A journey through KP'S HORSESHOE (Auckland, New Zealand) (1 Viewer)

[RagingAZN]

KP'S HORSESHOE (Auckland, New Zealand)
​

Every poker room deserves a thread and I think ours is no exception. Join us on a wonderful journey from 2007 'til now where I hope you will enjoy the pictures and stories that have made "KP's Horseshoe" what it is today. I am KP and this is the story of my poker room...

CHAPTER 1
"Why did you call with 9-high?"
"I was bluffing."
RT (From one of our first home games)
​

I was introduced to poker by my best friend in '05-'06 when we were still in high school. We would dabble in a few games over the holidays but it really took hold during a youth camp trip where we played for hours into the night with plastic chips and paper cards. We were hooked so I set out to set up a regular game in my parents garage. Being from New Zealand, even now its hard to get decent gear but in 2007, it was very hard to find much poker gear at all! I managed to find a folding poker table (which was damn heavy!) from an emporium type place and a set of beautiful dice chips from the games store. They even had an automatic card shuffler which I thought was a steal at $20. I had some plastic coated playing cards and we were ready to play!

Friday 10th of August, 2007. None of the first 9 of us had any idea about how the blinds worked so we all played ante only NL Texas Hold 'em for the first few games. Everybody would ante and action moved as normal. We started with 10c antes with a $10 buy-in. To be fair it was actually quite a good format, it ensured a lot of action, although that was probably because we were donkeys (we still are!) At the time we were 17-18 so that was a lot of money for some of us then. I remember winning a few bucks at the first game and thought I was on my way to being a poker superstar!

At our very first game, we had the now infamous "call bluff" pulled out by RT. At showdown, the hands were turned over and we couldn't believe it when he had called and showed 9-high. I guess everybody has to start from somewhere...

We started at 7:30pm and played until about 3-4am. At this time, I was playing first team football (soccer) on Saturday afternoons so suffice to say, I didn't play very well that day as I was suffering from a poker hangover. Everybody was super impressed with the setup and we all thought it was very professional but little did we know how things were about to change...

Keep tuned for chapter 2!

 

[RagingAZN]

KP'S HORSESHOE (Auckland, New Zealand)
​

Every poker room deserves a thread and I think ours is no exception. Join us on a wonderful journey from 2007 'til now where I hope you will enjoy the pictures and stories that have made "KP's Horseshoe" what it is today. I am KP and this is the story of my poker room...

CHAPTER 2
"These new chips look nice but they smell like ass."
SB
​

After playing regularly for about 6 months with our dice chips, I stumbled upon a forum called Chiptalk mid-2008 (Let's just remember the good times of Chiptalk, not the bad times at the end) and educated myself (or so I thought) on poker chips and cards. I searched the forums for hours and hours, digesting as much information as I could.

I was nervous as about buying something online (this was new to me back in the day!) but I took the plunge and made a deal for a 1000 piece set of Progen80 chips which I still think are the best China Clays ever made. A Paulson knockoff, they had beautiful colours on a Greek style interlocking mold, simply amazing. I got 400 greens, 300 blacks, 200 purples and 100 oranges. More than enough for what we'd need and a rather inefficient breakdown but ignorance is bliss. It was a daunting 6 week wait for them to arrive but when they did, I was absolutely gobsmacked. I had never seen anything so beautiful in my life...

...but OMG the smell was horrendous. I tried washing them, airing them out and leaving them in the sun but that odd smell just wouldn't go away. We eventually got over it but I feel like it still lingers on my hands to this very day.

I recently sold these to a poker-playing acquaintance but they were the workhorses for the best part of 15 years at our home game.

We salute you Progen 80s!

Stay tuned for Chapter 3..

 

[BottomPair7]

Following. I love a good home game thread. Some day I look forward to starting my own thread.

 

[Cbiscuit]

I’m new to PCF and just joined up also in New Zealand and would love to get connected with more people locally. Love this story and was wondering if there was more to it and also if there is a way to message on this forum.

 

[Longfoot]

When can we expect Chapter 3? We're waiting.....

