Shenanigans in Ireland

Ahh, so that's what the city looks like!

Hey!

Well this has actually got to be one of the funnest weekends of the year and I'm sure I'll remember it as being one of the best of my life. It was none other than the Irish Open festival, held in Dublin. I flew over with Ryanair on the Friday after doing an all nighter. I was pretty nackered and couldn't sleep on the plane so crashed when I got to the hotel for a few hours. After only a few hours sleep I woke in the early afternoon and so it began. A weekend of hardcore poker, drinking and banter.

Despite Dublin quite possibly being one of the most expensive places I've been, I still love it. The peoples attitudes are great and really playing poker is so much more fun at lively tables where everyone is having a good time and gambling. It really was a lot of fun and I hope vegas is like this in the Summer.

As far as the tournaments go, as usual I bricked. I got deep and built stacks playing solid poker in both. I came about 90/720 with 72 paid in the main event with 72 paid running my queens into Aces of the guy raising every hand near the bubble. Coooooool! I still can't believe how soft both the tournaments were. My bustout hand for the €1650 sort of sums it up:

UTG limps (limping every hand), UTG+1 limps (also limping every hand and about the worst player ever), I iso the cut-off with AcKs and the blinds fold.

UTG whines about how he hates folding and folds. UTG+1 flats me with Js6s. We are like 50BB effective.

Flop As9c4s. He check/calls my cbet. The turn brings the 2s completeing the flush. I've got about 1.5x pot size bet. Decide to value bet my top pair with NFD commiting myself. Kind of frustrated I ran into the flush but from how he's played seriously I double up for sure if he has a random Ace rag or even just a nine on the river. Oh well.

Just a bit frustrating after the hand and he scoops the pot he goes "that serves you right for keep raising me, I thought you had nothing". I felt like saying, well ofcourse I'm going to isolate you, you're the biggest donk I've ever played with and even if you put me on nothing, why would you call with J6! Decided against it and said GG and walked off. Still pretty annoying how people like that manage to build stacks in these things.

Anyway, enough about me being bitter about variance in live tournaments and onto the funner stuff! After busting the main just before the money, I went to the bar and met up with a couple of the other iPoker qualifiers who I had been chilling with on the first night. I then met Tom Rutter who was heading out of the bar and heading into central Dublin who invited me and the other guys to come clubbing in town. We ended up partying with him, Moorman, and a few other top online HSMTT pro's. It was a completely crazy night. Drinks left, right and center. After arriving in town and trying to unsuccessfully bribe the bouncer to get in the club which was straight up rejected and resulted in us all not being allowed to enter the club despite afterwards waiting in the queue! Onto the next place and the drinks started flowing some very bizarre stuff happened...

Here's a photo with a blanked out face for his own embarassment. But haha, yes they kissed. No there was not any money involved. And it was apparently with tongues for several seconds. Oh dear hahaha!





Other than that Ireland was really fun. I'm a big TV-poker fan. In fact I pretty much watch everything going and really like all the gossip about the pro's. With this being my first big live tournament and me effectively being a poker version of one of those middle-aged overweight women who reads OK and Hello every week. So these are my run in with the pro's!

-Kara Scott was at the table next to mine. She's even hotter in real life than on the TV. Brian Townsend is a lucky lucky guy!
-Shared a lift with Richard "CHUFTY" Ashby and Dan Harrington.
-Drinking with moorman
-Bumped into Jesse May walking around the corner in the hotel. Was so so tempted to mock his pretty unique voice haha.
-Bluffed Marty Smith in a big pot in the main event

Damn, I'm such a fish lol!

Anyway, I was a bit disapointed with the tournament failings too. I sold quite a lot of myself in both events, but still it left a deepish hole in my pockets and this was the reason I was here anyway. But it may suprise you all that I made a profit on the trip!

-I swapped 5% on day 2 with Cos when we were both pretty short-stacked 30 off the money. I ran my QQ's into AA's and didn't improve, whilst he managed to run a bit better and built his 25k stack up to 280k before busting for €13,500, good for about €650 for me, I was happy, from what I can tell he played very well too and deserves the success.

-I ground cash games on the last day for a 12 hour session and netted €400 at €1/€2 which was a nice bonus. Not huge, but certainly helps along the way.

-After busting the €1650 I was pretty annoyed and frustrated as the same shit seems to happen every live event I play. So I came to my room and luckily I can still win online. I decided to register for a tourney wasn't chilling and watching southpark fitting in a few of the later Sunday tournaments on Full Tilt. I then thought fuck it, and registered about 10 in total from 10pm-1am. By 8:30am I was at the final table of this $26 freezeout on Full Tilt and managed to ship the lot :D



That was a really nice boost to the roll and sets me straight for Vegas.

Pretty funny story with this too. I was sure that my flight back was on Monday at 8am. Well after final tabling the $26 freezeout and with $9k for the win, I thought ahh screw it, I've missed this one. I'll just book another one tomorrow and stay an extra day thinking I had to leave the hotel too. Well after the tournament finished around 9am, I went down to reception and was happy to find out that I still had one more day left with the room. Ahh that makes it easy, I can even get a good sleep in too! After the 16 hour, pretty much non-stop poker session, I just went online and bought another flight home for the following day. When I woke up at about 6:30pm the following day, I just realised, my original flight was on Tuesday morning anyway. So I bought two tickets for the same flight, under the same name. Haha such an idiot! I do kind of run good though, I was so sure my flight was on Monday and that I missed it, I would probably have just left the hotel, checked out, got a bus to the airport and found out then. I guess I prefer to waste €70 on rebooking the flight than doing all that again and trying to get a room back again at the hotel :P

Anyway, I really enjoyed the weekend. UKIPT Coventry main event is the following weekend. I've won a seat online for it already, so I'll probably go add to the dead money then head back to Nottingham to chill and see my girlfriend.

After that the real grind begins. Exam revision. Urghhh. Can't wait for vegas. What a great insight this trip has been. I really can't wait to do more of this stuff next year.

Happy days...