies used to be run, so I'll kick it off with a couple of mine from close to the top of my lengthy list.

Tables breaking and three players are told to go to table "X" whereupon there ensues a musical chairs scenario with each player trying to secure the most favourable seat re. the Big Blind.

Hand-timed levels whereby the blinds go up when a favoured player is now OTB or an ill-favoured one is in the BB.

Tournaments that would start an hour late, waiting for certain players to arrive who wanted to be in at the start

Self-deal on small round tables with Argos chips

Moving the short stack

Smokers

Self dealt tourneys and cash games

Things I loved and missed:

Pot Limit Hold Em Tournies

£20 rebuys where certain people put £100 plus in the pool but rarely cashed :)

Soft Fields :D

Smoking at the tables

12 players to the table

Getting told off for check raising, or going all in with less than ten bigs

Getting told off, or even overruled, for refusing a deal

Letting any old mug off the street deal cash games

Moving the short stack

5,000 chips in £500 comps, and that being 'deep'

Most of this still happens at Naps in Sheffield

I have heard alot of people say someone told them off for check raising.

But I must say it has never happened to me and I've never been at a table where it happened.

Worst thing about the old days?

You had be dealt in on the first hand of the tournament or you were dq'ed.

Being the sole non-smoker on a table of ten+ was really not uncommon especially in enclosed cardrooms like The Rainbow or Naps Sheffield, and the reek of stale smoke on your clothes when you got home had to be experienced to be believed.

I played a comp in Brum. In the 90 minute rebuy period, we were 12 handed.

However many all ins with multiple different sized stacks so it took forever to sort out the sidepots (everyone had a theory on how to sort it out easily). Then there was a board with three fives on it and two people said they passed a five so we had to go through the deck to make sure there weren't five in there.

We had three orbits.

Break time.

Structures that went

50 / 100
100 / 200
200 / 400
etc

I miss Tom not having to ask if there was the possibility of a 150-300 level in a tournament ;)

I'm on my phone so searching is a pain but someone post a link to the 'move the shortstack' thread.

Hated that tournies never started on time but preferred it when late entries were not allowed.

Miss smoking at the table.

Miss Free soft drinks and sandwiches served at the table.

Miss pot limit.

Miss £20 rebuys and the phenomenal prize pools generated.

Miss the inevitable cries of 'rebuy Ron' at the Rainbow

Miss the top heavy pay structure.

Feeling pretty nostalgic about the good old days of casino poker.

That was AdamM's finest hour.

Another cracking rule was that if you missed three consecutive hands you paid double the BB on each subsequent hand with it being doubled again for every further hand that you were absent.

Bearing in mind that all of the games were pot-limit and one table might have an extra ten BB's in the middle that might or might not be included in a "pot" raise according to the TD, it is not surprising that some arguments ensued...

Christ!

I'd forgotten that one. Why was it ever there FFS?

An absolute blonde classic

Moving the shortstack

http://blondepoker.com/forum/index.php?topic=8016.0

the old luton club used to have a dress code which ment if your jacket wasnt suitable ,you cant come in ,however you can use one of theres for just a small charge......towards cleaning,genius
we will take your shirt of you upstairs and charge you for a jacket while we do it.

Pretty sure if you were missing they posted your blinds as normal and after second orbit missing then the posted a sb every hand as well rather than as you described :)

Playing ten handed on all tables except the small ones that they cram in to sell more seats.... and the big one at the back they can get 13 on

Odd chip denoms at Owlerton Naps. 25 50 100 and 200 chips if I recall

Without that there'd be no Dusk Till Dawn though!

There were times when it doubled-up every hand Simon.

When the stack got short enough did they move it :D

These are hardly good old days, these are exactly the rules in Gala up until about 2 years ago. I used to like the self-deal tourneys too.

I remember when I was 18 I got bullied out of a decision that I knew was correct. In some £750'er in a festival I went allin and it folded round to that chap that owns the chicken shops from Walsall (Chicken Joe?). I looked up to the dealer and I said 28k and she nodded. Chicken Joe asked for a count and the dealer said "28k" without even calling it. Joe called and lost and then when my chips were counted I had 38k (I wasn't angling, just a pure mistake). Joe had almost the exact same stack as me but they let him keep 10k because I had said "28k" even though I had said all-in first.

There are many others, I have memories of one of my first ever live tourneys being in Luton and I had to play 11 or 12 handed for the first hour because they ran out of tables.

Everyone used to be old. Really old. Tikay used to bring the average DOWN and the table chat was dire.

Being a cocky 18 year old I refused a deal for the bubble when there were 11 left and it caused an uproar. I loved it and I'd do it again, although, nobody does that anymore.

