Second Place at the Gala Casino

I haven’t posted much lately so I thought I would hammer out a few thoughts.

First up, I was finally able to seat myself at a real poker table last week. There aren’t many poker rooms in the part of Europe so the closest one can come to touching poker felt (Black Jack felt is everywhere) is playing on someone’s kitchen table in a home game.

The Gala Casino here in Gib has been home to an unofficial poker night on Wednesday (and later changed to Thursday) nights. I had to this point never attended one but I was cajoled into playing by someone who then never even showed up.

I’ve talked about the Gala in some previous posts but I thought it worth mentioning that they don’t even provide dealers for the game. Kind of ruins the experience if you ask me. Rumour has it that the new casino near the new Ocean Heights development (and a 1 min walk from my apartment) will have a dedicated poker room. Hopefully they’ll have dealers.

Anyway, back to the action. Pretty basic stuff; £25 ($50 USD) buy-in, rebuys, and an add-on. Most of the players are in one way or another employed in the online gaming industry so the field is probably better than average.

I ended up doing a rebuy when I got under 1000 in chips and did the add-on at the break. When the dust had settled I took second place and about £370 ($740 USD) for my troubles.

Next on the list is to again express my sincere regret that I will not be attending the blogger poker fest in Las Vegas again. I was going to try to justify my absence by offering some lame excuse about being too busy or something but I couldn’t even come up with anything worthy.

I was in Hamburg at the beginning of Nov. I wrote a trip report but forgot to post it. I’ll do it as soon as I finish this post.

This month I’ll be spending a week out in India on business and then from there I’m going to fly directly to Thailand where I’ll be spending three weeks on vacation (or holiday as they call it on this side of the pond). I’ll be there for both Christmas and New Years which should be a total blast. Right now the plan is to spend a few days in BKK, head down to Phuket for a few days, back to BKK and then decide where I want to jump off to from there. The current thinking is either Chiang Mai or going to Phnom Penh in Cambodia. Kuala Lumpur and Vietnam are certainly options too.

I’ve got an evening layover in Frankfurt on the way out so I might venture out and see if any of my old stomping grounds are still there.

Anyway, that’s the update for now. I promise more poker content soon 🙂