/ nono / 23 May 2008 /

May 16 2008 saw over 40 poker players compete in the final of the Poker Player Magazine's Poker Grand Prix for a prize pool of £15,000 including the 1st place prize of a WSOP package of £12,000 with the popular event sponsored by Betfair.

Held at the City Bunker, the sponsors made sure that even those taking an early exit had plenty to do with golf simulators and Wii Sports providing a welcome distraction impromtu STT's and the state-of-the-art trading room providing wall-to-wall sporting action for those interested in some live sports betting.

A hard fought heads-up battle between Stephen 'Funkus Town' Baker and Graham 'mydogmolly' Dixon eventually saw Stephen taking the top prize and a trip to Vegas with the runner-up Graham taking £1,000 for his efforts.
The prizes broke down as follows.

1	Funkus Town	Stephen Baker	£12k World Series Package
2	mydogmolly	Graham Dixon	$1000
3	FiXXXeR8	Steven Ledsham	$650
4	bulldozerD	Dean Pearson	$500
5	LaticsBlu	Martin Walsh	$400
6	Buzz40uk	Mark Wilkinson	$200
7	zolmot	Kevin Mcparland	$150
8	gorilla G	Wayne Pretorius	$100

On top of the final prize pool Betfair also contributed $10,000 into the 10 qualifying events which took the top 45 players into this live final.

On a personal level the evening started badly with me struggling to find the damned place!
The City Bunker is quite a difficult place to get to! It's effectively walled off on 3 sides and as such I turned up about an hour late, despite having walked past it twice half an hour earlier!
The tournament draw had been done and had just started as I arrived, so with very few people to talk to (as usual) I headed straight to the golf simulators and started a round. Unfortunately those that I was playing against had actually played a round of golf before whereas I had only the odd trip to the driving range and Tiger Woods 2007 to work with, so ultimately I was never going to win and declined to play skins for money.

The golf simulator comprises of a projection screen with real golf clubs and real golf balls and the computer calculates where you've hit it and how hard. There's different material and lengths of Astroturf representing the tee, fairway, rough, deep rough and sand. All very clever.

There are boost and help options that allow the handicap of those that haven't played before to be almost negated and overall results in a very fun experience. Despite this after about an hours play my arms were sore so I looked for a new challenge.

As players started to drop out, the call to arms for Wii bowling was taken up and I got involved in that finishing 1st or 2nd in most occasions thanks to the many ridiculous poses I made every time I threw the ball and everyone else being a bit rubbish.

Eventually some more degenerate gamblers got bust out and I managed to play some Chinese poker and high card before enough people were out that I could get involved in some STTs.
Play in the Main Event finished just before 4am, at which point the 4 hours of golf and 2 hours of Wii bowling meant I was more than happy to see the taxi that'd take me home.

Everybody I asked seemed to have had a good time whether they cashed or not, myself included and I fall into the latter category having been bust out in both STTs I played in.
City Bunker do a regular poker night where you can learn from a professional player every Monday (called the Poker Bunker) and more information about the Poker Bunker or the Grand Prix and how to enter next year can be found here.

Poker Player Grand Prix
City Bunker

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