So I’ve been playing online tournaments since March 2008 (about 19 months ago), but I’ve never played a live tournament at a casino before. My chance finally came last weekend when I played at the Annual “Butch Smith” Poker Classic. It’s a benefit event for firefighters (more info here: http://allinforfirefighters.com/ ) held at the Palm Beach Kennel Club.
Buy-in was $200. There was 128 players, and one re-buy option for the first 90 minutes. It started at 1pm and I lasted a few hours until I busted out around 50th place.
I played well, but there is one thing I would have done differently. The blinds increased really quickly. Doubling every 20 minutes. I don’t know if that’s normal or not, but we started with 10,000 in chips and by the time I left, the blinds were 2,000/4,000. I was not playing aggressively enough to build a chipstack that could sustain that level of play.
In truth, without all the metrics readily available, e.g. largest/average/smallest stack, number of players, etc., it felt a little like playing in the dark. There was a board with the info, but I couldn’t see it from my seat and I felt uncomfortable getting up to look at it every 30 minutes so I just tried to eyeball how many other players were still left and how everyone else was doing. Anyway, I will definitely keep a closer watch on that stuff next time and adjust my aggressiveness as needed.
Anyway, it was a lot of fun. More so than the live table games I’ve played.
My Poker Million 