In the park…

August 18, 2009 by Nick Wealthall

Poker in the park

Poker in the park happened in Leicester square this week. Hope you made it down – if not you missed out

I think it’s the 3^rd year Bluff have run it and it was as big a success as ever. I have to hand it to them the idea of a poker festival in the centre of town free for the public is a great one. This will sound inane but I had no idea that bit in the middle of Leicester square was so big! It is though you know they had a tonne of marquees in their and still had room for general milling about.

I did a talk in the ‘lecture tent’ which was reasonably intimidating given that I’ve barely ever sat through a lecture let alone given one. I was a big fan of the plinth they gave you to lecture behind – I felt ready to stage a coup. We could have totally taken Leicester square and then together….half the west end…before everyone got a bit tired and stopped for a pint.

My talk was on ‘luck in poker’. Luck fascinates me and I’ve been writing bits and pieces on it for a long time now. It’ll be a book when I get my arse in gear – somewhere around 2013 I reckon. Anyway the talk was filmed and I hope to have it up on my site in a few days so check it out.

I finished my day by powning the special invite donkament – hey they don’t just give away 3^rd place in those things you know! Given that a large part of my talk was about luck/variance in live tournaments I’m not sure I can attach much significance to it…

Speaking of variance I had my worst single session in my online career last week in terms of buy ins lost. It was totally horrific. I’ll save the details for another blog or maybe a column but I played on far far too long something I almost never do. The next day I felt horrendous about it but I’ve learned my lesson. I’ve been winning so easily that I’d got complacent and poker hates it when you do that and gave me the thrashing I deserved!

Anyway I punished myself with a few days off and I’ve been catching up on work and seeing friends. Apart from some writing commitments I’m going to try and take it as easy as I can for the rest of August and get playing again. September has a ton of poker work and other good stuff so will be flat out so I’m gonna try and enjoy whats left of summer.

Hope you get to do some of that.

Play well – run better.

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