The Ogmore Poker Tour – Rodney’s House

Sssshhh!! Stop having fun! – The comment Rodney kept making every ten minutes to try and get us to keep the noise down while we were playing in the OPT and his wife and kids were cordoned off in the bedroom.

Close your eyes and imagine for a moment. Imagine a scene where there is a writer and he is writing the next BIG thing. What does it look like?

In my imagination the writer is sat next to his pool, outside his apartment situated on a remote island somewhere hot. The heat is blazing down on his well-oiled and tanned torso. Standing next to him, just slightly to the right is a tall lady with curly brown hair. She is in high heels that bring out the definition in her legs and make her 5”7” frame seem much taller. She has a black bikini on and holds an umbrella over the writer’s head shielding him from the heat. He is sat in an old wooden chair hunched over an old typewriter. It is a Remington Portable. His fingers stop, suspended over the words QWERTY. He is thinking. He lifts his head above the typewriter and peers towards the ocean for inspiration. He continues to type.

The Ogmore Poker Tour

I like my imagination. Do you sometimes read something, watch something or listen to something and think. “Do I live on a different planet?” I do.

This writer is currently sat on his decking in his back garden. The sun and I are playing a game of hide and go seek. I don’t want to play but he keeps insisting on hiding. His favourite hiding place is behind his mate called Cloud. I have flip-flops on because I cannot find my slippers. Debbie has hidden them. Another game of hide and go seek I don’t want to play. Occasionally the stench of pollution catches the wind and finds its way into the pit of my stomach through my nostrils. It is the aftermath of my blocked drained. Christ it is cold. Why aren’t I in the front room typing? Where it is warm and comfortable? Subconsciously I think I will get into the wife’s good books if I write while she sunbathes. She doesn’t have an umbrella and she is not wearing high heels. Instead she is laid on the sun lounger in her bright yellow Sponge Bob dressing gown. She is also playing a game of hide and go seek with the sun only her game is much better than mine. When the sun is found she rewards him with a peek of her pert tits. The sun is obviously not a tit man!

Today’s poker scene moves around the world disguised in a variety of tours, each one has it’s own acronym, WSOP, WSOPE, WPT, EPT, UKIPT, GUKPT, APAT, blah, blah, blah. Liv Boeree tweets.

EPT or WPT this weekend?

I tweet.

Rodney’s house or The Wyndham Pub this weekend?

I love the advertising campaigns for these tournaments. They are all very similar, each of them describing how you can qualify for peanuts and win thousands of pounds. Well that’s just fantastic. I can imagine the conversation now.

Wife – Are you taking me out tonight?

Poker Bloke – Well I was thinking of entering the $5 UKIPT Satellite.

Wife – $5? That’s sounds like value. Can we go out after you have finished?

Poker Bloke – I don’t think so. If I win I may be playing all night.

Wife – OK what about tomorrow night?

Poker Bloke – Well if I win tonight I will have to play in another satellite tomorrow night, so you will have to rule that one out as well.

Wife – Well, considering the value you are getting I think I will stay in and knit a jumper. You play away my darling.

It is fine reading the stories of people turning a few bucks into thousands and sometime millions of dollars, but unless your wife has decided to pack her bags and piss off to Porthcawl for the weekend with her mates you are screwed. Even on those rare occasions when she does piss off you are then The World’s Worst Father as your kids take on the impossible task of competing against your UKIPT Satellite. You get that phone out and ring every one of his mates to ask them if they fancy a sleep over. If you are ever stuck for money just rent your kids out to people addicted to poker. You could earn a fortune. You never win any of these satellites, but boy you come so close. Nobody likes a story about how close you came more than your wife after wasting 12 hours of her life. Even better when you find the time to peel yourself away from poker to watch Man Utd v Liverpool but can’t quite manage to leave the laptop to take your son out for a bike ride.

So unless we decide to sell our wives to Polish gangsters and our kids to rich "A" list Hollywood stars us mere mortals had better create our own unique tours. My mates and I have called ours the Ogmore Poker Tour (OPT). We don’t think it will catch on but that’s cool because we don’t have much room around our kitchen tables for anymore than nine players.

