UK & Ireland Poker Tour - The Queen & I

You cannot legislate against stupidity. If you could I’d probably have very few people to play poker against.

So says a man who has just seen his pocket Kings succumb to a rival so in love with his 3-7 he would not only waltz it down a wedding isle he would refuse to divorce it even if it admitted committing adultery and contracting the bubonic plague all in the same sentence.

The event was the latest leg of PokerStars UK and Ireland Poker Tour in Cork and this, the first day of qualification, attracted no less than 320 players.

By the end of day 2 there were over 600 runners. Pokerstars may have lost all their American players from their online site but they can still pull in a regular live game field like no other.

Day 1b’s play coincided with the Queen’s visit to Ireland’s second city and, although now departed with my tail between my legs, I can thank Her Majesty for getting me into the fourth hour of play as I devised my patient game plan whilst sat in a stationary car just a hundred metres away from the M7 motorway in Naas.

Behind me was a traffic jam which stretched deep into County Carlow, before me QEII’s cavalcade enjoyed a gloriously open road prior to inspecting potential new homes – the National and Gilltown studs – for her Epsom Derby winner in waiting, Carlton House.

Subsequently I arrived at the UKIPT over two hours late and spent more time in this gridlock than I did in transit or at the table.

The underlying theme here, a little like the Queen, poker is alive and kicking with no sign of recession or obvious signs of decline in popularity.

Presidents, attachés and politicians may not have filled every vantage point at Cork’s Rochestown Park Hotel’s conference room but the walkways between the poker tables featured as many cameras and reporters as any royal reception.

Channel 4’s exceptional coverage of the UKIPT will run throughout the remainder of 2011. Local media are clearly as intrigued by an international competition featuring over 600 competitors fighting over a €350,000 prize-pool as ever. Whilst people like me will keep playing hoping one day the stupid people, with their foolhardy love affair with a favourite hand, will have the results their talent deserves.

But therein one of the game’s biggest selling points that, on any particular day anyone can win, will be made redundant. Resultantly the numbers would dwindle and I’d be beating the second best in the world in a discipline as sterile and undistinguished as a Kasparov versus Karpov sat at a chess board week in week out.