SEARCH FOR MISSING PLANE MOVES CLOSER TO IRELAND

If you don’t remember the first time you played the Irish Open, there’s something wrong with you. Don’t look for help. It’s probably too late. The first time I played (and lost), it was in the eighties and I was buzzing for a week. A few days before the event, I was in a bookies shop when I was supposed to be somewhere else and couldn’t believe it when I saw Terry Rogers, bookmaker and event organiser, had advertised prices for the upcoming event in one of the racing papers. I especially couldn’t believe it when I saw Famous Seamus was 16/1 favourite whilst you could back Jimmy Langan and Don Fagan, Irelands finest at the time, at 18/1. Even I knew Famous had a better chance of being the next queen of England or running a sub three minute mile than he had of winning the Irish Open. I was having a bite to eat with Terry in the Eccentrics Club that night and asked him how the xxxx Seamus could be 16/1. Terry just laughed and said “If you were an English player and saw that Famous Seamus was favourite would it encourage you to come to Dublin?” I learnt a lot from Terry! This year the bookmaking arm of the sponsors, Paddy Power Poker, adopted the rather strange tactic of pretending, for betting purposes, that ten of the best known players in the world would be competing in Dublin. Everybody knew that, with San Remo clashing with the Irish Open, there was a better chance that Famous Seamus would turn up than any of these guys. And he’s been dead for ten years. I could almost hear Terry turning in his grave.

Poker players aren’t, in general, half as smart as they think they are. An idiot could figure out the Irish Open was going to be the best value ever this year. I quite enjoyed listening to one of the Irish players explaining to the streaming audience what a wonderful relationship there was between the younger Irish and English players. He neglected to inform his spellbound listeners why they forgot to tell them why Dublin was a must. Well, I suppose the English started it when they broke the Treaty of Limerick.

It’s taken twenty something IOs for me to figure out how to pace myself over this precariously dangerous weekend. It means you miss out on a lot of the craic but sometimes that’s a good idea. On the Saturday night the bar was pretty lively, especially as my friends Big Philip and Jesse May were flying in the main event. We were joined at the bar by a popular Northern Ireland player who is normally pretty quiet but on this occasion he was out of his mind and rather loud. I could see that this wasn’t going to end well so I bit the bullet and toddled off to bed. If my reads in the tournament were as good I’d have won it with a day to spare. Eventually, our hero was persuaded to hit the hay so all was well. For a while. At 8am, he woke up and decided to use the bathroom. For some reason or other, best known to the architect the bathroom door and the bedroom door are quite similar so, quite understandably, our man lost a flip and finished up in the corridor. As he hadn’t had the good sense to take his room key with him on his journey to the bathroom he found himself short on options so he, quite sensibly, headed for the front desk to obtain a new room key. At round about the same time a Singapore airlines crew checked in and were waiting patiently for the elevator. I’m told they looked really well, all dressed up in their uniforms. Then, the elevator door opened and they were probably a little surprised to be met by a poker player who wasn’t quite as well turned out. To be fair to him, he was wearing his second best pair of boxers and a complete set of socks. It appears that this was unknown territory to all concerned, so everyone just stood there in silence for about thirty seconds. Our man recovered first, remembered someone had told him that sometimes attack was the best approach in a stand-off, and kicked off with “What did you guys do with that plane anyway?” and continued with “I know some of you know where it is, but nobody’s saying anything”. Only at the Irish Open.