Our inaugural OPT took place last night. It was held in the Broadlands in Bridgend. For some people living in the Valley a trip to the Broadlands is like visiting Hollywood Boulevard. For others it is just full of those Townie Wankers. Our host is Andrew “Rodney” Edwards. I have never been to Rodney’s house before and I don’t know too much about his private life away from the tables apart from the fact that he did take my wife to watch The Karate Kid in the pictures when he was 14. I sincerely hope he never got under the top-top!

When I arrive I am invited into the poker room. Well it was the dining room really. There was one table – the dining room table. He had pushed all of his food mats into one column spreading from one length of the table to the other. There was no cover of green felt instead the table was adorned with a brilliant white sheet. I could picture his wife feverishly cleaning up the house all day.

You are not putting that dirty green sheet over my dining room table when we have guests. Not in my house.

Neil “Black 4” Farm was the first one there. He hadn’t played since his last outing at Tondu where he got too pissed, lost shit loads of cash and then decided to confess all to his wife and he isn’t even Catholic! I could tell he was bursting for a game. Eddie’s dad Steve turned up next and then Eddie the Ace. Eddie the Ace was a sponsored GUKPT pro for the evening. Well he was wearing a GUKPT cap. Next to arrive were Andrew “Too Nice” Bayliss, Steve “The Rock” John and Tony “The Rain Cloud of Doom” Thorne and last but not least was the giant Gavin “The Bear” Bayliss. I don’t know why he was invited to be honest because he is a logistical nightmare. Where the fuck do you put him? It was like Gulliver playing cards with the Lilliputians.

The first event of the tour was the £10 rebuy event. I hate tournaments sometimes. They are so fucking boring. I sat there like a lemon all night, folding hand after hand. Black 4 was pushing the table around and me in particular because I was his BB when he was seated on the Button. He shoved, I looked down at TT and called and hit the cash tables when his QQ held up. Well, not really the cash tables, I just sat on the floor in the kitchen with The Bear and Eddie’s dad Steve who had also been knocked out. The game went on for an eternity as it does when beer is flowing freely and mates get together to talk about shit. Black 4 took it down, Too Nice was second and The Rain Cloud of Doom was third.

We then had an argument over whether or not we should continue to play cash or have a freezeout. We decided to have a freezeout. A few of us weren’t happy so we decided to watch YouPorn on the iPad. We all took turns to show each other our favourite 1-minute wank moments. Quite a private moment and a little bit eerie watching porn with nine other blokes but it was better than the freezeout.

“Try Mushroom Tube. There is a much better selection on there.” Said The Rock.

I remembered being an excited kid when I was left alone in my house, searching under my Dads mattress for his copy of Razzle. In that copy of Razzle you had the choice of four different models. Well not exactly models, they were Readers Wives. Each page on YouPorn has 30 separate videos to watch. There are 3185 pages of porn. So my Dad had the choice of 4 Readers wives from Hull and The Rock has the choice of 96 thousand woman to choose from to share his two minutes of joy and that is not enough for him? No, The Rock finds more selection on Mushroom Tube?

“How can you be disappointed with 96 thousand videos on YouPorn?” I ask The Rock.

He considers the question for a while. He takes just as long in between hands to ponder his next move.

“Well there are no animal videos on YouPorn.” Said The Rock.

The table sent silent, we all looked at the dog and we all felt an urge to kick it.

Black 4 took down the second tournament. Eddie Ace finished second and Eddies Dad Steve third. Black 4 knocked me out in the same way as before, this time I had 66 and he had AA. The white tablecloth was full of pizza and beer and every ten minutes Rodney shouted at us to tell us all to be quiet in case we woke the family up. The more beer that was consumed the louder the whispering got. The dining room table resembled a bombsite.

Never mind next stop on the OPT will be Bobby Eggs allotment. Luckily I don’t think his chickens will give a fuck about the noise, as long as we play them some videos of chickens shagging squirrels.

Mushroom Tube wasn’t it Steve?

This article first appeared in BLUFF Europe Magazine