An Empty Seat At A Full Irish Open

Attendance and fun levels were impressive at this year’s Pokerstars sponsored Irish
Open, but a number of us were saddened at the sudden death of popular English player Dave
Barnes a couple of weeks before the event he’d been looking forward to. I’d known and liked Barnesy for over twenty years. He was great fun and a gentleman. When he heard I was involved in poker in Dublin’s Sporting Emporium, he contacted me and said he was coming over to play our END OF MONTH tournament (every last Thursday) and he certainly did! It was great fun. He promised to bring his Irish wife the lovely Val to meet Mary and I at Fintan’s paddypowerpoker Irish Poker Tour event at the Galmont (formerly Radisson) Hotel in Galway in very early January this year. What a start to the year!

For years, I’ve been visiting my favorite city to play poker at The Eglinton, a festival or the annual Galway Races. Usually, the craic was mighty very late at night, but this time it all kicked off at breakfast every morning. We’d get a large table so there was plenty of room for players to drop by and enjoy a laugh and that’s what they did. Someone asked how long Dave and I knew each other. I said we’d met in the Victoria Club when Dave won back to back main events at two of their festivals in the very early noughties. He said that wasn’t true. He claimed we’d met at a poker table in Paris’s Aviation Club after I drank my dinner one evening. He said that when I heard his London accent I’d started on about 800 years of oppression, The Famine, Bloody Sunday and all that stuff we usually served up when Americans asked if we were English. Barnesy said he’d just laughed and we’ve been friends ever since.

Highlight of the trip was when Dave ordered a vodka and Red Bull for himself at the
poker table from a rookie waiter. Another guy who he didn’t know ordered a burger. By some miracle, the waiter reappeared and gave Mr Burger his burger and Dave his drink. He asked Dave for 34 euros! Dave was a little preoccupied and paid him. A guy at the table leaned over and took 22 euros off Mr Burger’s stack and placed it in front of Dave saying “That’s probably about right”. As unflappable as ever Dave said “I thought 34 euros for a vodka was a bit steep!”

The Irish Open 2024, held in the RDS for the second successive year in the RDS was a
big success. Numbers were huge. It was a far cry from 2006 when paddypowerpoker boldly
tried to bring live poker to Irish living rooms. The tournament was played in the Burlington until the final day when the final was to be played in the RDS and televised live on RTE, Ireland’s national TV station. It was great news for poker. How could it possibly go wrong? Unfortunately, the finalists were not the most charismatic bunch ever to make a final table and looked more like lads queuing in a dentist’s waiting room than guys playing for huge prizes and a much coveted title. It was horrible. Everything took forever. Guys frequently spent several minutes thinking about absolutely nothing. I understand playing on TV can be stressful if you’re not used to it but this freezing up or needlessly wasting time by most of the finalists was as unfortunate as it gets. The live audience began to leave as though there’d been a bomb scare or a tsunami warning. I can only imagine what was happening in sitting rooms around Ireland! I felt sorry for the sponsors who deserved better.

In 2007, Pokerstars hosted the EPT event in the RDS and were kind enough to add one
of our Poker For The Homeless events to the schedule. Snooker legends Ken Doherty and
Steve Davis and football’s Tony Cascarino kindly supported us and it was a huge success. It was also great fun! I had a few scoops and the bartender caught me smoking. Mad Marty
intervened and in his own inimitable way explained to the bar guy that I lived in Paris where smoking was legal so it was okay. The bartender made the fatal mistake of trying to reason with him. Nobody ever won a ridiculous argument with Marty. I left. I’d seen it all before.

In 2023, the Open returned to the RDS but this time it was the whole festival rather than
just the final table. I took Barnesy and the lovely Val out for a very enjoyable dinner the night before I tackled the main event. The numbers were big and the days long but everything went along nicely for two and a half days. On Day 3, with 70 players or so left, Mary and I spent the dinner break hanging out with Andy Black, who is probably the only player who wants to win the Open as much if not more than I do. Andy’s obsession with the event started in 1991 when he finished 5th, getting knocked out with J5 or J6 or something like that. He got a lot of stick about that, mainly from people who didn’t understand. Maybe that’s why he wants to win it so much.

