extreme poker

No Limit, Sheffield style:

1. £1/£1 blinds
2. Minimum buy-in £20, maximum unlimited.
3. A LIVE straddle of ANY amount may be placed from ANY position, first man to get his money across the line goes, play proceeds from the seat to the left of the straddle.
4. Players are required to explain their inevitably flawed thought process following the play of each hand to the player to their immediate right.
5. Monotonously.
6. Raising appears to be absolutely forbidden at any point in the hand from any seat.

Suffice to say that I broke rule 6 in 50% of hands dealt. To counter-balance this, the opposing nine players adopted the exploitative (LOL) strategy of buying-in for the minimum £20 and playing call/fold poker exclusively.

Rapidly adapting to these rules, the following robotic playing style yielded a £245 win in 100 drunk minutes at the table last night:

• With tight dullard to my immediate left (see rules 4 & 5), straddle to £3 from every button/cut-off. (He had the temerity to explain to me no less than three times that I was giving my money away; thank you for the poker lesson Dr Antonius, but I think I’ll do it my way just the same…).
• Play 100% of flops, unless (in accordance with rule 6) random idiot has already opened for an overbet shove of 20x (circa once per round).
• Bet every flop, double-barrel every turn, triple-barrel every river. Take down 90% of pots from uninterested opposition who seem to not comprehend the concept of raising.
• Induce table tilt and sly smirks from the rather attractive dealer by showing every bluff, i.e. six hands out of ten PER ROUND!!!
• Balance frequency of bluffs with pre-flop shoves of top ten hands, all of which I was lucky enough to be called on and stand-up with.

Only slight downside to the night was my accidently randomly insulting a gang of Chinese lads at the table. When shown a huge hand on the end, I remarked “Hou Daai” (very big), however was interpreted as “Pok Gaai” (bastard!). Having ‘revealed’ the fact that I could understand some small percentage of what they were yelling at each other mid-hand, they reverted to the safer course of insulting me rather than talking about their hands. Things had just started to take a sinister turn (“hey, why you such lucky boy?” / – perhaps because I’m playing poker and y’all are calling off your bankrolls £20’s at a time?) when I elected to cash-in and split for the night at 1am.

All in all a very satisfactory experience. Will definitely be returning on my next overnight trip opp’Noorth.

Recently

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.