Community Weekly Round-Up: Tatjana, SPT Grand Final and Caption This

Barry Carter gives us a trip report from Dusk Till Dawn, plus tells you everything you need to know about the week ahead.

Me and UK Poker legend Tony 'Tikay' Kendall

A rare bit of actual poker today from your poker hero, as over the weekend I was at Dusk Till Dawn for the Sky Poker Tour Grand Final.

For those of you that do not know, Sky Poker is a poker TV channel in the UK that has built a strong and friendly poker community. It used to be really soft and fun, now the standard is actually much tougher but the fun remains.

They also had Tatjana Pasalic on hand to interview us, which was nice.

My car was getting fixed last weekend, so I had a quandary I have been in before. My last train was at 9:15pm (event started at 2pm) which meant I would have to book a hotel if I was still in the tournament near the end of the night. The one thing I did not want to happen was to still be in at 9:16pm with a small stack.

So in these situations I always play like a lunatic and gamble a lot, go big or go home is the philosophy. This method actually has worked out well for me, I came 6th in their Leeds event last year as a result. However someone else at my table had a similar approach, that is to say someone at my table was blind drunk and opening every pot to 6,000 at the 100/200 level. At one point he called a 26,000 shove around the 300/600 level with 4-5 offsuit, and got there.

Tatjana Pasalic doing interviews totally worth missing a train for

Some people were annoyed because he was eliminating people who had come for a fun game and travelled a long distance, they felt it was unfair to bust out to someone not taking it seriously. We all, however, were delighted to have him at the table. I must say, I for one was a little annoyed because he stole my thunder, I wanted to be that lunatic.

I got put out of my misery with an hour to spare before my train. I took a gamble with a weak top pair which I never would have if I had a hotel booked or my car with me. It always sucks to bust out, especially because it's my most favourite event of the year and I was having fun, but it is nice to play with a cavaliar attitude where busting out has its benefits too and you are not in fear of elimination.

They also announced along with Dusk Till Dawn the UK Poker Championships, which is another very ambitious event from Rob Yong and co. Watch our Daily Rewind later today for more details but it is a £500,000 guaranteed freezeout, £1,000 buy-in, at Dusk Till Dawn, it will be televised, Tatjana will be there again and you can expect some satellites on iPoker to be announced.

All this week my focus is going to be on the November Nine, whom I presume will not be worrying about missing their last train next week.

Threads of the week

Our best threads are the ones which get you to flex your creative muscles, so this week I urge you to check out Caption This.

Inspired by our Daily Rewind, we ask you to give us some funny captions to the pictures we choose, like the Hellmuth and Dwan picture (right) - thanks to ledzayats for that one.

You know I like blogs with funny names, so Blog of the Week goes to Omaha is Holdem on Steroids and other Revelations.

Its owner, themarxbros3, has already managed to turn $100 into $1,840 and it is well worth a read.

LOL of the week

Once in a while I like to take a break from laughing at poker players, so if you don't mind indulging me, this gave me the biggest laugh over the last seven days:

In case you missed it.......

Very popular this week, judging by how much it got shared on twitter, was my interview with Jason Mercier where he made his claim for being the best player in the world right now.

We had lots of great new videos in our poker school, including new No Limit videos from W34z3l and lnternet.

Shevtshenko also gave us a new Zoom video and Sam Phillips was back with an MTT video.

We announced details of our final VIP Tour stop of the year, a fun packed weekend in Paris next month.

And finally we announced yet another $10,000 Depositor Freeroll, this time on PKR.

What to watch out for this week

A busy week ahead from the boys at the Poker School. 

You can expect live coaching from CollinMoshman, Pleno1,
Unam and TomSom87. 

You can also expect new videos from CollinMoshman,
pokerguru740 and Oblioo. 

If we haven't already, expect to see the results of our Fantastic Five promotion announced today.

I promised a big announcement from our Poker School, which actually didn't happen, but it should happen this week (Scouts honour).

And you can expect us to start building up to the November Nine all week, as it starts next Monday.

I want your feedback on what you would like to see more or less of on the news pages of PokerStrategy.com. Let me know your thoughts, good and bad, in my editor thread below:

By Barry Carter l Barry Carter on Twitter

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