Late night with the cards.

Played one of my usual games of tournament pub poker last night. It has a $12 buyin with one $5 rebuy/addon/lifeline. There is a modest $500 guaranteed total prize pool with the top 5 making the money. In honesty, I was in the mood for a long walk instead, but a friend whom I often play poker with talked e into going.

The first hour was not taken too seriously and I squandered my initial stack just before the break. I then used my $5 rebuy and was back in the game. My table wa broken up and I was separated from my friend, this helped me change the way I was playing and all of a sudden, I started getting good hands. My friend was eliminated when we were down to 2 tables.

Pub poker tournaments have different objectives to a proper poker tournament - they ideally want you to play for a couple of hours, have a bit of fun and a couple of drinks, get eliminated and then have a slap on the pokies. as such, tournaments tend to start off slow but push you to play alot of hands towards the end and all you can do is push your chips in and hope to get lucky causing many to get eliminated in a short amount of time late in the tournaments. My very lucky moment was when there was 10 players left. I was first to act with pocket 8's. I went all in. After a couple of folds an announcement was made at the other table that someone was eliminated and we would be making final table. The last person to act woke up with pocket 10's but chose to fold and didn't want to risk his chips so close to final table - a sensible strategy that most probably saved me from tournament elimination.

On the final table I played my usual grind. I was not a big stack but picked my battles well and waited and watched as others were eliminated. Finally made it into the money and the chips started going around the table in a circle as we unintentionally took turns chipping each other up. The guy that came 3rd was rather drunk, despite this, it took some time to eliminate him. Once eliminated, we decided to do a split for $170 each which we were both happy with (although I cannot say the same for the guy who came third). The player I split with managed a Royal Flush earlier in the night - thats something you are lucky to see once a year! I've been on a bit of a streak since coming back from Singapore, making the money in 3 of the 4 events I have played.

Turned out to be a really good night, except for the fact that I didn't get home until 1AM , so ~4 and a half hours sleep for me. I was semi planning to go to an official work Christmas party tonight, but am thinking better of it as -

• Its a week night and I'm already very tired.
• There are several people from work not going
• It is a Jungle Safari themed party and I'm fresh out of loin cloths.