The top heavy prizepools were hilarious and they used to be a lot worse before I started playing. Examples: http://pokerdb.thehendonmob.com/event.php?a=r&n=23968 (http://pokerdb.thehendonmob.com/event.php?a=r&n=23968) & http://pokerdb.thehendonmob.com/event.php?a=r&n=17920

84 entries x £100 and £11K to the winner, sounds good to me :D

Chicken George. Think his brother may have been Joe, but without the chicken. Greek gentleman.

Ahh yes. The tournament in Luton I mentioned that was 12 handed for myself was the first time I ever met you Tikay. I was at a table with yourself and Jen :).

Not missed:
Self-deal tables.
Sticky chips - lifting the top one and having a stack of 10 come with it.
Smokers

Missed:
The old Luton Grosvenor - my first UK casino poker experience and the new place never had the same vibe for me (including the walk of death down the alley, which was character-building, to say the least!)
Vegas cardrooms with 90% of games available being limit holdem.
Jon Raab dropping trophies

I'm glad that tournaments can start earlier than 5pm these days...

forgot how funny the 'moving the shortstack' thread was  - given me a few lols this morning!

Can't remember if anyone who played 'village poker' at BB3 in Walsall is still around?  As I recall, the short stack at the start of a hand found themselves in the bb and dealing.  Good times :D

Those tiny round tables at the Vic and the near religious fervour with which the old boys enforced the shuffle-cut-deal pantomime.

1500 chip rebuys.

Smoking.



On the still miss it list is the 6O cash game at Walsall and the massed look of disdain when some young kid asked if they would open a hold em cash table :)

I remember that happening at the Vic to a lad from Norway who was over with a mate of mine.

He had been asked to go and buy some suitable shoes by the front of house, came back just after the tournament had kicked off (literally minutes) and they gave him his buyin back...

Being able to win.

Yeah it was Chicken Joe, his Brother is Shah Koumi.

There was someone at the old Luton that missed the start because he went to the toilet, after buying in.

Haha, this was a £1500 comp back in 2006, and he had flown over from Norway specifically to play this comp.

All of the above + crammed in like sardines

Shefield Naps was a busy place for  festivals , tournaments and cash with many a "face" frequenting the premises

However late 2005 they decided it would be a good idea that "you couldn't register for tournies unless you were on the premises"   Genius !

That meant players had no way of knowing runner numbers etc which actually created a chicken and egg scenario as non local players refused to travel , consequently the numbers quickly dwindled and Naps would either start 1-2 hours late or actually cancel certain events ....also there was no late reg avaliable

That was the start of the end for the big festivals  and its just £20 rebuys I believe now... Im a Sheffielder and like a lot of others have not been back since.

How did you put up with all this crap? Then again seeing some of the faces at GUKPTLuton this week I guess it was part of the fun for them.

Def think that the £20 rebuys should return, they sound fun. Problem is that every single fish says they prefer a £30 bowl sigh 40k starting stacks which is so so bad for them. Also guess that with poker being run at so few venues there was less choice and people had to really commit to the £20 rebuy to make it worth going.

There used to be a £20+R on a Friday night I think it was, which was very popular which was capped at around 80 players.

It was so popular that some locals created a black-market by buying seats knowing it would sell out and then selling them on to travelling players at double the price+ who arrived after it was full. I think I once saw one sold for £80.

The big cash game back in the day at Stoke where a guy used to bring his dog in and he'd lie there all night chilled as, eating cheese sandwhiches people gave him. I don't remeber this name but he was the first person i ever knew who actually understood things like pot odds, total revelation at the time.

Smoking at the tables was great.

£5 rebuys where people went all in every hand from the first hand until they got some chips to play with.

Haha, the local Gala in Bournemouth used to have a £10 rebuy on a Sunday night, and you got 500 chips to start :D

yep, was standard as far as i knew.

Found out tonight that Broadway will be running some rebuy comps in their standard weekly schedule from November.

Should be interesting.

I ran a £5 rebuy with 500 chips at Gala Brum, back in the day. Cardroom held 50 and used to plough through 45 rebuys a hand and that was pot limit :)
Had a £2k GTE used to make £3k.

Doubling the last bet for min raise, blinds flat and doubled every 20 minutes. Ewwwwwwwwww can't believe people played them lol

I remember it well. Self deal, right?

Absolutely unless we had a spare hanging around :)

I was new to holdem then. 500 chips at 25/50 was a raise-fold stack

Consider it low stack training for future deepstacks :D

Absolutely. Nothing's changed.  :D

I ran my first no limit freezeout there. It was a deepstacked 5000 chips on a 30 min clock. £30 entry no juice. The field was halved in the first 2 hands, players didn't get it at all to start with. And I upgraded from an egg timer to a laptop with actual tournament software lol, I was like a pig in shit.

