Well, it’s official. Ryan from PokerStars support says he has confirmed that the PokerStars registration number is on my site, and I’m registered to play in the inaugural Blogger Championship on October 23, 2005.

If anyone had told me a year ago that I would be playing in a blog-related online Hold ‘Em tournament, I wouldn’t have believed them. I didn’t even know how to play Hold ‘Em back then. Poker being what it is, I may get knocked out early on. Or, I may hang on and do pretty well. Hopefully I will at least make the top 10% of players, especially since the field will be made up of other bloggers, many of whom may not know much about poker. Usually, when I play in the big play money tournaments, I make it to at least the top 20%. My best showing was 205th place out of 5807 players in a satellite tournament, which works out to be the top 3.5% of all players.

Tonight, I played three Sit’N’Go tournaments. I finished 4th in a 9 player tourney, 11th in a 27 player tourney, and then 1st in another 9 player game. The last game was interesting, because when it got down to a head-to-head game, I was significantly behind in chips (about 2,500 to the other player’s 10,500.) An observer came into the room to chat with the other player, and the following conversation occurred. (The other people’s names have been changed, irrelevant comments have been edited out, and I’m paraphrasing the observer’s comments because the PokerStars Instant Hand History doesn’t record observer chat.)

Observer (to other player): So, when you get done taking this guy’s chips, what are you going to do?

Player: i’m going home

Lytspeed: Thanks for the vote of confidence. LOL!

Observer: No offense, it’s just that you don’t have a chance. She’s a pro, and she’ll probably kick your butt.

Lytspeed: Probably true, but I’m going to try anyway. 🙂

I won every hand that went all the way to a showdown after that. There were several hands where one or the other of us folded, which is very common in heads-up games, but every showdown belonged to me, and I won the tournament. In the end, I had about 2,000 more chips in my play money account than I had at the beginning of the night, so I consider the evening a success.

I find it interesting that I’m motivated to blog about this. It’s been a while since I was interested in blogging. I can thank PokerStars for that, at least. 🙂