This week some of the Back­Row­Pok­er reg­u­lars and me got togeth­er in Oslo, Nor­way to play some live pok­er. The play­ers was Goggen_S, MrHan­sol, BMKW100, Bluffer­Hebbe and me. The plan was to play an Back­row Pok­er live event, but the plan was also to get about twice as many play­er to enter..

So we joined a tour­na­ment at the Fish Club in Oslo, and set out on a mis­sion to fin­ish off the final table as an Back­row Pok­er exclu­sive tour­na­ment. (yeah, we ARE that good ) And we almost made it, at least we got two play­ers with­in the four best (of some 35 entrants total).

I’m rather pleased with my own per­for­mance, fin­ish­ing 4th, and sec­ond best Back­row Play­er. It could how­ev­er end­ed quite dif­fer­ent­ly.

Dur­ing the first lev­el I looked down at KK and raised up. A cute blonde called me, and the flop came TJQ rain­bow. The blonde bet out, giv­ing me cause for con­cern as she had called sev­er­al pots pre flop but this was the first where she showed real aggres­sion. It wor­ried me that she might have the AK, but i fig­ured she would have raised me pre flop with that. Thus I called, and watched as the turn was blank. Again she bets into me, I can’t recall the bet size but I believe it was about 2/3 of the pot. Again I’m con­fused. It’s hard to put her on a real strong hand (AK) as I still believed she would raise med pre flop, but then again, she did not seem con­cerned about my call on the flop. So I went on and made what might be the weak­est play of the tour­na­ment, I called.

The riv­er was a nine, giv­ing me the straight thus beat­ing every hand she might have, but the AK. She checks… What a relief.. Or was it? Does this change any­thing? I can’t do any­thing but check and hope I’ve played the rest of the hand like an idiot. She can’t call a riv­er bet by me with any­thing but the AK thus there is no val­ue in a bet. I check, and flip over my kings. She sounds dis­gust­ed, and right­ful­ly so, she had the rock­ets all along, and there I was call­ing of about half my stack with only a draw… Kudos Ace!

But what a night! Hours of real pok­er, real chips, real tables and last but not least real peo­ple! Don’t get me wrong, the peo­ple at the Back­row games are great, but the social aspect of the game won’t ever be the same behind a com­put­er screen. I’ve real­ly missed the live games, and it was a great feel­ing to play­ing against real peo­ple again!

This comes after a time of unin­spired play online in the Back­Row Tour­na­ments. I’ve got no patience, don’t mind play­ing coin flips for my stack in ear­ly lev­els and don’t mind get­ting knocked out dur­ing the first few lev­els. I’m actu­al­ly con­sid­er­ing tak­ing a break from online play, part­ly because of the pre­vi­ous­ly men­tioned rea­sons, but also because it’s tak­ing up too much of my time.

Only time will tell I guess, I’ll start off with reduc­ing the num­ber of tour­na­ments i play online, and hope to find some more time to play live pok­er…

In any case I hope to play more live pok­er with the Nor­we­gian Back­row­Pok­er play­ers in the future, and that we may get enough play­ers togeth­er to play a prop­er Team Back­row Pok­er tour­na­ment.

I’ll see you all at the tables, and hope­ful­ly not only at the com­put­er…

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