Monte Carlo Satellite Challenge

Certain behaviour is acceptable on Saturdays certain behaviour isn’t. The football, the pictures, romancing, dancing and using beverages to inflicting permanent liver damage – all acceptable. D.I.Y., shopping, any kind of ‘work’ and shaving completely unacceptable. For me Saturdays are often an 18 hour, eye bleeding pokerfest. In the old days I could play an 80 hour week but now I have a “career” my playing time is limited and so the weekends have become a shrine to my first love.

A few Saturdays ago I had a mission, qualify for the EPT final in Monte Carlo. I’d already given it a few cracks and come up short but this time it was different – I was focussed, driven; there would be no cash games in the background and a picture of the Monte Carlo casino to aid visualisation as my wallpaper.

My alarm awoke me at a brutal 11.30. (I also play Friday nights…. I should really get a girl). I dragged myself up, popped on a tracksuit and sat unshaven at my computer. I’d be playing double shootouts to claim a seat in the $800 satellite that evening. Poker’s strange – some days you have it and some you don’t. This Saturday I was in tune with the game from the start, playing my hands well, reading the other players perfectly. I was Michelangelo painting a ceiling, Mozart composing a symphony, Kieran Bracken dancing on Ice. Barely had the sleep cleared from my head – it takes 2 to 3 hours on a good day – and two tables were dispatched, I’d qualified for the evening tournament. Look out tax exempt Frenchie types here I come

I had 3 or 4 hours to kill and somehow managed to remove myself from the temptation of other games and left the flat for a late lunch. With me would come some hand histories and a couple of text books. I’d been making the same type of errors lately and didn’t want to do it that night. Over a veggie Quesadilla I would day dream, strategise and try not to laugh at the blokes who had clearly been dragged shopping for the day – some of them had even clearly shaved that morning.

Satellites are a curious monkey. Already becoming popular they exploded when Chris Moneymaker turned a $20 buy in into enough money to not have the piss taken when he tells people his surname. They are poker’s equivalent of the American dream – promising untold fame and riches but actually it’s only the very few that prosper. I have a slightly old school dislike of them – they take money that people should be spending in cash games and many of them are fast structured crap shoots. However without them there would be no poker boom, no massive fields in the big events. It’s that dream of turning a few dollars into a few million that has makes most people download poker software in the first place. Oh well if you can’t beat them – might as well join them… and then beat them.

7.30 that evening and the first hand was dealt. 8 players would qualify – roughly one in 16 – and be on their way to Monte Carlo to compete for millions of dollars and all the tax haven women you can eat. I started tight trying to get a read on the table – who are the players who are the got lucky in a qualifying tournament dead wood. Sadly I was about to play like the latter. It’s still painful to recall my exit so badly did I play. I flopped a set in a 4 handed pot and for some reason I still can’t understand checked. I almost never check sets on the flop – idiots check sets on the flop – but the pot was small and I got greedy. As I was to discover this let the player behind me turn a bigger set. I filled up on the river, made a big bet and he moved me all in. I looked at the pot, which was now huge, looked at my hand, my eyes got wide and I called. He showed me his bigger full house, the only hand he could rationally have, and suddenly someone else’s name was on my seat.

I had lasted 36 minutes.

I’d called for all my chips, for my tournament, as casually as if making up the small blind. I called and hoped. Hoped that he was an awful player, hoped he was making a ridiculous bluff, hoped my low full house was good. In poker if you hope you do it from the rail; you’re the schmuck staring at pictures of Monte Carlo instead of staring down the big boys at the real thing.
Where had the poker playing God from this morning gone? Is excessive Guacamole at lunch time bad for your game? I had become an awful player for one hand and it had cost me my shot.

Luckily drowning your sorrows in half a bottle of Jack Daniels is also behaviour acceptable on Saturdays.

Originally published in Poker Player magazine.

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