I can remember being in Andy’s house a month or so before the next year’s event and seeing a jar filled with money on the mantlepiece. It was explained to me that that was his Irish Open money and couldn’t be touched for sundries like rent, food or even alcohol. An hour later, I was dealt two aces and that was the end of me. 63rd. On the plus side, they gave me 6,000 euros for my time. I’ve had worse days. It was my fifth cash in the Open, which sounds good if you don’t know I’ve probably lost it more times than anyone else! The next day, I tuned in to watch the final, hoping Andy would win and get the monkey off his back. He told me later the tv guys had sent a junior out to ask if he’d join the commentators in the box when he got knocked out. I thought it was funny. Andy didn’t. Admittedly, it could’ve been phrased a little better! I was delighted Andy finished fourth for a decent chunk as his house had burned down, so he needed the money. A short while later, he came perilously close to winning a bracelet. Not a bad few weeks!

This year, there was a buzz around among the older guys as there was plenty of talk of
68 year old Barny Boatman winning 1.3 million in EPT Paris. In some style too. He certainly proved that if you’re still breathing, there is no limit to what you can achieve. I could tell that, despite the laughter, a lot of guys were thinking “Why not me?”. I played too fast on my first buyin and knocked myself out while I had a good stack on the final level. I re-entered the following day and wasn’t, out of respect for a tournament I love, going to do it again as I don’t think it’s fair. I started Good Friday with 2023 Champion David Docherty (very nice guy but a nuisance) on my left and two lively players on his left. Hardly ideal, so I decided to play tight for a while and see what developed. We were moved to the feature table. Lots of players were following the streaming with a short time lag so playing tight was to yield a dividend later.

After we were done there, a few eliminations later, everything changed and Plan B went very well especially when we were put back on the stream and I was playing a decent stack. The day ended well. Over the next couple of days, I got lots of kind messages of support from all over the place. The US, Australia, Egypt even! and all over Ireland. It was lovely. I blamed Barny but then an ex friend of mine said maybe people thought it might be my last Irish Open. Thank you. On the morning, of the fourth and final day Andy phoned to tell me things would go my way as it was April Fool’s Day. Thanks Andy. Barny helpfully said the clock going forward an hour the previous night should help enormously as I’d had one hour less drinking time. I hadn’t had a drink for two days but why spoil a good story.

We arrived an hour early on Day 4, which was great as I got to meet grassroots players
I’d met in their own pubs and clubs on my travels around Ireland who were waiting to play
the final day of the 200 mini Irish Open. It was great. Fintan’s Irish Poker Tour had been providing the players who are the heartbeat of the game with festivals all over the country and now the Irish Open had gteed 500k for this event which opened the Irish Open to all. It brought a hell of a buzz to the room and a smile to the faces of organizer Paul O’Reilly and Dave Curtis of sponsor Pokerstars. It all ended in tears when a guy trapped me and I finished 13th . They gave me 25k and great memories of the kindness of players, friends and the excellent good-humoured staff. So much for the Boatman effect! However, a week or so later Irish senior Michael O’Dwyer satellited into a 10k GG Poker online event and won a fantastic 1.3million dollars. Obviously, the Boatman effect only works if you play well. Well done!

Irish player Dave O’Kelly spent two weeks at this year’s WSOP. He told me he’d been
sitting beside a guy in a tournament who, after figuring out Dave was Irish, started telling stories about legendary Irish bookmaker and founder of the Irish Open, Terry Rogers, in Binions going back to 1980 or so. He was also talking about an Irish player called Paddy. Dave eventually figured out that Paddy was me and the guy he was talking to was Hall Of Famer Mr. Jack McLelland. As well as playing poker, Jack was the efficient and very funny tournament director of the WSOP from the 80s till 1998, before becoming poker supremo in The Bellagio. Dave told him a story about Dan Harrington walking around Dublin with me one morning during the Irish Open. We dropped into the iconic Toners pub in Baggot Street. Two of the bartenders there, Tom and Gerry, knew their poker and when Tom spotted us he shouted to Gerry saying “There’s a world famous poker player here”. Gerry came down and said “And he’s brought Dan Harrington with him!”  Dan loved it. So did Jack. I love Dublin!