We had a fantastic turn out at this event: over 100 players. We sold out the event in just over a week. One of our players even managed to flop a Royal Flush.

Don’t believe me? Check this out.

After nagging from Mike Jones, Dave Williamson and Dominic McAdden, I have finally given in and started to use Twitter, to enable everyone to follow pokercoder at least - see http://twitter.com/pokercoder. This will allow you to get instant notification of events, registration opening, changes in events, results etc.

Lot of people arrived early this time and in contrast, I scraped in there by the skin of my teeth at barely 7pm (the tournament start time)

I then had to do the registrations on my Mac, as I had forgotten to print off the attendee list. Grrrrr. This took so long that we didn’t start playing until about 8pm. After this, Adobe broke the news that Serge Jespers wasn’t coming and they wouldn’t be demoing Flash Catalyst or Flex 4 after all

So the event didn’t get off to a flying start, but hey, what event really does? And really it’s bout how you deal with the challenges set out before you.

Everyone was is great form and really up for the event. The Tshirts were all there and the first 50 registered got their event Tshirt. The first 10 knocked out got a full round of applause, their Loser’s T shirt and a crap prize of their choice, many of which were truly awful. Our lucky losers were:

In order of exit:

1. Biffer Rowley.
2. Chris Sees.
3. Dominic Crowhurst.
4. Jimmy Taylor.
5. Miguel Sanchez
6. Neil Bennett.
7. Chris Williams.
8. Mikko Tormala.
9. Byron Manley.
10. Stuart Lees.

I managed to go out in mediocre position and my night’s play was uneventful. I won a hand early on with a total bluff and by raising in position. Everyone folded to me. Suckers lol. However, the dealer at my table obviously had a whole stack of unlinked, unsuited low cards he had deliberatly put aside for me and by the time I was down to a tiny all-in stack I was lucky enough to draw a K+Q. Only one caller, but he had K+A. Ace on the flop and I was gone.

The Winners: In position number

1. Jonathan Craig - Tournament Champion (Web Premium Package - PC + ticket for FotB).
2. Alam Gill.
3. Alex Gounaropoulos.
4. Andrea Ottolina. (Photoshop CS4 Extended - Mac)
5. Sam Clark.
6. Surya Kona.
7. Irvin Suntokee.
8. Mark Schaschke.
9. Richard Lord.
10. Hamish Cross (Adobe After Effects CS4 for Windows)

Go see the photos of the night here

We finished up around midnight as usual, but lots of people were still there either watching the final table or playing at the numerous sit ‘n go tables that had sprung up as people went out. The last of us were thrown out at about 1am. Some of the hardcore crew even went on to The Empire casino in Leicester Square till the wee small hours in the morning to carry on.

No inane celebration of mediocrity. Just quick sharp facts about events, notifications, prizes, offers, benefits to you and the odd bit of begging for feedback or opinions on how we can improve your PokerCoder experience.

We have been having the problem that our emails hit firewalls and Spam blockers long before everyone gets them, as all our emails contain the word ‘Poker’ a number of times and we send out hundreds at a time. This leads to problems with our members not getting their notifications about events or not getting their confirmations.

If any of our members who attend have expertise in email batching, your advise on fixing this would be massively appreciated!

But for now…click HERE, then login and follow the PokerCoder feed, or if you don’t already have a Twitter account, please set one up. It’s free and you don’t get any spam as notifications are sent to your twitter client, not your email address. And they are only the people you choose to follow…which will obviously only be PokerCoder

For those of you who haven’t received the emails, don’t forget, if you registered for the event, it’s TONIGHT! Your names will be checked at the door. Everything starts at 7pm sharp so don’t be late.

Any questions, see the site.