Not too bad.
Financially, completely neutral. I walked out with basically exactly what I walked in with. Ok, so I made enough to buy two beers afterward.
Lost $50 right away on two $25 SNG's. This 'super turbo' format had me not knowing whether to shit or go blind. 700 chips with 25/50 blinds increasing every 8 minutes. I think my tight play was a mistake here, and I just got blinded out and ended up with a pathetic AI with Q9s on the first one. 8th out of 10.
I hung around a little longer (5/10) but I think there is a strategy for this format that I might want to research.
Certainly part of it was that my first experience with live play was FREEZING. I think I was dealt a A7 once, and that was a monster compared to the cards I was seeing. Oh well.
Combined with that I admit I was pretty uncomfortable just due to the new environment. Keeping track of bets and pot size was just kind of confusing.
I need to bone up on my poker lingo, too. The first time someone said to me 'it's $x all day', I was like huh? Finally I figured it just meant the amount I needed to complete a bet (I call the $100BB, someone raises $300 to $400, so it's $400 'all day' and I need another $300. Is that right?)
So I tired quickly of tournaments and decided to try a cash game. The smallest blinds they had were $1/$2, so I gave it shot. Went down a little, but scored a set of 6's to felt some guy shortly after (I discovered at least one nice thing about live play ....... collecting a big pile of real chips). Kept my play fairly tight and ended up winning enough to cover the SNG's.
Anyway, it wasn't hard to see that if you were a sharp player, I think this event would have been a place to make some money. I saw some silly play and some very sad
bluff attempts.
One other thing. This aspect of live play relative to online, live play giving you the opportunity to 'get reads'.
Horse hockey.
People rarely even looked at each other, let alone do some kind of Phil Hilm stare-down. Then again, I only played for about 4-5 hours, so maybe these kinds of things need more time to develop.
One final note, call me anti social but I just wanted the two guys on either side of me to be quiet and stop talking to me. Again, all my poker to date has been sitting alone in a room in front of a computer screen, so I just was not used to sombody trying to have a conversation while I'm trying to think about poker.
I had fun and it was a positive experience, if only to pop my live play cherry. I'll be looking forward to getting into a casino and trying again.
