Once Bitten, Twice Shy

A couple of weeks ago, I played poker in Clonmel for the first time in over 20 years. Back then, it was kind of an accident. I'd been working in my first proper job for just a few weeks and had to phone in to explain I wouldn't be coming to work as I had to go to a funeral in Clonmel, which went down very well as you can expect. The funeral was great craic and eventually turned into an all night poker game in a local Gentlemen's club.

By 7 in the morning, my customers had run out of cash and cheques, so my two fellow mourners and I headed for Dublin. I'd won about £400, which was not to be sneezed at in those days. We had a small problem in that our driver had got cleaned out early in the night and had spent several hours helping himself at the bar and was highly unlikely to make it safely to Dublin, even if he could remember in what direction it was.

We put him in the back of the car and after a best of three toss, I was appointed navigator while our other friend took the wheel. It was all going very well for a while, until the original driver fell asleep in the back, I fell asleep in the front and the substitute driver fell asleep at the wheel. We all woke up when we hit a tree head-on, which slowed our progress somewhat. So we got a lift to the nearest town and found that we'd have to wait until the afternoon for a train to Dublin. I phoned my new boss to tell him I'd be absent for a second day, as I'd been in a car crash. He was suitably impressed!

The reason I hadn't gone back since that to play poker while the coursing was on was quite simply that every cheat and mechanic in Ireland used to turn up there. As Mr. Kelly and the lads were now running the poker, that was no longer a problem, so Scott and I decided to head down both for the craic and the easy money.

We had a 50% success rate.

The craic was great, the hotel joined in the spirit of things by pretending it was the Paris Ritz when it came to charging for accommodation. I was only in the poker room five minutes when some guy announced that the cash games were at the right hand side of the room. As the room was rectangular and had several entrances, finding the game was a challenge in itself. It didn't matter because when I found the Omaha game it was jam-packed with guys playing for their lives, trying very hard not to drop the ball. They all had such pained expressions on their faces that a lad who was passing by on a Guinness run couldn't help remarking, "If I had a rope, I wouldn't know which of yez to give it to." That was worth the room rip off all by itself.

The poker never did get an awful lot better and when a bit of lunacy did break out, I was always in the wrong game. The mugs of yesteryear never did show, but it was worth the trip just to listen to the moaning and boy did they moan! "Bad lineups, ridiculous rake, where the hell are the English and the Scottish doggy men." Player A showed up and created havoc in the Omaha game I wasn't in, having a good win the first night and a big loss the next night. The loss got bigger as the word went around. A few guys in one of the games even suggested that player A might be in need of help from a psychiatrist and were beginning to warm to this idea until player B quite rightly pointed out to them that they'd all been sitting there for over 24 hours in a shite game, were knocking back pints at 11 o'clock in the morning and were perhaps more in need of help than player A. In fact, I was told that one of them had only got out of the nuthouse three weeks previously. Out of the frying pan into the fire!

After three days, we headed home. We had intended going to Paul Lucey's club in Carlow the night before the deepstack tournament, but the weather got worse and Scott didn't fancy the drive. That was a big relief for me, because I'd only recently remembered waking up in a car that was wrapped around a tree!