Irish Open roundup
A Party at the ad breaks
Production company Win Media impressed everyone with its groundbreaking show, which captured the day's action and was fit for broadcast by midnight.
However, it and event sponsor Paddy Power were surely caught out by the cunning strategy of rival PartyPoker, which filled all of the breaks with ads.
Need a cab?
The irrepressible Sylvester Geoghegan created a stir when arriving back at the Burlington Hotel, the venue for the
Irish Open, in the early hours of the morning, following a night on the tiles.
The casino owner, unable to find a traditional taxi, pulled up outside in a stunning horse-drawn carriage. He promptly handed its driver a bundle of notes and left instructions for him to "keep the meter running while I go wipe out a cash game!"
Domination, not money, the drive
Andrew Black, fresh from his €238,910 seventh-place payday in the
European Poker Tour Grand Final in Monte Carlo and on his way to winning the €300 buy-in Omaha competition at the
Irish Open - via what
Card Player's online odds calculator shows to be an inflicted 268-1 beat - was quoted in
The Irish Times newspaper as saying: "I'm not a money kind of guy. I might give some away and spend some of it. But my plan is really to take the poker world by storm, to reinvent the standards of poker. No one has really dominated year after year and I want to do that."
Bet on this, get paid on that!
The Irish leg of the
European Poker Tour now seems like a distant memory, but it was there that an amazing gamble was inadvertently hatched that almost paid huge dividends.
As the field narrowed to the final dozen players in that
EPT, an eagle-eyed poker dealer discovered that an online betting site had not closed its book on the outright winner.
Only two quoted players, Willie Tann and Roland De Wolfe, remained in the tournament, and the respective odds of 100-1 and 80-1 were too much to resist, considering the final table was looming.
"Lump on," he and his colleagues did, and there was some party when the young Londoner, Roland De Wolfe, prevailed.
However, their celebrations were soon tempered when the huge error in the opportunists' ways was uncovered. They had, in fact, placed their bets on the market for the
Irish Open and not the
EPT!
Fast-forward a full six months and, amazingly, De Wolfe was once again at the final table and looking like a remarkable double champion.
This time, their bets were valid, but the outcome … close but no cigar, and not even a penny's worth of each-way winnings was to be had.
Festival at the Fitz
Dublin's Fitzwilliam Card Club is staging
A Festival of Poker, Nov. 1-14.
"There will be numerous disciplines of poker to suit all pockets during the fortnight, with the main event being a €1,500 no-limit hold'em tournament," said Peter Doherty, a director of the Club.
Interestingly, the venue is not using a title sponsor and plans to offer all tournaments to individual sponsors. Field sizes for all tournaments will be restricted to 150-160 entrants.
BoylePoker Waterford Festival schedule
The BoylePoker
Waterford Festival will be held May 17-20 at the Waterford Open Woodlands Hotel in Waterford, Ireland. The tournament schedule is as follows:
Thursday, May 17 - €100 supersatellite with €50 rebuys for the first four levels (eight tickets guaranteed); starts at 8 p.m.
Friday, May 18 - €500 freezeout main event; three-day event (one-hour clock); starts at 7:30 p.m.
Saturday, May 19 - €250 freezeout; two-day event; starts at 4 p.m.
Sunday, May 20 - €150 freezeout; starts at 4 p.m.
To register, call: +353 (0)87 2828744, or e-mail:
[email protected].
Visit Roy Brindley at www.Roytheboy.net.
