How I Won An Entry into the PokerStars PCA

I Did Everything Wrong to Win This Tournament and You Can Too!
How I Won an Entry into the $14,000 PokerStars Caribbean Adventure Package By Breaking All the Rules


Conventional Wisdom Says “Do NOT Do These Things If You Plan to Win a Poker Tournament”
(X indicates that I knew better but did it anyway)

X Drink alcohol (several glasses of wine)
X Play when you’re tired (I had been at the local casino earlier that day and played for about five hours)
X Stay up half the night when you have to go to work the next morning (the first round started late in the evening and the final round wasn’t over until 1:30 in the morning)
X Play in tournaments that are out of your financial comfort zone (I had never played a $30 rebuy and probably never will again)
X And my personal favorite ….Call an all-in heads up with a 5 2os and WIN!! (More about that one later)

I’ve always done things a little differently. When someone tells me to zig, I zag. When they tell me I can’t do something, I say ____ ___ ______!! . . . well, I can’t say it here because they won’t print it, but you get the idea.

Let me just start by saying that I’m not your typical poker player. When I sit down to play in the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure $10,000 buy-in tournament in January most of those brilliant young gun internet players will probably think I’m a keno player who wandered into the poker room by mistake. Shaundeeb or PearlJammer might be at the table (they also won a seat) wondering “Who is this lady?” They will not be expecting a middle aged professional woman who looks like she would fit in better at a local school teaching English or pushing paperwork in one of the offices there—and they wouldn’t be wrong in thinking that. As a former college dean and English teacher, those pursuits are where you would have found me up until about a month ago. That is, until I quit my job and decided to train for the upcoming tournament like my life depended on it. And that’s not far from the truth either, since college dean jobs aren’t easy to come by, especially where I live in Oklahoma City. The way I look at it, I have a better chance of winning $2 million dollars at the tournament than I do of getting another job anytime soon.

So anyway, back to my story of Day One at the PCA . . .
When it becomes obvious that I know what I’m doing and plan to stay put for awhile they will probably start going through the names of the handful of women’s names on the qualifying list to figure out who I am. The list of women’s names is not long (2 out of 150 so far), at least the ones who will identify themselves as women. They will eventually remember that weird name they had never noticed before—Tiltedrose (read that Tilted Rose). When they start pulling the files in their head of all the tournaments they’ve played on Stars to see if they can remember me they will come up blank, I’m pretty sure. I’ve never won any big money in the Sunday Million or any of the other big tournaments on PokerStars. As a matter of fact, the entry to this tournament is the biggest thing I’ve ever won. A package worth $14,300 is huge for me. A $10,000 buy-in to a European Poker Tour event, 7 nights at the Atlantis hotel in the Bahamas, and $2000 for food and air fare is by far the biggest win I’ve ever had at poker. When I won it I was so excited I could barely breathe for two days.

When it all starts to unfold I don’t know if I will last two days, five days, or ten minutes, but I do know that I will be having the time of my life. It doesn’t get any better than this—Playing in (not watching) a major poker tournament with many of the stars of the poker scene, a chance to win $2 million dollars, and a week’s paid vacation at one of the most beautiful spots on the planet (the Bahamas ) while staying in one of the most amazing hotels anywhere. Yeah, you could say I’m excited, or did I mention that already?

But I need to get down to the business of answering the question you really want to know, right? How does a woman like me wind up in a spot like this? The short answer is that I’ve always loved poker and knew I had to do it because I love the idea of beating the crap out of people and not getting arrested and taking all their money. And I also like the possibility of winning millions of dollars while doing it.

Oh wait, I take that back. What I meant to say was that I enjoy the mental challenge and the financial opportunities it provides. And I want to be able to give back to society by contributing to my favorite charity.

The truth is I started playing poker because I was bored to death and couldn’t think of anything fun to do with my time on weekends besides drink and that was getting old. I saw an ad in the local newspaper and went to a tournament hosted by the Amateur Poker League in my hometown of Fort Worth, Texas. I played in the tournament and was hooked instantly. I started playing several times a week and spending nearly every free moment playing and studying poker. I became a poker nerd, like I do with everything I get interested in. I bought all the books and read them. Then I started winning a few of the APL tournaments. That was such a high I can’t think of anything like it. The rush of kicking some cocky kid’s butt after he tried to push me around was so great I couldn’t believe it was legal. I’ve always been competitive and loved playing games, but most people get sick of playing spades or Trivial Pursuit after ten hours straight and will never play with you again. Not poker players! They will do it every day! So this became my tribe. We bonded on a universal level. We shared money and sustenance, we talked strategy and analyzed hands, then we secretly tried to destroy each other by using every trick in the book we could think of and when it didn’t work we went home and kicked the dog and yelled and fumed and we loved it.

That was so much fun that I decided it was time to try casinos. I’ll be honest; it took me a few “fly bys” to get my courage up to enter that testosterone fueled male bastion for the first time. I would lurk outside with my husband looking in like a kid staring at a new bike in the window. Sometimes the men inside would glare at me like I was stealing their souls by watching them, but mostly they ignored me.

TO BE CONTINUED

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