Truth or Dare

I stayed at home last weekend, the first one I’ve spent in Belfast since before I went to Vegas. We went to the Belfast Food and Music Festival in Botanic Gardens on Saturday night and then again Sunday afternoon. It was a great set-up and some of the food was fantastic.

The highlight of the weekend though, without a doubt, was beating Ciaran Corbett in a snooker match at my house on the Friday night, with a very embarrassing forfeit on the line for the loser. Himself and Paul Spillane drove up after work on Friday and we went out for food and a few drinks in town, before heading back to my house for a few games of snooker before we went to bed.

Beating Ciaran at any time would be pretty satisfying, but this victory was made even sweeter when the next day he admitted that when he’d been going to the bar while we were out, he’d been buying shots of Jagermeister for me and shots of Ribena for himself in an attempt to get an edge over me!

It was a good night and we all ended up in a pretty messy state, none more so than Paul, who fell asleep in the middle of a conversation with Karen at about 4 a.m..

The next day Paul and Ciaran decided to drive home, as they had tournaments that they wanted to play. Obviously I did my best to try to convince them to stay up in Belfast as I knew Saturday would be a good night out, and also because I knew that realistically they probably wouldn’t do much good in the tournament anyway. Shows you what I know!

In case you’re one of the few who hasn’t heard Paul bragging about it, some of my luck must have rubbed off on them and he finished third in the $500 Omaha FTOPS event, picking up a little over $41,000.

Ciaran obviously didn’t realise the affect that spending a night under my roof can have on you luck-wise and I feel that he missed an opportunity by only playing a tournament with a $10 entry fee, which of course he went on to win, beating more than 500 players in the process.

This week I’ve been in Cork for the Macau festival. I’ve been really looking forward to this, partly because last year was such great fun and partly because I had a title to defend after winning the Omaha event there last year, but mainly because Ciaran Corbett was scheduled to carry out the forfeit that he had to do after losing to me at snooker.

It was decided that my initial idea for the forfeit, involving Ciaran being sent to the shop and having to go through the embarrassment of buying an inappropriate magazine, a cucumber, and a jar of Vaseline, was a little bit too extreme (even though there’s not a chance in hell he’d ever have let me off doing it if he’d won).

Instead we reached a compromise after the bar on Saturday whereby he had to buy a pink cowboy hat and a rose from one of the street vendors that hang around outside the bars after closing time. The deal was that he had to hold the rose between his teeth and wear the cowboy hat for the whole walk through the busy Saturday night streets back to Flipper’s apartment.

In terms of poker, Cork was a bit of a disappointment for me. My Omaha title defence went about as well as my last one did in Vegas and I think I might have been the first person out. I played three big pots in the first half hour, all of which I was drawing in and lost them all.

The main event didn’t go much better either. I was very card dead the whole time and managed to scrape through into day 2 with 12,000 out of my 20,000 stack remaining, only to bust early on with A-K v J-J.

I still had a good week though with a couple of good nights out, a few rounds of golf, and a winning cash session in Sideshow Bob and Gavin Steven’s new casino, in which I ran so well it was actually embarrassing. I even hit a one-outer against some poor guy.

The journey down to Cork was pretty enjoyable too, with Paul Spillane bringing his backgammon board along, no doubt with the intentions of hustling me out of a few euros on the train (as if he doesn’t take enough off me playing golf).

I wasn’t entirely honest with him when I told him I’d only played it once or twice, although I do very much consider myself a novice and expected he would still be a favourite over me. Unfortunately for Paul, his superior knowledge of the game was no match for my superior skill in rolling double sixes, and I recorded a pretty facile 10-0 victory, leaving us with enough time for me to give him a quick hiding at heads-up PLO for good measure.