Late Night Poker

I’ve played a lot of six-seater TV tournaments now, but this is the first time that I had the pleasure of being invited to Late Night Poker. Everyone’s familiar with the poker boom that was created when unknown everyman Chris Moneymaker fluked his way through a couple of online satellites and then 839 players in the 2003 WSOP main event to win $2,500,000 (no offense meant — I know he’s improved a lot since then and is now a decent player). However for me, Late Night Poker, with its introduction of under the table cameras, was just as important a part of poker’s history as the so-called “Moneymaker” effect.

It’s hard to know if I would be doing what I am now if I hadn’t stumbled upon an episode back in 1999. I’d always played poker with friends since I was at school, but it was mainly with the same group of players, and looking back we were all just gambling rather than trying to play poker (except for a guy called Marty McKensie who would make Ben Roberts look like Gus Hansen). We played the craziest games we could think up that facilitated getting as much money into the pot as possible. We all loved gambling and we all loved poker though, and so whenever we first saw this TV show with this new Texas Hold’em game that we hadn’t played before, and this new tournament format that we hadn’t thought of before, we were all immediately hooked.

Shortly after that we stumbled upon the Jackpot Casino on a weekend trip to Dublin and to our delight saw that they held Texas Hold’em tournaments and cash games in the room above the gaming floor. For the next two years we played Hold’em (or this new game that we’d learned in the casino — Omaha) two or three times a week in Belfast and usually made the weekly trip to Dublin for the Friday night rebuy tournament followed by cash games.

From the start I was one of the winning players in the Belfast game, but Dublin was a real learning curve for me. Despite a few early wins, I was a losing player at the beginning, and myself and the other Belfast guys were definitely the value in the game.
That changed over the next couple of years though as we learned the game properly and went from being the fish, to being ‘break-even’, to being among the bigger winners in the game. One of the stalwarts of the cash game back then, Charlie Power, once told Marty McCabe that whenever we first started coming down on Friday nights that he used to get to bed early on Thursday so he could be fresh on the Friday and get his share of the Belfast money, but that now he was considering not bothering to play on Fridays any more.

Most people can appreciate that I’ve had a lot of luck in my poker career, most obviously in a few tournaments where I’ve got lucky in a couple of pots, won a load of ‘50-50s’ and taken down the titles, but I’ve also been lucky in ways that people can’t even begin to realise. If I hadn’t saw Late Night Poker when I did, and hadn’t found the Jackpot casino when I did. If I hadn’t really learned how to play the game from playing with all the good regular players like Charlie Power, Pat Crowe, Rory Battigan, and occasionally Scott Gray, Tom Hanlon, and Alan Betson, then I’d probably be working 9-5 in a poorly paid job in Belfast, playing in a weekly poker game where we’d all stick our money in the middle and cross our fingers.

If I hadn’t discovered Late Night Poker and the Jackpot club, I’ve no doubt that I’d have eventually found my way to Internet poker, but I’ve also no doubt that I wouldn’t have been anywhere near good enough to beat the games if it hadn’t been for my education in Dublin. I’d have made a few deposits, lost my money, and eventually packed it in and tried to pay back my credit card over the next couple of years. Instead, when I did discover internet poker I was one of the better players and had a bit of a bankroll as I’d been winning in Dublin. I was able to play in the biggest games on the net at the time, with a lot of rich guys who had no clue how to play, but also with some amazingly talented Scandinavian players, and I grew my bankroll and developed my game exponentially.

If things had happened even slightly differently for me in terms of my poker history then life could have been very different for me, and no matter how many bad beats I take, I’ll always appreciate how lucky I’ve been overall. I started writing this blog with the intention of writing about my Late Night Poker heat, but I kind of got caught up in things and rambled on. There isn’t really much to say about my heat anyway (I busted early), but I’ll fill you in with what there is to say in my next blog in a couple of days.