July 20th - £20 NL Hold'Em - Cavendish Club (Belfast)

Well after a three week hiatus from 'live play' I was tonight, once again, at the hot bed of poker in N.I - the Cavendish Club in Belfast. Forty four runners for tonights £20 rebuy event and I have to say it was quite a remarkable evening.

For the first 90 mins of the 120 mins rebuy period I managed to have a single rebuy as my chips floated up and down between 1k & 7k. Suddenly there was a whirlwind of activity and, at the end of the rebuy period, I've done another 8 rebuys and with the 4k add-on I'm stuck £200 and have 5k in chips for which to start the 'proper' part of the game!

I win a small pot after the break then a remarkable hand occurs.

I'm dealt Kd 8d on the BB. With blinds at 200/400 its passed around to the SB (who has a mountain of chips) and he raises to 800. I flat call. The flop comes 3d-4d-6h.

Now as soon as I see this flop I'm ready to put the rest of my chips in straight away so when I see the SB create a big stack of chips and start to move them forward I immediately put all my chips into the middle and await the remainder of the flop...but there's a problem!

Apparently the SB's chips had NOT crossed the line in front of him which indicated that the chips were now in play and so, having seen me act so quickly behind him, he now ummed and arred about his position in the hand.

After much thought he flipped over the Ah-4h and folded. What was THEN interesting is that he asked the dealer to 'rabbit hunt' the rest of the flop. The dealer dealt out the 8h and the Qh which would have made him the nut flush!

I never had to show my hand of course and from that moment on my game went from strength to strength and I reached the final table of 10 with exactly 100,000 in chips and easily the chip leader.

For whatever reason then I went absolutely card dead. Four orbits of the table later and I had 50k left having literally been ante'd away and with the dying minutes of blinds at 5k/10k I get my final hand which should act as a lesson to all poker players everywhere!

There are 6 of us left and I'm UTG+1.

Now at this stage of the game players will usually go all-in or fold. After all there's absolutely no requirements to flat call the BB...or is there? Well of course holding AA might be one time you want to so when the UTG player flat calls for 10k big alarms should have gone off! I was holding Qc Jc and did the mandatory 'all-in'.

Of course hindsite is a wonderful thing! All pass around the the UTG player who calls! He, of course, flips AA and its goodnight Vienna.

I finish 6th for £50. Still a £150 loss on the night but better than it could have been!

44 Entries - 6th - Win $90 - Loss -$270 - Acc Total $267.89