Texas Calculatem and Poker Office Blog

The attendance was rather muted last night. To begin with, Acorn had trouble deposting into Royal Vegas. So Gary C had to loan him some chips. On top of that, our readers failed to show up, and Juice was very disappointed.

Participating poker bloggers were:

Little Acorn Man
Juice
Gary C

Tripjax couldn't make it as he was working on the layout of Gary's blog.
Another unexpected participant was a red dog called Waldo. He wouldn't provide us with any details of who he was, other than stating that he was a red dog.

Anyway, once Little Acorn got his Neteller deposit sorted we found that our readers hadn't turned up, and as a result were a little short handed. We therefore moved to a $5.00+$0.50 NL SNG and sat down with a load of other players. Gary C soon doubled up by cracking someone else's pocket Aces. Other than that, I didn't really do my journalistic duties as I was looking at contract specs on the Sydney Futures Exchange. I'm sure one of the other bloggers will give a better account of the tournament.

After that was done we decided to have another go. But Juice and myself were feeling a bit skint so we went to a $2.00+$0.50 NL SNG.

One very unusually observation I made from the Poker Office Live Tracker was the comparative looseness of the tables. I'd have expected the $2.00+$0.50 to be crazy, with the $5.00+$0.50 slightly tighter. However it was the total opposite. At the $5.00+$0.50 there were a 3 players who saw about 80% of flops. Though they got knocked out relatively quickly.

At the $2.00+$0.50 there were still 8 players when the blinds hit 80/160. And Poker Office told me that they'd all seen onlt 25% of flops! That was very worrying as I'd taken large hit forcing a short stacked opponent all in (he hit a full house!).

For this session I did not use Texas Calculatem. It's far too easy too get short stacked as the blinds increase, and you can't afford to raise a drawing hand, only to fold it on the flop. You need to either fold or go all in and hope to either scare off the opposition or that your hand holds up.

Overall it was a good night and interesting to play against the bloggers who I'm always reading about. However, I'm not sure if Royal Vegas is the way to go as the starting stacks are 1,000 (as opposed to Ladbrokes' 1,500) and this seems to add a significant luck element to the game.