PokerProf's Noble Poker Freeroll

I played in the PokerProf’s freeroll at Noble Poker tonight, finishing 29th out of 193 players that registered. Top 15 paid. Not a horrible performance overall, but not great either. It was a freeroll, so the play wasn’t outstanding, although it was still better than most play money games you’ll find.

The early theme for me was trips. I was in the big blind with K5o in the first hand of the tournament, and saw a flop of [ 5 5 6 ]. A third heart showed up on the turn, but no one made their flush, and I took down a pretty big pot to start things off.

Shortly thereafter I was dealt a pair of jacks and flopped a set. There was one other player that seemed like he wanted to go all in with me, but he ended up folding to my post flop raise. I don’t remember exactly how it went down and I don’t feel like looking up the hand history.

A few hands later I’m dealt rockets, and the same player calls my large pre-flop raise. I get a third ace on the flop, and we both check. He leads out on the river with a small bet, and I raise. He reraises, and I go all in, thinking I’ve got him. But he lays it down. Oh well. I guess I have to tone down the aggression a little bit.

After that it was a lot of folding. I had a pretty good chip stack, and didn’t have to make any drastic moves.

I would like to nominate myself for the most retarded use of the hammer ever. We’re approaching the first break and blinds are 100/200. I’m in the small blind. Someone from early positions limps, as does the dealer, leaving him with only 40 chips. I haven’t played a hand in quite a while, so I figure I can make a huge raise, and steal the big blind, and the limper’s chips, and then worst case lose 40 to the super short stack. What I didn’t realize was that he had already put in $200 so if the big blind and limper fold, then the main pot includes their chips, and there will be no side pot. Doh. He wins the hand, tripling up, then double or triples up on the next hand. Oops.

After the break, I was at a table where over half the players were sitting out. My goal was at the very least to outlast all of them. One of them was stubborn and kept winning his blind all-ins, but I think we finally took him out. I really didn’t have much worth playing here. I stole a few blinds, but that was it.

The blinds were up to 400/800 and I only had about 3200 left when I got 66 in the big blind. The dealer and small blind limped, and I pushed all-in, hoping to take it right there. Unfortunately the small blind called with K9o and hit a king on the flop to knock me out.

---------------

Noble Poker’s site is decent. Its not the best site around, but it’s also not the worst. They have a standard top-down view, as well as a first person view, similar to True Poker. They don’t have many avatars yet, but I assume that will change over time. The voices get annoying after a while, although I’m sure you can turn them off. Play also seems to move slower than at most sites, but that could have been a function other player’s connections or just slow decision making.

One thing I did like was the hand history. They show what each player had, and the bets/calls/raises etc, in a graphical timeline type view. I don’t know that they store the history on your computer so you can review later, but at the very least it looks cool at the time. I don’t think I’ve seen that elsewhere. Most sites jus put up a text summary of the hand.

Their multi-tabling interface needs some work. All the tables share the same window and you have to toggle between them, which is somewhat confusing, and rather annoying.

Overall I’d say the site is better than average. They are promoting it really hard, so we’ll have to see what kind of player base they can achieve.

---------------

Still haven’t decided if I’m going to play in the blogger event tomorrow. The max number of entries has been dropped down to 100. If it was for cash and not a WSOP seat, I would definitely play, and if it was at PokerStars again I’d play. I still think I’m going to play but I haven’t completely made up my mind yet.