The Goldfish Club meets in Manchester most weeks, usually on Thursday in Denton, but sometimes elsewhere, and sometimes on Wednesday in Longsight, to play poker, starting at 20:00.
We call it The Goldfish Club because, like goldfish, we have terrible memory problems and can only remember our cards for 7 seconds.
Sometimes we play just Texas Hold'Em (when we're in Longsight); usually we play a several variations including Hold'Em, Omaha, 7 and 5 card Stud, Draw, Lowball, Razz, and Denton.
The game's basic unit is 10p and most games are played with a half-pot limit, but the ones with only 2 betting rounds may be pot-limit. For games with an ante we have the dealer sweeten the pot; for games with blinds we have either 1 20p blind or a 10p and a 20p blind, depending on the number of players.
A tenner is enough, unless you're an exceptionally poor player, but you might soon be shortstacked. Fifteen might be better. Twenty's plenty. We've capped the buy at 25 - and you can't make your stack bigger than that when re-buying.
Bring your own drinks/choccy/whatever, the hosts are rubbish. Smoking permitted - several of us do.
We open a new deck of cards about every other week, and share the cost: we like Waddingtons No1 (we used to get them wholesale) which currently run about 1.25 or so.
Lifts may be available, depending where you live.
We play with chips so you don't need loads of change
Nobody is forced to play: you could watch for a bit, come in with just a few quid, stop if you lost it and watch for a bit, etc. If you take money off the table, though, you should be finishing for the night. We usually finish shortly after midnight, so if you plan to leave earlier it's a good idea to say what time you intend to leave at the start, or to give at least 15 minutes warning, in case it accidentally looks like you're running off as soon as you win some money!
History
I first played at school - we only knew draw then, and we only had pennies to
bet with. I must have been in my 20s before I played again.
I got into a
game with a guy from work and some of his friends, very cheap - pennies - it
must be nearly 15 years ago now. That lasted a year or so (weekly, more or less)
until people moved away. Learnt some different versions though.
A couple of
years after that, I joined a game at another friend's place, just hold'em but
for slightly higher stakes. That folded after about a year, and it was only
about every 3 weeks anyway.
Then I discovered the power of the net and
advertised for a game. Jason and Tony contacted me and soon we had a game going,
just Hold'em, with 6 or sometimes 7 players. This lasted about a couple of years
until too many people moved away and we couldn't keep it going.
But after a
gap, the net once again came to the rescue as somebody else in Manchester
stumbled over Steve Sembay's poker web page and he pointed them at me. Soon the
old game was revived and it had an alternate location and day for when Tony
wasn't around (his kitchen's handy for playing). And when Tony wasn't there we'd
play other versions, too. But we still had only 5 or 6 players at best.
Until
about May of 97, when once again the net brought us into contact with a few more
players in search of low limits. We're looking at the possibility of full tables
now, and wondering about chair counts and altered odds