Almost novel to discuss Poker on here these days, but scenes at DTD last weekend, whilst I was up in Scotland.
They have introduced a new weekend schedule, a £50,000 G'tee £125 on Saturday, & a £50,000 G'tee £250 on the Sunday, both one-dayers so inevitably a bit "sharp", though they did have a 20/25 minute clocks. And for reasons we can only guess at, they were "reg-free" if you regged before it started.
I had bumped into Rob last week & he was musing on whether it would hit the guarantees, which looked very ambitious for 1 dayers.
Well he need not have worried, the Saturday £125 got 662 (SIX HUNDRED & SIXTY TWO) entries. WTF? That must be some sort of DTD record for a 1 day affair.
And that's despite it being during Ramadan, which with the DTD demographic, means quite a few absentees.
Rather oddly, the £250 on the Sunday "only" made 268 entries. Which, compared to 662 for the £125, really seems to emphasise that there's a price-point sweet spot.
When the dust settled, the £125 went to Mark Habbershaw and the impressive Ben Shannon chopping it up for just north of £25,000...
1 MARK HABBERSHAW £12,550
2 BENJAMIN SHANNON £12,550
In the £250, I believe it was a 5 way chop, with the winner being shown as the fella with the best name.
1 GHOLAMREZA MOHAMMADI MOGHADDAM £9,600
2 ANONYMOUS £8,045
3 GEORGE HOLMES £7,975
4 ANDREW MAPP £7,690
5 KAI CHAN£6,500
In a post script to those extraordinary numbers at DTD when they ran the £125/£250 on Saturday & Sunday.
I was able to play the 2nd weekend of them. And the Saturday £125 dropped from 662 entries to 451, with the Sunday £250 going from 268 to just 140. Explain that. Safe to say, the £250 got promptly dropped from the schedule. Rob arrived for his Sunday night pow-wow with the Team & it disappeared from the schedule within minutes, having missed g'tee by a mile. Can't say I blame him.
All of which is an excuse to shoehorn in the fact I cashed in both.
Full on min-cash in the £125, (£250), minus £25 for a 10% swap with Thewy. Gonna take me a very long time to get even with him on staking at this rate. But we had great fun, & the meet-up crew during breaks was Ian Gas, Maria, Thewy & me. Lovely.
Even more surprising, was somehow bimbling & bumbling to 9th & the FT on the Sunday, collecting £1,810. A £250 NLH is top of my range in NLH really, the kids are just too good, only the WSOP Seniors would I play a higher NLH affair. A 10% swap with Moulty cost me £180, but I suppose I should not complain as he ran 2nd (chop) for £9,400, lol, so that was a bit of a bonus. How good do I run with swaps?
And on the subject of run-good, in both the £125 & £250 I had two remarkable strokes of luck.
In the £125, it's walked to the SB who has A-K, & I'm sat in the BB with Aces. Match ups don't come better than that - & it happened TWICE, in identical positions.
And in the late stages of the £250, there's a shove & a call & I'm sitting behind with Aces, which held. Then, on the bubble, rinse repeat. And still I only ran 9th.... In fact, that was the last hand I won or even played, I just went totally card/spot dead after that, & just bled away. The Final was painful, three levels without a) anyone busting or b) without me playing a hand. It's variance doing it's thing, & I had to get payback for all those Aces.
Really pleased for Moulty though. And for myself, I'm on a mini-heater right now, 6 or 7 cashes at DTD this year now, though of course never threatened a win, Top 3 or even "business". And it was one of the most enjoyable weekends of poker I can recall, 12 hours play two days running, it does not get better. Loving life.
And with that, I end this chirp.
