Newcastle Preview

Some towns produce an inspiring list of famous people, bands and institutions over the years…take Seattle for example: Jimi Hendrix, Bill Gates, Nirvana, Microsoft and The Seattle Coffee Company (since rebranded as Starbucks).

Some places don’t do quite so well. To date Newcastle’s highlights have been Jimmy Nail, Cheryl Tweedy and the synthetic entertainment duo of Ant and Dec. The Geordie production line reached an all time low in 1990, when the cover of “Fog on the Tyne” sung by Paul Gascoigne hit the charts.

My own home town of Watford does not fair particularly well either - Ginger Spice, Tim Lovejoy and Nick Leeson, to name but three. Lovejoy, of Soccer A.M. fame, currently resides at number two in my celebrity irritant list, just pipping veteren sportscaster Jim Rosenthael, but behind Chris Moyles.

Rosenthael has been irritating me for nigh on two decades now, as the front man for ITV’s chaotic sports coverage. The nadir was reached in San Marino during 2005. A fantastic F1 race was reaching it’s climax - Schumacher was all over Alonso’s tailpipe for ten laps and the tension was electric - one mistake would settle it. The boys at ITV, at this point, realise that they are one advert break short of their contracted amount, and decide to take us for a break …during the 2nd last lap. Four minutes later, we cut back to Alonso punching the air in triumph after holding off the German superstar.

Great. The commentator nervously hands back to the studio where we see a nervous looking Mark Blundell staring at the floor. At this point the screen fills with the beaming tanned face of Rosenthael, who instead of apologising profusely and explaining about contractual obligations, opts intead to treat the watching public like lobotomised monkeys.

“Well, wasn’t that exciting! Let’s enjoy a re-run of those final 3 laps again”.

Again? Again? I bet you saw it in your studio in Imola, but I was watching an advert for Capital One credit cards while Alonso was crossing the line.

Anyway, where was I…ah yes - Newcastle. I’m travelling up there tonight, and will play in the £200 event on Wednesday night. Thursday should be the UKPT Main Event, which has a nice structure I’m told along similar lines to the Irish Open. If I bust early from that there is a £100 on Thursday evening which I may play, but after that I’ll spend the rest of the weekend relaxing.

I played 4 online tournies last night - I went pretty deep in 3 of them, but didn’t cash unfortunately. I built up decent stacks in those tournaments, but lost the key races as has been the way recently. Perhaps the problem is partly that, when I take on the races, it is for my tournament life, when I should be looking to generate bigger stacks in the mid/late stages of tournaments so my neck isn’t on the line so much. The issue is, restealing is so prevalent at that stage during MTTs, that if you are going to raise for 20% of your stack, it really needs to be a hand you are comfortable calling an all in with. In the tournaments I played last night, people pushed over a raise two or three times an orbit. In many ways, you are better off being the “re-stealer” because if the initial raiser has AJ or mid pocket pair it’s pretty difficult for him to call no matter what you have. Online tournies certainly play a lot different to live tournaments, particularly in the mid-late levels when you are down to three tables.