Pub Poker Challenge

If it was a boxing match the ref would’ve stopped the fight. In poker though, no matter how much you pummel the little guy he can still bounce off the ropes to take the prize. At one point in Sunday’s first ever Every Point Counts Seasonal Final heads-up I’d left Stephen with only a couple of chips and no option but to call my all-in with J5. I had KJ and as you’ve guessed already Stephen’s one live card, a five, appeared on the river.

As the pummelling continued, increasingly I felt like George Foreman in Zaire with Ali doing his rope-a-dope. Regular readers will realise I rarely, if ever, break out an Ali analogy unless I’m playing the role of The Greatest – it’s called being a bawheid – but on this occasion I was Big George; too tired to stand and collapsed on the canvas the first and I think only time Stevie put my tournament life at risk. I didn’t even manage a wobbly-legged dance around the ring, struggling to beat the count. All very unsatisfactory.

After losing the Rumble in the Jungle, Big George became depressed, he couldn’t handle defeat, and he lost faith in himself. I’ve been moping around a bit since Sunday, although I’ve no plans to turn to God or release a Lean Mean Fat-Reducing Grilling Machine as Big George did before coming back fully 10 years later to become the oldest heavyweight champ in boxing history. I’ll be back this coming Wednesday.

Unfortunately, the George Foreman vs Mike Tyson bout never took place. Some say Iron Mike ducked Big George. I tend to think it was just an unfortunate set of circumstances that kept them apart.

Foreman’s comeback was incredibly successful, even without the opportunity to knock Tyson out, and when George eventually lost the lineal title it was to a hugely controversial decision against Shannon Briggs and I assume Briggs took a J5 starting hand into the ring.

Okay, enough’s enough, I think I’ve established my credentials as a bad loser. I’m nowhere near the baddest. I’m not a hissy-fit drama-queen or a tiresomely repetitive whinger. I’m just quietly bitter.

I don’t want anyone to mistake me for a good loser though so I’m not congratulating Stephen and I’m certainly not mentioning that, given the Every Point Counts format, Stephen started with the shortest stack. He was actually on earlier begging me to talk about his short stack. You get some funny requests on the interweb.

Anyway, what would a 10-player final be without a dodgy reference to The Final Countdown, the enormously unpopular and thoroughly cheesy soft rock nightmare by some Swedish lads with girls’ do’s from the 1980s, when it was ‘fashionable’ to destroy the ozone layer with pressurised hair goop. If Bloo’s battery hadn’t run out I’m sure we’d have heard it on Sunday. Instead I managed to come up with a plausible excuse to force everyone into listening to Billy Bragg all night. Only joking, I genuinely didn’t know how to work the shuffle feature.

So, here goes, it’s The Final Countdown dada daahhhhh duh… duh dah dah daaadaahhhh:

10. James – Said he was going to be the wild man and play any cards. The big fibber did nothing of the kind. He was actually the quiet man and went out first with a little whimper.

9. Robbie – Mean Boycie impersonation, but only fools and horses go out this early.

8. John T. – Last in, third out. Very much a form player at the moment but too much revelry at the egg-chasing in Edinburgh the day before and clearly jaded.

7. Derek – “A hard shift,” said Derek. I’m not sure if that was a complaint about the bad chat around the table or a backhanded compliment about the good quality poker. If the latter, don’t tell Stevie.

6. Bloo – Good music, bad poker, “every ****in’ 5 minutes!”

5. Sid – Caught a few cracking hands early on, but almost certainly spooked by roasters shouting at him. Sid’s just too nice. He did double his side-pot money though, as did the final four in our final countdown.

4. Andy H. – Murder! Polis! He refused to admit to hitting a monster hand when I folded a 40,000 chip pot. Apparently, the outrageous bluff is now in Andy’s “arsenal,” but so is telling big fibs, so make up your own mind. Now requires two weeks at a health spa to recover from this shocking defeat.

3. Louise – Heavily stacked for most of the game Louise began moaning about time wearing on… and that was before the game even started! Can we ban girls from poker? Don’t tell anyone I said that or I’ll start banging on about the time I won a big indirect discrimination case on equal pay and everything else I’ve done for wimmin’s rights.

2. Joe – Made a terrible, terrible start. Didn’t win a hand for the first 2 hours, 17 minutes and 39 seconds (Bloo was counting). Good bouncebackability, bad beat.

1. Stephen – Winner of the free-roll main pot. If he fell in the river he’d come up holding a salmon. Don’t think I’m going to say something nice at the end here to come out looking like a half decent guy. I’m not a good guy. I’m bitter to the last. The best I can do is a wee quote from someone else:

“Success is simply a matter of luck. Ask any failure.” – Earl Wilson

Plus a wee countdown for you know who: