GCBPT Teeside, Credit Crunch and luck bastards losing their jobs.

Last week Gala Coral were kind enough to invite me along for a free seat in the Stockton on Tees leg of the GCBPT (Because I am a media type that gets stuff for free) and once again I donated away to a day 1 finish. The usual story really, I built up a big stack early (actually played some of my best poker for the first two levels) but never really got going after the first break.

Partially due to this very chatty and very good Irish bloke that moved to my left after the break and became a real Burdon; outplaying me almost every hand. It didn’t help that the structure was faster than the games I am used to (no 75/150 or 150/300 levels, which are my favourites) and all of a sudden it found me short stacked and running jacks into kings. I do, however, think that a faster structure is needed for the GCBPT and not because of the lower skill element in these events. It is effectively only a two day event, so it does need the faster structure and also there are not that many pros in the field, so it’s unreasonable to expect the players to spend half the week there.

But I must say I do like the GCBPT very much, rightly dubbed the peoples poker tour. What makes them different to say the GUKPT is that most of the field is made up of regulars from that casino (which also makes it great value) rather than the same 200 players regardless of the venue. I think both tours are great btw, I think the GCBPT is the people’s tour and the GUKPT is the prestige tour.

To be honest, I’d just like to cash in either at the moment.

Cash games are going ok at the moment, particularly because the pound is so weak compared to the dollar, I’m glad to be doing my poker business in $ and wish I understood currency well enough to justify cashing some of my roll out (Hmmmmm, I might actually just because its Christmas) and enjoying the exchange rate.

I’m sooooooo jealous of my old workmates; the lucky bastards might be getting made redundant. I was toying with sticking around at my old Norwich Union job because redundancy might have happened, 18 months later it is for some of them. They get a month’s gross pay per year they have been there, I would have got about 14 grand for that, my mate is due to get about £40,000. Lucky bastards.

I’ve been doing some research about how the whole recession thingy might affect the online poker industry, after all this is the first time we have had ‘online gambling’ in a recession, and although gambling historically does well in those periods, some experts think that online poker won’t be as lucrative.

First of all, I don’t think the traffic will go down all that much. For every player that opts out because of the credit crunch there will be a new player in the Asian market to take their place. Not only that but we have things like PKR and Sky Poker bringing new people to the game (Plus the odd idiot trying to poker their way out of a debt).

One thing is for certain, I am not keeping all my bankroll in any one place, that’s just common sense. I’m trying to find out exactly what would happen if an online poker sites bank went bust, but at the moment the online poker rooms haven’t been all that helpful. Could you imagine if Pokerstars invested all their money in Icesave? Christ.

So I have my roll spread out in Neteller, a few poker rooms and I am thinking off sticking it in a savings account. I’d get a lot of interest as a direct result, but as I’m a spanner when it comes to these things I have no idea whether Id be better off not converting the dollars to pounds, or if I’d get shafted if I redeposited or not. One thing I am doing is sticking all my rakeback straight into a savings account, that’s a nice medium I think and I tend to get quite a bit a month (Especially since getting a deal from the Tetleyboy guys in the above banner) and previously I just used it to pad my roll.

The smaller poker rooms will suffer I think. Duplicate poker has already closed down blaming the credit crunch, but make no mistake, its closing down because it was a fucking stupid idea for a poker room and had way too much invested in it. The Crypto network could be on its way out and I hope they merge with Party as its being suggested. Places like Sky Poker and PKR I think are destined to become huge and I can actually forsee them getting bigger, as will iPoker, especially when William Hill merge with them.

I think the credit crunch will adversely affect live poker more than online. I can casinos and poker tours see numbers drop more than online poker rooms. The ‘experts’ are saying poker attracts less habitual gamblers and thus, will give the game up much easier in a recession, but as poker is just a mouseclick away and there are no overheads online, I can see it thriving even if lots of smaller rooms and related business suffer.