Virgin Festival Nottingham 28th & 29th June 2008

The Virgin festival was held at the DTD (Dusk till Dawn) card room in Nottingham and what a great venue it was, massive card room with some 60 or more tables, so no squeezing in to get to your table.

Qualified to the main event, and was seated at table 22, along with The Sneak who came 2nd at the last fest, crafty sod was playing like a novice, string betting and all.

I was in seat 5, nicely positioned between the two halves of the table to my right all agressive and to my left reasonably passive. Game play each hand one of the agressive would raise every time, blinds were only 25 and 50, a few hands later each of the aggs just called the 200, looked at my cards to see KK, being suspicious I thought I would call too.

The flop came down JJ2 mixup, all checked round to me I bet, they all called?? next card was a K and all checked round to me, I dribbled a bet but got no takers, should have checked, but expected the re-raise on form from one of the aggs, shame.

Chip stack gently rising by the hour still on table 22, was dealt AKs, I raised 4x big blind and the agg teacher re-raised me 2500, I thought through the hand, this guy had been raising 9 hands out of 10, so I went for the re-raise and put him all in?????

He thought through the hand then folded showing QQ, phew, he was dying to know what I had but never showed.

Unfortunately for me the game became quite agressive all round, my raises were re-raised and I never did really see any more decent hands, with the blind structure increasing I was eventually out in 96th of 259, played for around 9 hours.

Day 2 Entered the Terminator event with bounty. Got off to a very bad start was down to 900 chips before the first hour, pushed with 33, called by QQ, flop came down 3Q* turn produced * and the river came 3 giving me quads and a double up.

Made a few more moves and doubled up a couple of times to bring chip stack reasonable, table broke up and found myself sitting with a few big stacks, short stack on table pushed with 9000 chips, player before me raised all in to isolate the pot with circa 20,000 chips, checked my cards to find KK, damn, surely at least of these two had an A, hopefully both so after a few minutes I called all in with 16,000 chips. My KK held up and I collected a nice pot.

Blinds were going up every 20 mins and I basically went card dead apart from the odd hand, but there was always a raiser each hand mainly all ins too.

Made the money but eventually pushed with rags and got busted out in 10th out of 146 starters.

Overall the weekend was fantastic, great venue well supported and well organised by Virgin and DTD.

Next Festival arranged for end of September in London and the Loose Cannon club, not sure about the venue as the last time I was there the lighting in the card room was crap, barely make out the chips colour difference. Unfortunately I'll misss the London Fest as I'm on holiday.