By Alex Rousso
Travelling abroad to play poker always has a double edge to it. On the one hand, you’re on holiday and you should enjoy yourself. When you bust out of the tournament you’ve got a vibrant new city to explore, rather than the standard bus ride home haunted by thoughts of whether you should have played the hand differently. The flipside is that, given you are on holiday, how much a grind should the poker be?
Balls to the Olympics. There, we said it! The real British hope for gold this year lies within the hole cards of our heroic poker players. Here we profile young British players yet to win bracelets who we think will shine in Vegas this summer. With apologies to the likes of Ben Vinson, Priyan de Mel, Jon Spinx, Rob Akery, Ketul Nathwani, Marc Wright, Ben Jackson, Stuart Rutter, Laurence Houghton… (we could go on forever).
After the very successful leg 1 of the new Genting Poker Series at Star City, Birmingham, which had a guaranteed prize pool of £100,000 and actually made £146,000, it was down to London’s Fox Poker Club for leg two, which promised to be even bigger and better.
The King of Online Poker is in exile. Unable to play online in his homeland, he roams the globe in search of action. On the anniversary of Black Friday, we tracked him down to Macau to talk about Full Tilt, the future of poker in the US and to find out just how life has changed for Tom “durrrr” Dwan.
The most important statistic for tournament poker results is return on investment. It’s a simple figure for how much you are expected to make on average per tournament, expressed as a percentage of the average buy in. So imagine you had played 100 tournaments with a £100 + £10 buy in and your total winnings was £15,000; your return on investment, or ROI would be:
Poker beginnings
The STT, or sit-n-go, is one of the best ways to get a poker grounding. They don’t take very long and you get to experience playing with various stack sizes. Players of all abilities will find a level that suits them, whether it’s for play money or a high-roller buy in. You can also find varying types of tournaments, from super-turbos to double-ups.