It's been another quiet week for me, interspersed with some mid-week poker and a masked birthday party which the less said about the better. On Wednesday I decided to go down to the Gutshot club in central London, which I feel guilty to say I hadn't been to for over three months. I felt guilty because the Gutshot is one of the clubs that really needs support from the poker playing community due to London's councillors deciding that it should be made an example of and be very publicly shut down for allowing the "evil" game of poker to be played on its premises without a full casino licence. And where do you propose the poker players will go to play their game Mr Councillor? In some dodgy back building without proper surveillance and regulations? Do you think they'll just give up and the game of poker will magically disappear? Garr, the ignorance makes me mad! Anyway, I won't prattle on about this because I'll start getting all political on you and then you probably won't want to read anymore...


So as I was saying, I went along to play a £75 freezout which I'd been told had one of the best structures for a live game in London. Now, 4000 chips and a 25-50 starting level is reasonable value for a buy-in of that level. The trouble is that 20 minutes a level, which is pretty much standard throughout the UK for any average sized weekly tournament, just doesn't get enough hands in to allow any kind of imaginive play once the blinds get up to the 200-400 mark (unless you've somehow gathered a monster stack in that short time). This was a dealer-dealt tourney, and a very well dealt one at that, but the trouble is that despite this we were getting only 10 hands per level (trust me, I was counting). So after just 60 hands, unless you've had a couple of big pots you have a stack of around 15BB and are on the cusp of the all-in zone. Which is exactly where I found myself after losing a race with my 10s vs A-J, nursing 4k chips with blinds up to 300-600. Thankfully, I found QQs to push with shortly after, but they unthankfully didn't hold up.

I guess what my point is, is that whilst Online Poker might get a bad rap for being full of maniacs, out-draws etc etc, at least you get a hell of a lot more than 10 hands a level. Unless of course you are a poker masochist and actually choose to play turbos.

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