| Re: Heads Up Challenge- An Ongoing Game worth 5K
Well, the match is over. And what a blast it was! I love playing heads up, even to the tune of 5 dimes.
About tonight’s webcast,
I tinkered with the web cams and decided to do two smaller cams, one of the flop / board cards, and another of the action, from above. However both were smaller, rather than trying to push out a larger image with two smaller (hole cam) images. I think this worked well, but I’d welcome comments from the viewers. There were at one time 19 viewers online, and there were I think about 6 or 7 in chat at one point. I also added a chat component to the web page which allowed viewers to chat while watching. I really like this, and will do it again. I thought that was really cool. While I couldn’t read / follow it, we could hear the “bing” noise it would make when someone was chatting.
Things for the next webcast: I think it will be the same setup as tonight with the two cams, with an additional two cams, for hole cards. That was a really cool feature that was there last time, but it’s a tough to coordinate. So, I’m actually thinking about another table with glass panes where the player’s cards sit, as you see in (for example) Poker Superstars. That way, cards will sit there, and you can catch them when ever and not miss it when you are watching live and the player sneaks a peek at his cards. So, something to improve upon.
The other thing is simply bandwidth. I was pushing a solid 30 to 35Kbps out tonight the entire time. Not bad, but I’d actually like more, to give the users a better viewing experience. So look for a stronger feed when I tinker with a few things on my end. The picture, I know was choppy, which it will never be 30fps, but I think it can get better. So, tweaking on that to be done.
The last thing will be a better quality camera for the overhead / full table cam. This has been a crappy picture from day one, and the bottom line is I need to invest in a nicer camera for that shot. So, look for that.
One other thing I want to consider, (which will come with the higher quality cam is a microphone to broadcast the audio, along with the video.
So, look for those changes and possibly updates / tweaks to come in the next few webcasts and heads up games.
OK, so on to me never recovering from a short stack deficit in round one.
We played 4 sessions for a total of about (roughly) 20 hours. I picked up a few hands tonight, but again, ran into one that crippled me even more. The board showed 4 diamonds and I held the Kd, and there was a pair on the board, so there were the gambit of full houses that beat me, had I been betting into a K/6/7/10 combo to make a full house. There was no full house, and I made a raise on the river when I flushed up, and of course, Scooter, like the prick he is, held the punk ass Ace of Diamonds.
Back to the grind stone. I managed to slightly recover from that hand and built back to about where I was when we started, roughly 12 or 13K and took another hit. I don’t clearly recall the hand, but again, it took a good amount of my chips.
We grinded out for another hour or two and the rush I was on in the early stages of the session just went away. I simply couldn’t catch a card to save me, or it seemed like it. After being drawn out on and being called by bottom pair, in another hand, I was so frustrated at this point, I was willing to simply go all in and get it over with. However, we were playing Pot Limit Hold’em at this point, so the best I could do was raise every pot.
I finally connect up with pocket 9 and throw a re-raise out in the pot preflop. Flop didn’t hit me, but had over cards. I figured with as short as a stack as I had, the only hope I has was that Scooter didn’t have an A or a 10, which were the two overs on the flop, so I jammed the pot with pretty much all my remaining chips. Turns out I was completely wrong, and not only did he have an Ace, but he also held the 10 to make 2 pair.
So, long story short, I took some hard hits, never recovered, and had a really tough time in this last session getting anything to come together. Looks like I’m paying for Scooter to play some tourney action either at the Spring Pot of Gold up in Reno later this month, or something else more towards the WSOP.
Regarding the match itself. It was huge fun. I love playing short handed ,and am always up for a heads up game.
A few comments on the items we changed while playing, or will / would change for next time:
When we played 8B, we decided to play it as $200/400 rather than $100/200. We did this because we both agreed that at $100/200, there just wasn’t any chip movement. We also agreed that while we both loved 8B and playing it was a lot of fun, chopping high and low was pretty much a waste of a round of poker, again because we didn’t move many chips.
We decide to add a Limit game of $200/400. This was a great addition.
We discussed having a pot limit game, and how that effected the action. Preflop, there was pretty much a cap, unless you got in a re-raising battle and kept jamming the pot. This was very rare, so any time there was a PL game which we were playing, we were typically (9 out of 10 times) going to the flop with $300 in the middle. Building pots was a little harder, and the game was somewhat tame for the most part.
We discussed changing the rounds to possibly 20 or 25 minutes. 30 minutes was plenty long, but thought it might be interesting to shorten them and be able to get more rotations of different games in.
We discussed and decided that for the next heads up challenge, that we would add either a 7CS game, or a 2/7 / Razz game. Limit or NL.
Overall, it was a lot of fun, and will do it again!
I made one final offer to Scooter at the end of the night, which was double or nothing, and he decided to take the money and run. Obviously he is not a *true* gambler…..
It was a good match. And I look forward to the next opportunity to do it again-
If there are any questions I can answer about the setup, format, software, etc. etc. etc., please don’t hesitate to ask. Look for something soon with a new table which has the glass windows for the hole card cams.
One last thing. Playing with the web cams, and in particular the software I was using, has opened a lot of ideas for building a table with hole card cams for each player and streaming that locally to your local network / TV / etc. There are quite a few features of the software I was using which will take up to 100 cams connected and offers quite a bit of flexibility in spooling the stream locally or over an Internet connection. So, look for some additional information on that once I get a chance to digest it, put some ideas together and get it committed to paper. In summary, you could easily put together a pretty sweet (LOCAL) stream of your game to people watching in other rooms, etc. who are connected to your local network. (no bandwidth issues) or if you were sitting on a full T1 or even a PRI with a fractional T1 with decent bandwidth. But locally to your TV, Plasma, other computers, etc. I can see some really cool spectator features being developed. Look for this discussion over at Keen's joint.  |
Re: Heads Up Challenge- An Ongoing Game worth 5K 
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