Virgin Poker Festival Newcastle 2009

Virgin Poker Festival, €150 No-limit Hold’em, Aspers Casino, Newcastle, 4th-5th April 2009

Entrants: 200
Buyin: €150
Prizepool: £30,000

1. Ross Jarvis, £7,000

2. Kris McLackland, £5,500

3. Andy Edgington, £4,000

4. Brian Clarke, £3,000

5. Richard Potts, £2,500

6. John Crawford, £2,000

7. Krzysztof Zawierucha, £1,500

8. Dave O’Connor, 1,000

9. Glen Hopley, £750

The latest instalment of the ever-popular Virgin Poker festival took place at the Aspers Casino, Newcastle this past weekend…and I won! The £7,000 is by far the biggest score in my poker ‘career’ and was the perfect tonic after a number of near-misses and epic blowups in big tournaments before.

Attracting a sell-out field of 200 players, including poker pro Maria Demetriou and the On The Rail team of Nick Wealthall and Kara Scott, the event had a good, slow structure with 10,000 chips and 40 minute blind levels. The usual Geordie banter was in full effect as we got kicked off at 2pm on the Saturday.

As is always the case with deepstacked tourneys, the early levels are basically a case of jabbing away slowly while hoping someone will horribly misplay a hand to double you up. I had a pretty soft table who always seemed to believe me when I raised (they must never have played with me before!) and I slowly got my stack up to 14,000…before I decided to run a big bluff with 4-4 which ran into A-A. Oh well!

With a bit of luck, I made a recovery however before going on a massive heater after moving tables, running up a 70k stack. To make things better, my PokerPlayer team mates Nick ‘Lighty’ Wrighty and Mark ‘Shafty’ Stuart were both going great guns also.

After getting moved to Wrighty’s table, the walls soon came crashing down as I lost two huge pots in quick succession to have me wondering what was the bloody point of playing well for 7 hours only to get coolered. I think God must have heard me moaning or something because I then proceeded to put the most heinous bad beat on some poor chap that I have ever seen.

Nick Wright raised the button, as he is addicted to doing, and I looked down at K-Q which was plenty good enough for me to re-shove my 20 remaining big blinds in. That hand was way ahead of Wrighty’s perceived range but then the horrible moment came as the big blind decided to go into the tank before calling. Wrighty folded showing another K-Q as I saw I was up against Kings and had just 8% equity in the hand. Needless to say, a Q came on the flop and the case Q on the turn as I sucked out royally.

There was something strange about K-Q as just a few hands later, PokerPlayer’s Nick Wright managed to suck out just as impressively by rivering a flush with Kc-Qc vs both A-Q and K-K to win a huge pot.

There were 45 remaining at the end of Day 1 and I had the chiplead with 112,000. The following morning I got up early, had a little workout Phil Hellmuth-style and was confident of taking it down.

Day 2 was smooth sailing from the start as I could pound away on the short stacks with people terrified of getting KO’d before the bubble burst. This was really where I won the tournament. I would raise 4 or 5 hands per orbit and generally take down the huge blinds and antes. If anyone ever pushed all-in on me, it was just an easy fold but people never really wanted to take that risk.

The bubble went on for a good while, with Nick Wright unfortunately losing a race to just miss out while Mark Stuart crept into the money before busting in 20th place. It was smooth sailing from there as I coasted onto the final table with 25% of the total chips in play!

At this point, I was very confident of winning and would have been devastated at any other result. My plan of bulldozing the table started pretty well as I KO’d two guys within the first 10 hands. Nice.

Sat opposite me was GUKPT champion Brian Clarke, who had a threatening stack. He was consistently foiling my plans to win every pot by shoving his large stack in the middle at every possible point. I knew if I was just patient he would make a huge error though and he did just that, shoving pocket fours for no real reason and being called by Jacks. Clarke was out, the third placed Andy Edgington soon followed (it was his 40th birthday so the £4k was quite a nice present) and so I was heads-up with a local lad called Kris, whom I had played with a lot all weekend.

We had quite a bit of history as I had ran a huge bluff on him the night before and just made his life a living hell by having position on him at the final table. He was a good player but I was determined to take it down even though he now had the chiplead. After a good ninety minutes of play I finally got a huge double-up when I made a tough call with A-5 on a K-K-5 flop. He had 9-5 and my hand held. From there, I sensed his confidence fall away and I finished him off quite quickly to take it down.

After putting that much pressure on myself it was a huge relief to reach the end. I’d like to say a huge thanks to Virgin Poker for putting on such a fun, well-organised tournament and would recommend all our PokerPlayer readers to make sure they qualify for the next one later this year. And, last but not least, thanks to the rest of the PokerPlayer team for railing me all day and making sure that we had a great celebration afterwards that involved two of life’s essential qualities; steak and tequila.

Next stop…VEGAS!