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Thoughts after the seminar...

I couldn't write anything yesterday because I was too tired coming from the seminar. That's right, as I said in the previous post I was attending First Croatian Poker seminar and as mentioned I was one of the dealers at the post seminar tournament so that basically meant that I had to be there for around 12 hours. I don't have anything against being there for long time, I am just mentioning it in the context of not writing this post earlier. So, to recap what went on there in short...
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Seminar started around 01pm with short speech by organizer about the motives and the idea behind the First Croatian Poker Club and this poker seminar. He then proceeded to introduce Tonchi Restovic, third placed on the biggest Croatian tournament in Novigrad that was held last year, who tried to give an unencumbered first person perspective on three things that he considers most important when playing tournaments. Chip stacks, position and player image. He went on to talk about "player table image" and explain his views and ideas on how to use "what your opponents think about you" against them. It was a good ice breaker and it was interesting to listen to. After Tonchi finished his part Borko Brunovic (brother of Branimir who I mentioned earlier) presented his impressions (backed up by pictures) from the Vienna Spring Poker Fest, and went on to explain how difficult and tiresome it really was for his brother to sit in a chair for 4-5 days trying to play his best poker against some of the best European players while there are 15 cameras cruising around you and spot lights aim directly into your eyes at the same time as make up is being put on your face and comments on your play are being exchanged amongst the railbirding watching crowd. All in all, not the most pleasant poker atmosphere but the one that comes with the big money tournaments and that has to be accepted that way. After Borko finished his short but interesting and lively presentation for which credit must be given since they all arrived from Vienna late in the night, Matej from Osijek took the stage in order to try and explain some of the pitfalls and opportunities of the cash poker game. Matej had some significant cash game success so he was probably the best person at the moment to talk about that part of the game and his own experiences going through the stages of winning, but also sometimes losing. He also touched and explained some important but often overlooked differences between online and live poker. With the end of his presentation the main part of the seminar was finished and the long anticipated tournament was about to begin. Now, this is the part of the organization that I am not particularly happy with, not because of myself, but because of the other participants. First of all, it was supposed to be a Freezout tournament based on the initial Poker Club buy in and registration and the members and participants would play for three prizes of which the first would be a Toshiba laptop, and second and third place would be 350 and 250 Euros respectively. It ended up being a 1 re-buy and 1 add-on tournament with crappy chip/blinds structure that increased every 15 minutes with inexperienced and not yet fast enough dealers (me included by all means) for that kind of a shot. First of all, people didn't expect it to be a re-buy tourney and didn't bring additional money with them, and more importantly, the re-buy's and add-on's didn't really ended up building up the promised prizes. I understand that it's hard to organize something for the first time, but I also understand that if you are trying to be an icebreaker with a good idea that is sure to grow in the future you have to be prepared to endure some losses in the beginning in order to potentially make more profit in the future, especially if the loss we are talking about here is more then bearable... Back to the story..To the left you can see the picture of this tournaments final table (click to see large). I actually don't know who really won the tournament and who was second or third since I didn't deal at the final table and was far too tired to stay and see who it was. Interestingly enough, simultaneously with the tournament, as players dropped out of the tournament and some of the other players that joined in the event later and didn't get to participate in the tourney decided to enjoy themselves in side games that were spontaneously created at the empty tables. So, some of the players decided to play Heads-up NL Holdem with symbolic buy-ins and some players decided to play short handed 1/1 PL Omaha Hi. This game actually also started as a Heads-up contest between "Just" and Djonjara and "Just" and "Miljac" before that, but as they played more players joined in the 50€ buy-in game. In the end there were 5 players playing this Omaha game (namely Vanja, John, Matej, Sasha and Frane) and even though I didn't stay till the end, word is that someone got his ass kicked a bit (lol, sorry), but more importantly it was apparently a lot of fun. You can see the side game pictures to the right. I apologize for the quality of the pictures but they were taken by mobile phone and since there was a lot of action it was hard to make the players make slow moves or no moves at all just to have a more quality picture...
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There is one more thing that I noticed yesterday that I wanted to share. It is the fact that the idea of the Poker Club, seminars and a tournament is actually a great idea that definitely should have a future in Zagreb and Croatia one way or the other. There are definitely many improvements that can be made, and I am sure that by next time everything will be arranged as initially promised. One reason for the support of the seminar and the club from my viewpoint is that when there is such an event, players tend to be more relaxed then when they come to an actual tournament event or cash game and there is much much more opportunities to discuss everything that is even remotely interesting and concerns the game of poker. Everyone at the seminar were friendly, and even more so even though there were people that were introduced to each other for the first time. I guess that it is because poker, as some kind of a sub-culture brings similarly thinking or oriented people closer and therefore there is an increased sense of community and acceptance between the people. This, for me is the best possible environment where one can freely mingle, talk and learn from others as well as share their own experience.... Even if there were initial drawbacks to the seminar and the tournament organization, I truly am looking forward to the next one....
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p.s. as a first time ever dealer at a poker table I managed to deal pocket aces 4 times in first 7 hands, and two times pocket kings in the next 5 hands as well as some "minor" (lol) pairs like QQ, JJ, TT and similar in the next 10-15 hands... I guess it was some kind of first time luck, only I didn't get any real profit from it... At least the players at my table had something to play with, and I truly hope that I was doing my job good for the first timer ever.. If I didn't satisfy someones standards, I am sorry but at least know that I did my best.... cheers!

Post je objavljen 19.03.2007. u 16:33 sati.