Despite the fact that I told myself to never play online for real money, I took the plunge today with a 1$ tournament over at PokerStars.com.

The setup:

• $1 + 0.10$ (fee) buy-in, no rebuys…top 180 finishers are “in the money” (1: 341,67$, 2: 201,90$, 3: 132,01$…)
• 1553 players entered
• starting time: 3am (my time zone) / 9pm ET
• Starting chips: 1500
• No Limit Hold’em

So, how did I do? Not all that bad I guess, although I didn’t last long enough to get “in the money”. I held my ground playing rather tight all the time. And after some, not many, good hands I was able to double up and keep a nice stash of 3620 chips at the first break (after 1h of play – 67 hands played, 605 players still in the tournament). But then I ran against a wall two times in three hands:

1. My 7-7 were crushed by A-A (pocket rocket) to lose quite some chips (around 1200)
2. I folded the next hand (nothing much you can do with a 8-6 in a four-way-hand)
3. Then I looked at a beautiful set of Queens (Q-Q, the Hilton Sisters, …) and one fellow player called my preflop raise to 600, then called again on the flop (2-6-9 if I remember correctly) and then raised on the turn (another 2 – this is probably the moment were I should have picked up a tell on him, but hey…after all this is my first tournament so it’s hard to lay down a hand like Q-Q after you’ve commited more than half of your stack), then he raise again on the turn (K) and I was dumb enough to call – I thought I had the best hand with K-Q-Q-2-2 (two pairs), but he beat me with a nice set of three twos :-(

So…I’m out, it’s well after 4am and am I sad? Well, a little bit (who doesn’t hate losing?!), but hey…I’m out of a dollar and I had a great time finishing in 552nd pace (out of 1553) beating out 1001 other players, but the fairy tale never happened ;-)

My favourite hands of the night:

• A-K (Big Slick) holding up against a 3-3
• Q-J holding up against 10-10 to double me up

Will this be my last tournament? No! The next one is right around the corner when I take my seat to battle against numerous fellow bloggers over at PokerStars for the first blogger poker tournament…and who knows, maybe I’ll play another tournament even before that :-)

You finished in 552nd place (eliminated at hand #2845203462).

76 hands played and saw flop:
– 2 times out of 9 while in small blind (22%)
– 3 times out of 9 while in big blind (33%)
– 9 times out of 58 in other positions (15%)
– a total of 14 times out of 76 (18%)

Pots won at showdown – 3 out of 5 (60%)
Pots won without showdown – 1