Things are Looking Up Part II

The craic over the weekend was as good as any tournament I’ve been to in the country. I met a lot of nice people, the tournament was well run, and the dealers and hotel staff were great. The standard of play in the tournament was also surprisingly good. There were a few bad players around early on, but by the time it got to the later stages it was pretty high.

The final included Tom Kitt who had run over the tournament for the 2 previous days, at one point holding over 300k when the average was 50k, local player Una Ayers who seemed to move from 55k to 700k with a series of all ins that no one dared call, as well as Dara O’Kearney and Andrew Grimason who were both extremely impressive. Jay played great too and I wasn’t disappointed at all to lose to the man.

The only downsides for me were that I didn’t get to see much of the town as I was playing all weekend, and also losing the biggest golf bet I’ve ever had against Nicky Power. I wasn’t too bothered when I lost a piece of my tournament action to him as it only had a face value of 44 euro, and to be honest I wasn’t intending to take it too seriously unless I got off to a good start. I was pretty sick on Sunday night when I handed over the 1400 euro for his 10%, although I managed to win 5% of his action in the Cork main event when we played on Monday so hopefully he can return the favour.

The funniest pot I played all weekend was in the cash game after the tournament ended on day one. I was blind drunk at this point, as was half the table, and raised preflop with 78. I bet 100 on an AK4 flop and got raised to 300 by a pretty drunk player on the button. I proceeded to call as I’d got it into my head that he wasn’t very strong and I could get him off the hand with a big bluff on the turn or river. I checked the turn as did he, and I took this as confirmation that my instincts had been right and fired out a 600 euro bluff on the river which he folded to. I was feeling quite clever at this point until Glen McCabe who had been sitting beside me and had saw my cards whispered to me… “Er… Did you know that he only had about 80 euro left?”

I’m going to drive down to Galway for a couple of days now for the racing and maybe to play some cash games in the Fintan Gavin’s Eglington club. After that I’ll be giving my liver a break and playing online for a couple of weeks before the Macau festival in Cork.