Team Tactics

On the way into London for the Staff vs. Punters tournament, an idea started to form in my mind. Maybe I could play the famous £5 rebuy as well? Who says multi-tabling is only for online play ?

Could I really play two tournaments simultaneously ? A little bit sick (perhaps?) but when I arrived and mooted the idea, it was received by most people as almost sensible. Half a dozen others followed my lead !

My plan was to try to get quickly from 500 to 5,000 chips in the rebuy, then concentrate on the staff/punters fixture. If I survived in both games, my gameplan was to give priority to the team event and play positionally and very aggressively in the other game. That is, I would jump into that game when I was in late position and look to play big pots.

Conveniently, seat D3 in one tournament and C5 in the other were almost adjacent, which helped me considerably.

I managed to triple up twice in the rebuy (unfortunately going bust in between times) but never made the kind of progress I needed. So, after 5 rebuys and with only 5 minutes left in the rebuy period, I decided to throw in the towel there.

Meanwhile in the other event, 15 punters and 12 dealers (all the staff were dealers, some very strong players indeed) had started out, but right from the off the dealers had the better of it. In the very first hand, Dom (with T8 suited) knocked out Swiss Marco (J9) when the turn made a straight and 2-pair respectively.

All of the next 6 eliminations were punters as well and with collusive play allowed, it became even harder for the remaining players to fend off the home team. Not only that, but the dealers were outrageously lucky !

To give you a flavour .... with 14 players left, Haresh for the dealers moved in with K9-spades. Our player, Dharm, in the big blind dwelled and eventually made a good all-in call with KT. The flop was all spades ! That was kind of how it went all night.

The atmosphere was boisterous, to say the least !

I had played very tight. I played less than 10 hands all night I think and was all-in on most of those. We were playing 400/800 and I had only 6,900 left [5,000 starting chips]. We were 6-handed (of the 11 players left at this stage, 8 were dealers!).

I picked up KQ and decided this was good enough, especially with blinds about to rise to 500/1,000. Haresh raised UTG and I pushed from the Big Blind. I thought there was a small chance that he would fold but mainly I felt KQ was good enough to take on a race against 88 or AJ etc. I am only in really bad shape against the famous five (AA KK QQ AK AQ).

Unfortunately, it was about as bad as it could be - pocket Kings ! The flop was pretty bad also: all fives, leaving me needing running Queens (or running Aces, or the case 5 to tie for the pot).

So, I fell in 11th and almost simultaneously our captain, Gandi, was caught out in a move with 7-3 which was in really bad shape against A-3 for Lisa the dealer !

So, just one survivor from our team on the final table of 9 and unsurprisingly, all 4 of the qualifiers were dealers. The staff team has a 6 - 2 advantage in players going into tonight's final which may even mean they are guaranteed the win).

I stuck around to watch the end of the tourney, and then played PLO .... more on that in the next post.