A Life Rich in European Poker

The story of modern poker history is littered with names we have come to know well – Doyle Brunson, Chip Reese, Stu Ungar, Jack Straus; Americans, all. But back in the heydays of early poker, there were also some Europeans playing the game, matching wits with their American counterparts. No man so coolly encompasses the European side of the history of poker than Irishman Donnacha O'Dea. Donnacha has seen it all, been there, and done that for more than 30 years. I was fortunate enough to catch up with him recently, and he was kind enough to share stories, opinions, and insights into what he's lived through, a life rich in European poker.



Donnacha O'Dea was born and raised in Dublin, Ireland, the son of a high-profile couple in the world of stage and screen. Donnacha's mother, Siobhan Mckenna (pronounced Shivawn), was one of the leading stage actresses of her day. She won the first Evening Standard best actress award in Britain in 1955 for her performance as St. Joan, a role she also performed on Broadway. She also later appeared in quite a few films, including playing the role of Omar Sharif's mother in Doctor Zhivago. Donnacha's father, Denis O'Dea, was an actor as well, spending a film career typecast mostly as a priest or detective, including memorable roles in which he received third billing after Marilyn Monroe in the movie Niagra, and appeared in Mugambo with Grace Kelly.



It was through an association with the stage that a young Donnacha first became exposed to poker, as actors on film sets in those days often played the game, and Donnacha's father hosted a Dublin game that was attended by many political and cultural figures of the day, including the Irish prime minister, Sean Lemass. Donnacha remembers being 12 or 13 and watching the game at the O'Dea house as often as he could. The poker game played in those days was draw poker, jacks to open, and Donnacha recalls his father as being a tight, solid player who frowned on chasing losses. Donnacha would later mould much of his own poker style from watching his father, whom he describes as a winner in the game and also very good at protecting his players.



Although Donnacha did play a bit of poker during his teenage years, assorted penny games with school friends at lunchtime, he found that what he was really good at was swimming. At one point he held eight Irish swimming titles, plus Irish records in every freestyle event from 100 to 1,500 meters. He was the first Irish swimmer to break the one-minute mark for the 100-meter freestyle, and his time in the 200-meter butterfly stood as an Irish record for over 10 years. All of this was accomplished without much formal training, as Donnacha swam for only a few hours each week. His swimming career culminated in a trip to Mexico City in 1968 for the Olympic Games. O'Dea was offered swimming scholarships to a few American universities, including Columbia and the University of Michigan, but he instead opted to attend Dublin's Trinity College, where poker soon took over.



During his time at Trinity, it was lectures in the morning and then poker in the common rooms all afternoon and evening. Although his parents weren't so keen about it in the beginning, Donnacha soon saw that he could be a consistent winner at poker, and he took up the game nearly full time, graduating to a large-stakes private game held on a weekly basis in Dublin that was his first experience playing all-night poker sessions. During the 1970s, Donnacha mostly remained on the Irish poker scene, as there wasn't a widespread scene in Europe at that time, and most Europeans had not been to Las Vegas.



Everything changed in 1981, when Irish gambler Terry Rogers came up with the idea of an Irish poker championship. This inaugural event was won by Collette Dougherty, who was then convinced to take her winnings and attend the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. This not only had the effect of encouraging the Europeans to begin attending Las Vegas regularly, it also brought the game of hold'em across the Atlantic and over to Irish shores.



Donnacha first went to the World Series of Poker in 1982, and he has played the main event every year since then, with the exception of 1986 when he stayed at home to witness the birth of his daughter. O'Dea had some success in the big tourney right from the start, coming about 30th out of 100 players in his first try, and he still remembers getting busted out that first year in a large pot against Chip Reese while holding an A-K. The next year, 1983, Donnacha made the final table of the main event, and also came second in the limit hold'em event to Tom McEvoy while playing that discipline for the first time ever. O'Dea remembers thinking to himself, "This isn't so hard, I'll have a bracelet in no time," but it was to be 17 years before Donnacha finally did win a WSOP bracelet, for pot-limit Omaha in 1998. Over the years, O'Dea has done quite well in the $10,000 championship tourney, finishing in the money six times.



In the early days in Las Vegas, however, the big money was not in the tournaments but the side games, and a young O'Dea decided to go straight in and play in the biggest no-limit hold'em games on offer to see where he stood. The games used to be played ninehanded, and Donnacha noticed that despite the fact that there was a full game plus a waiting list, the players were always willing to make an extra seat for him to sit down and play! He describes the games as crazy lineups, filled with the likes of Stu Ungar, Doyle Brunson, Chip Reese, Dewey Tomko, and Jack Straus. "These days, I'd never even consider sitting down in a game with a lineup like that," says Donnacha, "but I did quite well, and managed to come out a big winner on my first trip. In 1983 I won as much as $70,000 in one night playing hold'em."



