First online poker tournament

Despite the fact that I told myself to never play online for real money, I took the plunge today with a 1$ tournament over at PokerStars.com.

The setup:

  • $1 + 0.10$ (fee) buy-in, no rebuys…top 180 finishers are “in the money” (1: 341,67$, 2: 201,90$, 3: 132,01$…)
  • 1553 players entered
  • starting time: 3am (my time zone) / 9pm ET
  • Starting chips: 1500
  • No Limit Hold’em

So, how did I do? Not all that bad I guess, although I didn’t last long enough to get “in the money”. I held my ground playing rather tight all the time. And after some, not many, good hands I was able to double up and keep a nice stash of 3620 chips at the first break (after 1h of play – 67 hands played, 605 players still in the tournament). But then I ran against a wall two times in three hands:

  1. My 7-7 were crushed by A-A (pocket rocket) to lose quite some chips (around 1200)
  2. I folded the next hand (nothing much you can do with a 8-6 in a four-way-hand)
  3. Then I looked at a beautiful set of Queens (Q-Q, the Hilton Sisters, …) and one fellow player called my preflop raise to 600, then called again on the flop (2-6-9 if I remember correctly) and then raised on the turn (another 2 – this is probably the moment were I should have picked up a tell on him, but hey…after all this is my first tournament so it’s hard to lay down a hand like Q-Q after you’ve commited more than half of your stack), then he raise again on the turn (K) and I was dumb enough to call – I thought I had the best hand with K-Q-Q-2-2 (two pairs), but he beat me with a nice set of three twos :-(

So…I’m out, it’s well after 4am and am I sad? Well, a little bit (who doesn’t hate losing?!), but hey…I’m out of a dollar and I had a great time finishing in 552nd pace (out of 1553) beating out 1001 other players, but the fairy tale never happened ;-)

My favourite hands of the night:

  • A-K (Big Slick) holding up against a 3-3
  • Q-J holding up against 10-10 to double me up

Will this be my last tournament? No! The next one is right around the corner when I take my seat to battle against numerous fellow bloggers over at PokerStars for the first blogger poker tournament…and who knows, maybe I’ll play another tournament even before that :-)

You finished in 552nd place (eliminated at hand #2845203462).

76 hands played and saw flop:
– 2 times out of 9 while in small blind (22%)
– 3 times out of 9 while in big blind (33%)
– 9 times out of 58 in other positions (15%)
– a total of 14 times out of 76 (18%)

Pots won at showdown – 3 out of 5 (60%)
Pots won without showdown – 1

2 thoughts on “First online poker tournament

  1. Hey man, was fun reading about your first tourney. I remember those days. If you get bored of Pokerstars, my favorite site is Ultimatebet has the same type tourneys for the same prices, plus you can go to UltimateBuddy and download a buddy list for the site, Which comes with Phil Hellmuth, Annie Duke, and Devilfish already on the list (whom i’ve had the pleasure of watching play many times now). Anyhow, Today was your first tourney and today was my second day with a blog. So if you get a chance, check out my site Beastmanpokerplayer.blogspot (Pssst! You could put me on your list if you wanted to. lol) Thx

    Beastman

  2. Lo there Mike. Well, I’m satisfied with PokerStars atm, but I guess I’ll try UlimateBet sometime soonish – I’ve seen quite some good (pro) players wearing their gear on WPT events, so I guess it isn’t a bad place to be around! So, maybe we’ll see each other at a table sometime soonish…

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