Every now and then, poker players take risks . In the summer I ended up entering a 3pm starting two-day tournament at the Venetian (the $550 PLO) despite the fact that I had just got off the plane from London and it was 11pm my time. By the time I went to bed it was 4am and I’d been awake for 27 hours straight. Not a great way to enter day 2. I went on to finish 8^th for $5600.

Sometimes those risks don’t pay off. The £1k Monte Carlo at Dusk Till Dawn in Nottingham was the last major tournament of the UK calendar and given that my sponsorship with Unibet was shortly coming to an end, it was one I had to play. I had an Academy to teach in London on the Saturday, which would be during day 1B. No problem, I thought. I’ll play day 1A and drive back to Nottingham on the Sunday if I make day 2.

Albert Sapiano told me about the traffic on the M1 on the way up to Nottingham (I had come up that morning from North Norfolk). There was apparently a huge contraflow around Luton and it was murder.

I doubled up on the last hand of day 1A (what a spot to pick up Aces!) and made day 2. Being careful, I checked the other ways of getting to Nottingham from London which avoided Luton. I could go via the A1(M), but it would add another 20 mins to my journey. With my stats/economist head on, I concluded that my expected loss going through the M1 contraflow would be less than 20 mins, so I should take the M1.

Damn. If only I’d been to that lecture about risk averseness. Sure, perhaps on average the journey time via the M1 will only add, say, 15 mins, but when the contraflow goes wrong, it goes catastrophically wrong. Using a different economics theory, it’s sometimes worth a guaranteed penalty of 15 mins to make certain that you don’t suffer a disproportionately worse outcome.

So there I was, in the gridlock, a hundred miles from Nottingham, thinking my ETA was around 1.10pm, or 70 mins into day 2. What does a poker player think in those circumstances?

Being the maths bore I am, I punished myself by working out how much the traffic jam was costing me. So here it is:

My stack was 84,500 and the blinds for level 11 would be 800/1600 with a 200 ante. There would be 9 players at my table, and for the sake of argument, I’ll say that 27 hands would be dealt per hour. Level 12 would be after 60 mins and would be 1000/2000 w/200.

(Oh, and by the way, you can forget about the hope that – as with many places – they’ll actually start at 12.15pm after some general faffing. The DTD is a tightly run ship and they’ll definitely start on time.)

So that’s three rounds at 4200 (800+1600 + 9 x 200), which is 12,600 and around half a round at 4800 (1000 + 2000 + 9 x 200), which is 2,400. All in all, the traffic jam would cost me 15,000 in tournament chips. The buy in was £1000 (+£90 – but the juice is not in the prize pool) and you get 30,000 in chips starting stack. Since we had not reached the money, the tournament chips were still worth their initial value. So that 15,000 cost me £500.

Or £7 a minute.