Free No Limit Hold’em Tournament at Pacific Poker Palace Philippines
I couldn’t sleep well this morning ‘coz of some ideas swimmin’ in my head, so I decided to surf a bit to wear myself down. I ran into this while surfing. Apparently Pacific Poker Palace Philippines (ACF Poker?) is hosting some Hold’em games (limit and no-limit) at Casino Filipino’s Airport Casino. Since I don’t even play cash games, I don’t have much of a shot in tournaments, unless the buy-in is really really low that I’m willing to part with the money for the experience.
Well, it just so happened that that was gonna be a FREE No-Limit Hold’em Tournament today! Given that I had nothin’ to lose (it said it was free), I went there to check it out.
There were some schedule changes, but the free No-Limit Hold’em Tournament pushed through at 14:00 today. Yes, it really was free, but only the top winner would get something (P20k). I registered and had my first real-live poker games.
I was doing pretty well in the first table I was placed it, I ended-up being the chip-leader until we were distributed to other tables. The blinds increased every 15 minutes, so my early chip lead became just average in the second table, and I became short stack in the third table. It was bad enough that I was short-stacked and the blinds were gonna eat me up, but the quality of players went up too (and them having huge stacks gave them a lot of advantage).
I could probably have stayed around longer, but I was already getting outclassed, and the stacks of the chip-leaders in the third table just ate me up. The deciding hand was my losing a two-pair to a straight. I normally wouldn’t try fighting such an obvious straight with a two pair but I was getting desperate to improve my stack due to the blinds that I decided to charge ahead. I lost, and that effectively ended the tourney for me (I lost everything on the next hand’s big-blind).
Before I left the building, I checked how far I got. Out of 12 tables, only around 4 were left, so I guess I got in above 50% of all players. I wasn’t really expecting to win, so I’m pretty happy that I wasn’t one of the bottom 10%.
Tomorrow (Thursday, 2006.12/14, 14:00) and on 2006.12/13 (Saturday, 18:00) will be 2 other Free No-Limit Hold’em games. On on 2006.12/22 (Friday, 18:00) will be a Free Limit Hold’em game. Registration is 2 hours before the tournament starts. I dunno if I can make it to any of the No-Limit games, but we’ll see.
Free tourneys where you can actually win money don’t come often, you know. Check it out!
Tags: poker