Back in Europe, poker started growing as hold'em came to England. In about 1986, O'Dea began to make regular trips to London to play at the Barracuda Club, where he ran into top British players like Ben Roberts and Derek Webb, who Donnacha believes was the best British hold'em player of his time, and Irish stalwarts such as Colin Kennedy, Tom Gibson, and Scott Gray. In those days, the big game at the Barracuda was lowball, but it was the club's refusal to spread a new game that was becoming all the rage that led to the Victoria Club taking over as the big poker room in Europe, beginning in about 1989. The game was Omaha.



Despite the fact that Omaha has come to be known as a specialty of the Europeans, the guy Donnacha remembers introducing it in Las Vegas was Puggy Pearson. "We started playing cash games in Omaha in around 1985, '86, and after that, interest in the no-limit hold'em cash games started to wane. The Omaha games were just playing bigger because of the size of the blinds, so everybody became forced to play Omaha." The Omaha players who particularly impressed O'Dea back then were Chip Reese and Roger Moore, but he says Puggy was the game's best hustler in history. Pearson was the first to realize the value of backdoor draws, O'Dea says, and that top set on the flop might not be such a strong hand. "You'd flop set over set," Donnacha says, "and Puggy would be in there getting such good prices on the insurance bets that he was nearly hoping to flop the worst hand! They would lay him 10-1 without taking into account the value of backdoor straights and flushes. People copped on eventually, but it took a while."



Despite some early tournament poker success, Donnacha has mostly built a career as a high-stakes cash game player. "At some point," he says, "I found that trying to play a lot of tournaments was interfering with the cash games, so for a long time I played only five or six tournaments a year, and I used to not play any tournaments in Europe at all. It's like an athlete; if you are training for the 400 meters, it's very difficult to win the 400 hurdles, and if I was in a tournament, I'd be looking over at the cash games, because the two were both on."



Recently, though, Donnacha has returned a bit to the tournament circuit, and he attributes watching television poker to sharpening his tournament game. "I used to last a long way in tournaments and then run out of steam," he says, "but from watching Late Night Poker, the World Poker Tour, and Poker Million programs, I saw what other people were doing in shorthanded situations, and I think I've adapted my game accordingly." This point was underscored when Donnacha won the Poker Million Masters II tournament live on Sky Sports this past July. During his heat and semifinal appearances in this tournament, O'Dea uncharacteristically opened up his game to become the most aggressive player at his table, and he was rewarded by reaching the live final as the chip leader. Donnacha then defeated Dave "Devilfish" Ulliott in a heated heads-up battle for the title that was world-class play on every card and gave millions of viewers a lesson in textbook tournament hold'em and garnered Donnacha $300,000 plus the trophy.



Donnacha attributes his long career and continuing enthusiasm for the game to the fact that he rarely plays seven days a week. "When I was playing in London, I would always keep it to three days a week, and I think that's probably stopped me from burning out. It was only going to Las Vegas that would get me exhausted." These days Donnacha has something else that keeps his poker fresh, and that is the emergence of a new star in the family, his son Eoghan. "Eoghan didn't seem to show much interest in poker. I never thought he'd play it, but a few years ago he started playing for fun on the Internet. He started to read books, then we started discussing hands, and all of the sudden he's won six tournaments and split three in a year and a half!" Young Eoghan has been playing in the very tough proving grounds of the Dublin tournament circuit, and his already impressive results have led many to speculate that the third generation of O'Dea poker players will be picking up from where the others have left off.



As to the keys to his successful career, Donnacha says, "I think you can't overemphasize the importance of money management. It's a flaw that many people have because when they come to poker, they are slightly addicted to gambling." A second thing is not to chase losses, to which he credits his father, who frowned heavily on playing all night. "After that, I would be quite inclined to play on when I was winning, knowing that other players would be playing recklessly, as I don't think there's anybody who can play as well when they're losing. I've been lucky because when I am losing, I sort of feel dejected and am less likely to chase my losses. I'm not the eternal optimist." An eternal optimist Donnacha O'Dea might not be, but he has been a consistent winner over the course of a long poker career, and he has irrefutably proven that being a gentleman and a successful gambler can go hand in hand. ´