Poker ain't the same anymore.

When I first started playing at Blackpool, I became a huge success. I mixed with players who had nicknames, The Fox and The Chaser were two of my favorites. Once you were a named player......you knew you had made it. These were seasoned pro's, and they traveled the country sniffing out the big game, and that's the way it was back in the day.

The casino games were mainly freeze-outs, which meant if you were not at the casino for a certain time, you just could not play. There were £5/10 rebuts too, these were crazy games, all in, all in, chips please is all you heard for the first hour, great fun. I remember my mindset, set my self a budget for the rebuys, and concentrate hard on the freeze-outs. Watch the pro's do the walk of shame was the highlight of the night, the shout would go up, lost one, and a top player would stand up, walk towards the cash table with his head held in shame lol. You would think wow, at least he's gone, and another etc.

To me, watching the field thin, seeing the big names drop out gave me a boost, and made me focus even harder. This is now lost in our community, the greed of the casino's will in my opinion come back to haunt them. They are allowing unlimited rebuys, re-entries in a lot of their games, giving the deep pocketed pro's a big advantage, with some games allowing re-entries not for an hour, but for 3 days, right up until the final day. Having introduced a home game player to the G casino, he told me after, he will never go again. You said £50, but you never said I would need a rebuy and a top up lol. The tuesday night game at Bury new rd was not the best place to blood him, and I doubt he will come back.

As I have said, the main event at Grovsvener saw one guy guy rebuy 12 times, and another well known guy 8 rebuys, £22,000 between them, and that's a lot of money. These people think nothing of splashing out several thousand on getting to a final table, and often do. There is no way your newbie average player can compete, and this will not last forever, it's unsustainable. Vegas has lots of freeze outs, and they invented the game, so think we should look to them maybe?

They called me the Trumpet.