Hi I'm Gareth and I am an experienced amateur Tournament Director have been involved in running poker events since 2012.

I started playing poker in 2006 after watching Late Night Poker on Channel 4 and began by just playing in my friends home games and trying my luck in the occasional casino trip, but quickly found that I was missing some basic knowledge of poker etiquette of what not do at the tables and I found this a little embarrassing and costly so I looked at getting some more experience and found a local pub league to join. 

My first impressions was that it seemed quite popular with around 15-18 players waiting to play even though it was free to play, which was a bonus, and played for points each game and played over 13 weeks for the season. If you finished in the top 3 at the end of the season you get to go and play a Regional Final at a casino and try to win a trip to Las Vegas! What a great prize but a long way off for me at that point.

A few years later and after somewhat of a good progression in my game, I'd won some games, a couple of league titles and competed in the regional finals and even finished runner-up in one of them, the league needed a regular player to run the night and record the scores and communicate with Redtooth Poker (the league provider) and from there I read all the rules I could find, changed starting stacks, adjusted the blind structure, and introduce penalties for rule violations to help create a closer casino-like experience for the players.

I created a Facebook group to display results and keep the players up to date with all that was going on to make sure that it was the best run game I could produce. We went from 8-12 regular payers to having 27 players over 3 tables each week and a good percentage of returning players.

I wanted to help to encourage new players into the game but equip them with a good starting knowledge of what to do and not to do at the poker table especially for those that have not been to a casino before.

I have run weekly league / rebuy games, monthly games and annual Christmas tournaments, all through the professionalism, consistency and popularity of how my games are organised. I also help new leagues to get started with how to set-up and get the best out of their night, which I've done in Chelmsford and Hornchurch this year.