Having 500 chips last hand before add on and raise/folding to 250 so can rebuy. Have 750 and take add on. This was in the £10 rebuys at galas.

The Grovsnor in Cardiff use to run the 500 chip £5 rebuys as well, think it was around 2004 time. You would play I think 40 mins with the blinds 25/50 and then they went up to 50/100. Look back now it's quite funny how bad I played in those things. At the break the blinds would increase to 100/200 and you could add on for another 500 chips. I didn't like taking more than 4 rebuys back then.

Playing one now would be quite fun though, I wonder how many rebuys I would now burn through in a night.

Blinds: They were on the button, like a DC game.


Chip Counts: Tournaments would finish at 4.30 a.m., when if there were 2 or more players left a chip count would ensue. Fair enough, except the prize pool was distributed according to these rules:

The player with the most chips took first prize, second chip leader second prize and so on. If top prize was £2,500 & second £1,750 and player A had 350,100 chips and player B 350,000, then A gets top prize, B gets £1,750.

Farcical scenes would ensue, where players would want an exact chip count of their opponents stack every hand and would dwell for 2 minutes, knowing that in the time left they'd locked up first.

I explained this scenario in DTD a few weeks ago and people looked at me as though I was making it up, which I could understand coming from 20 somethings, but Julian gave me the same look and he was playing in those games.

I remember first playing in Leeds Naps 7 years ago, was a tony space at the back of the casino, big enough for a bout 4 tables comfortably, there would be 8 full tables for the £20rebuy every tues and thurs without fail, 75% of the people smoking relentlessly, you got 1000 chips at 100/100 for 2hours of rebuys, action was POT LIMIT and after a while the chips stopped and you got these ballin' plaques instead!! If you made it to the final two tables you'd have a big pile of plaques was SICK :)

used to be £2.5-3k up top every time as well, amazing  :)

Also when I first started playing cash games in Leeds the game was £2/£2 and £5/£5 Pot Limit Holdem but there wasn't a bb and a sb everyone just ante'd £2 or £5 and the action started from the left of the button, so you could open to £50 at £5/£5 lol not that anyone was EVER that wreckless oviously...

Happy to have contributed :)
when I was the OP, i was sure there's be a link to that thread by the end of pg1.
sure enough, there it is

I in a way quite liked self deal comps. It makes the game feel less formal.

I miss comps not starting you with stupidly high chip stacks.

I miss being new to the game and finding it fun whilst at the same time not really knowing what I was doing but learning.

I can remember a £30 1000 chip re-buy tournament I held here in Norwich 2003/4, with over 100 runners, players came from all over the UK to play, there were numerous 10 All-Ins on a 10 handed table, there was £11k of re-buys in 2 hours, were have those days gone?

Poker in most casinos now, sometimes 2 or 3 in small towns which dilutes player pool.  OFC when you travel far for events like this then you need to keep on punting or face a boring drive home.

Every comp is a 30k chips for 20 quid etc

More people grinding online?

These rebuys sound fun.  DTD set one up?!

Haha, I remember knocking a few rebuys in at that one!

Your dad had a few as well Marky

Great weekend  :)

Another name from the past

Yeah, he had his fair share and it was a great weekend.

The 2nd one was absolute carnage, I just went right through from Saturday lunchtime until we left on Sunday :D




Remember the 2nd one that dad ran, people flying from Sweden and Tenerife for a £30 rb :D

I remember in Nottingham when rules were rules unless you were named Ash Abdullah

I think that's a bit unfair Cos, there obviously were rules in Nottingham. Ash wrote them.

...And he always implemented them in a fair, judicious and even handed manner, according to the outcome that would benefit him the most.

What comps they were.  So much fun.  I guess they were ultimately responsible for me wasting about 8 years of my life, loving the game.

What happened to people like John Huckle, Salmonesta (sp?), decision, Mr carpet etc etc

Saw him last weekend in Dtd. The man never ages!

Miss those nights in Gala when even i could win

Salmonoysta is still in Manchester working in the ticket game, and spoke to him a few months ago as it goes.

I used to speak with Decision quite regularly when the old Lads was still running, but lost touch a few years back. Remember meeting him on the 2006 Laddies cruise and as expected he was a gentleman.

MrCarpet is a blast from the past too, but no idea about him either unfortunately.

"Change the cards" would be called out every time certain people suffered a beat.

There was one Italian guy in Derby called Camilo ( I dubbed him Camilo Parker-Bowles) who was a lovely guy with quite a strong accent, and he would shout out something which sounded very much like "ginger fucking cards" whenever he wanted a new deck.

After that we just used to shout "ginger" to the TD who was actually TJ.

+1  :'(