What's Hi Lo?

Sunday December 2nd - Stoke

Played the monthly £1000 added tournament in Stoke last night.

92 runners 3000 staring chips with a 3000 second chance

started off quite well and up to 4500 after 15 minutes with a few late position raises with good hands.

Then I picked up a pair of fours on the button after there had been a raise of 300 from seat 4 folowed by 3 calls so I decided to squeeze and raised to 1500.

The raise got past the 1st raiser who I was most concerned about.

However I had one caller - Mr leather hat who called after a little think.

The flop came Ks9s3d and old leather checked and so I fired out a continuation bet of 1500 - leaving me 1200 behind. Again he has a long hard think and eventually called.

The turn is a Jh and he checks again.

Thinking he had AsQs or something similar I decided to put my last 1200 in and he called showing Qc10c for the enormous gutshot straight draw!

Later on in the tournament this same guy had a huge stack after calling someones huge all in bet on the river with Q6 on a board showing AJT63!

Needless to say, the huge chip leader with 30 players left failed to make the final table!

So it was on to my first game of dealer's choice.

Blinds were £1 and £1.

Having never played dealer's choice I had never played Irish but quickly learned from a friendly local.

So the games being played were 4 5 and 6 card omaha and irish with the occasional texas holdem.

After a couple of rounds it was my button and I elected for 4 card Omaha hi-lo to be greeted with the question of what is that? from the dealer!

I replied that it was only the 3rd most common game played! To be fair to the dealer she did say that it was my choice and I had never played Irish before but there were two objections from a couple of locals and it was decided that hi-lo was not an option, nor stud or anything else other than Irish, Omaha and Texas!

Surrpisingly since I had never played before I was happy to leave the table with my £50 parlayed up to £201, partly due to one of the locals who was quite happt calling my bets when he held the bare ace of clubs on one of the omaha rounds with 3 clubs on the flop because he could have always made the flush! - One of the other locals then told him that you have to use 2 of your cards in Omaha and so he wouldn't have had the flush even if another club had arrived!