 

[RagingAZN]

KP'S HORSESHOE (Auckland, New Zealand)
Every poker room deserves a thread and I think ours is no exception. Join us on a wonderful journey from 2007 'til now where I hope you will enjoy the pictures and stories that have made "KP's Horseshoe" what it is today. I am KP and this is the story of my poker room...

CHAPTER 3
"That's the top of the table dummy!"
SP
​

After a rough first year at University where I flunked out of Biomedical sciences (This was one of the pathways to medical school but between late nights playing poker online and football on the weekends, my studies fell by the wayside), I change degrees to a Sport and Exercise Science/Psychology double major and I'm doing quite well. My game is running well every fortnight and we alternate between a $10 buy-in tournament with rebuys with 10c NLHE cash games. I have one of the best games going with a quality set of chips and COPAG cards. Other games around here are playing on dining tables with plastic dice chips and paper cards!

However, my folding table with green felt-like surface was always something I was not happy with, so we decided one day to make a table ourselves. After searching online, I came across Scott Keen's table building forum. It was a plethora of knowledge and I imagine a lot of table builders on here probably owe quite a bit to that forum. It had so much information, pictures and plans, it made building a table so easy for a rookie like me. On a side note, it was quite sad when that forum went downhill but that story is for another day!

Living in New Zealand, quality poker gear was (and still is!) hard to get so everybody had the same crappy folding green tables made out of MDF. My best friend who is the son of a timber merchant got us some good plywood and we went to work in my garage over a few weekends. We didn't have proper sawhorses so had to use some of the breakfast bar wooden stools but ended up cutting into one of them! My old man was not happy at all We used the scottkeen discount codes on sites such as yourautotrim and got all our materials shipped over. It ended up costing us an arm and a leg but it was so much fun!

I was still living at home at the time and we had a second lounge/rumpus area which my parents let me use as a poker room. I got a bit of decor, some lights up and my dream poker room was complete.

I unfortunately don't have any build progress pics but this was the finished product below...

I apologise for the photo quality, it was probably taken on a point-and-shoot digital camera with like 3 megapixels lol

Although the table wasn't perfect, it came out pretty damn good and I was super happy with it.

Everything seemed to be going so well in my life but as the old saying goes, all good things have to come to an end...

Stay tuned for Chapter 4!

PS: I apologise for the wait, I will do my best to post more frequently.

 

[RagingAZN]

KP'S HORSESHOE (Auckland, New Zealand)
Every poker room deserves a thread and I think ours is no exception. Join us on a wonderful journey from 2007 'til now where I hope you will enjoy the pictures and stories that have made "KP's Horseshoe" what it is today. I am KP and this is the story of my poker room...

CHAPTER 4
"Sorry guys, we're closing down the game!"
KP
​

The saying "all good things have to come to an end" really rang true for us in the early 2010's. My old man's business collapsed so he was forced to sell his house and move to somewhere a lot smaller. This also meant the end of me hosting poker for the time being. It also coincided with a time where it was getting harder to keep my game going as all my regulars started to finish university, travel, enter the workforce or start families.

This led me to start grinding online at Pokerstars, PartyPoker and Full Tilt Poker. I read and absorbed all the books that I could and did reasonably well. I followed the standard TAG formula at the time, playing something like 14/12 and grinding at the microstakes full-ring games and $5 SNG's. I would multitable 12 tables at a time and grinded out 15-20 hours a week while studying at university.

Winning at online poker was great but I think my most memorable achievement was spending some of my hard earned Stars points on a Pokerstars t-shirt. I wore that T-shirt everyday for about 6 months, thinking I was the bees knees.

It was a great time to be playing online poker but then Black Friday came along and dried up the games completely. Being in New Zealand, we could still play but it meant all the juicy USA fishes were nowhere to be found! I remember having to battle with all the Eastern European nitbots who would be playing 20 SNG's at a time and playing stats like 8/6. It was exploitable but made it such a grind!

I missed all the friendly drunk USA players who would actually chat on the tables

This continued for a few years but poker would then take a backseat to life when I graduated University in 2012...

Stay tuned for Chapter 5!