New to tournament poker

My exposure to Poker is a fortnightly game with friends which normally involves more beer than poker chips. I religiously watch WSOP on the telly though, but recently the energy required to put a game together between six busy people has been lacking, so I’ve started looking at online poker as a way to play more often.

I’d heard of PokerStars and so that was the first client I downloaded. Wow, I was simply not ready for the complexity of online poker! The amount of vocabulary required just to understand the incredible hectic scheduling was overwhelming. There seemed to a bewildering array of options to set the client up as well, again requiring terms I just didn’t understand. I went through a number of other poker clients, dismissing the downright tacky and clunky, and finally settling on FullTilt for no other reason than it was the one I had loaded when I finally decided to play.

It was clear that I wanted to play sit&go; cash games looked as though they would cost me money if I didn’t know what I was doing! My first attempt at an s&g failed because the game started before I had confirmed I wanted to play! This turned-out to be good thing because, now being a spectator, I realised I wouldn’t have been ready for the speed the game is played at. Poker, for me, is a plodding game where I have lots of time to take the piss out of my opponents, and make a decision; this was something else entirely. It’s alright making a choice in a hurry but would I know how to control the thing? There’s $1.25 at stake here, I don’t want to blow it on the first hand! Watching a game’s fine but you’re not watching how the players interact with the client; how they actually make the bets. The options were no help: “bet slider mode exponential” – what the hell is a “bet slider”?

I finally just decided to go for it: chose a game with very few registered players and pressed the button without delay. The game filled up and we’re all sitting there - I’ve actually got butterflys in my stomach - I’m looking around at the usernames, chuckling at the silly ones, then suddenly realise that everyone is waiting for me to press the “I’m ready” button…