Yorkshire Regional Poker Tournament 2008

We had another large turnout for the third regional Texas Hold'em No Limit poker championship for Yorkshire.

44 Players took part in what has been described as the event of the year!

The team of dealers again had a bounty on their heads. The bounty goody bag was largely provided by the CSSC BDE and included items such as a pen, yoyo, notepad, key ring and a Bounty bar. This went to any player who knocked out a dealer.

Defending champion Liam Brady also agreed to have a bounty on his head and he lost his to last year's runner up, Craig Ingham. Sweet revenge!

Players play a number of varying styles early on. Some go all out to be aggressive and try to double up their chip stack. Some stay super tight and wait for a monster opening hand. Others try to play as many cheap flops as they can so they can flop a super hand. Each strategy has it's danger but the important thing is to survive the first couple of hours. Once the blinds increase people need to make moves and big confrontations happen more frequently.

Eventually we managed to whittle down the players to 8 who made up the final table. As you can see the whole of Yorkshire CSSC was well represented.

Final Table

Tracey Taylor-Dunne was the chip leader and had taken out two dealers on the way to the final table. Craig had Ace 10 and pushed all in thinking he would frighten everybody from calling and steal a couple of small bets. The only person Craig didn't want to call him was Tracey who had a pair of Aces. They held and Craig was out.

Tracey was way out in the lead with chips and began to bully the table with aggression. Jackie also tangled with Tracey and lost but slowly Tracey's luck was beginning to run out and the rest of the table found some resistance to her tactics. Paul Sweet eventually knocked her out when a pair of Kings held up.

Chris Houlden then started to get a run of cards together knocking out Dave Mappin by hitting a straight and then John Wilkins when the river card gave him three Kings which won over trip Queens.

The last three players seemed to be circulating chips between them with wild fluctuations. Nobody could get a grip of the table and it seemed that every time that someone went all in, they survived and doubled up.

After a while, the very steady Kevin Beattie found himself with the lowest stack and was dealt a pair of fours. He pushed all his chips in and was called by Chris Houlden who revealed a pair of Jacks. This put Kevin in big trouble and the remaining cards didn't help him and so he finished third.

We were finally heads up with Paul Sweet and Chris Houlden. Chris had twice as many chips as Paul but slowly Paul began to claw his way back into contention. We saw an all in from Paul which was called by Chris. Paul had A3 against Chris's A4. This hand ended up being a split pot as they both used the same 5 cards to make up their best hand and neither the 4 nor 3 came into play.

The chips went back and forth like this for an hour but eventually we had a conflict where Paul went all in with a pair of tens. Chris called with Ace and Two and was relieved to hit an Ace on the flop to take the title after 8 hours of play.

Big thanks to all the players who acted as dealers for the tournament and to Ian Burnett who acted as tournament director and ensured player movements between tables ran smoothly.

Photos: top - left to right: Kevin Beattie, Chris Houlden and Paul Sweet, bottom - Chris Houlden