I have been playing poker for 2.5 years. I mainly play at internet NL Texas Hold’em varying from NL25 to NL200, also play lots of NL Texas tournaments and Pot Limit Omaha. Sometimes (1-2 times per month) I play live poker at Grand Casino Helsinki at blinds 2€/2€. I've also had some success at minor live tournaments (buy-in from 25€ to 100€) at Grand Casino Helsinki. I’ve been playing at Tower Gaming for 7 months.

I first entered a live event satellite at Tower Gaming which was a5$ tournament. First 2 got tickets, 120 participants or so attended. The event was a bit difficult. I got crappy cards for the first half an hour - totally card dead. I only survived by playing pseudo-poker to latter-stages (that is all-in or fold). Luckily, I got no callers and was able to steal lots of pots. Then I got a lucky double up by pushing with KhTh. 2 hands after that I got AA, tripled on that hand, because my 8,7 on the previous hand got no respect from other players…wonder why?

 

5 hands after that I land AsKs, and double up again. The rest was easy. I had a large stack, and I was able only to play premium hands and wait for people to fall out.

2 players got the ticket for 300+20 Live Event Qualifier, and I was one of them. You had option to use the ticket to one of three qualifiers: European Poker Tour (EPT) in Monte Carlo, Svenska Live (SL) in Sweden and Genting Stanley National Poker Championships (GSNPC) at Manchester. I decided to use the ticket to Manchester qualify, because I thought that most of people would use their ticket to EPT Monte Carlo and the tournament in Sweden was only available to Swedish residents.

 

The GSNPC qualifier tournament started with nice 2500 chips, and 15 min blinds. It was nice to play a well structured tournament for a while. Only 22 participants, and a prize pool of 6600$. At first our table was loose, and I thought, man what luck, a bunch of people who don't know how to play tournaments. After 15 hands I was down to 2000 chips and had to admit the fact that I had been wrong. The tournament was full of good players. Once again, I was totally card-dead the first hour, no pairs, no high cards, no suited connectors, nothing. My luck was that the blinds raised slowly. The tables were tight and aggressive, lots of pots went unopened to the first raiser. And if someone called, usually it meant a good battle. No fishes were around. I managed to semi-bluff few pots, and raised my stack to 3800. Blinds went up and time passed, 10 players left.

 

When the blinds reached 200/400 I was forced to push with 8d7d with a stack of 3400. Flop hit an 8 and I doubled. At the next hand I got AA, and pushed again, with 7200, and got a call, caller had JJ. I doubled up and had the third biggest stack. Then it was easier to play, because I had some stack to push with and could take free pots from the table. There were only 7 players left. Because there were so few players at the tournament, it meant that the final table was full off small stacks. Three players at that point had a bigger stack (15k-25k), and we eliminated the rest of the pack. Three players left and I had 15k. The chip-leader had 32k.

 

The end of the tournament was a good and tight match. I eliminated the third seeded player with AJ against A4. Flop came AA8, and a J turn was the nail in the coffin. The pot sailed to me.

 

At heads-up Mr. El Chadri put up a good fight. The tournament moment hand was my AdJd against KcQc (60%-40%). I got A on flop, and it held to the finish, despite the K on turn. The final hand I had AhJs and called the small all-in, and it held.

 

I won a $1900 tournament package to Manchester GSNPC and $1800 cash. Not bad for a $5 investment! This will be my second biggest live tournament. The first one was Helsinki Midnight Sun at summer 2007. There I was18th, and just dropped out of pay-table.

I'm looking forward the GSNPC tournament and maybe I will also see the ManU-AstonVilla match on 29th of March at Manchester.