Revenge is Sweet Part I

Finally, I have some good news regarding poker. I feel like I’m kind of clutching at straws, when I’m reporting a couple of results in one table sit ‘n’ gos as good news but after Vegas I’m happy to take any result I can get.

It’s actually not the results that I’m claiming as good news, more the fact that I feel I played very well in the tournaments and that the small fields contained some very good players. Also, in Jude Ainsworth, Derek Murray and BigMickG, I was up against exactly the sort of young internet whizzes that scared the life out of me every time I got into a pot with them at the WSOP.


I’ve been trying to think about why I was comfortable playing a lot of pots aggressively against these guys in Galway, yet whenever I played against players of similar quality in Vegas, I was afraid to get into hands with them and ended up just playing very tight. With it being Galway, everyone was having a few drinks and even though we were playing a €500 re-buy or €1,000 freeze-out, it just felt like a group of friends playing a small home game.

The $1,000 WSOP tournaments have a similar buy-in and the overall standard is worse than it was in Galway, but the atmosphere is a lot more serious and I just don’t feel as comfortable making bluffs or playing my natural game.

I could probably overcome this by getting drunk any time I play the young aggressive internet players (and I often do have a couple of drinks to settle myself), but I know realistically this isn’t a good long-term plan and I have to just learn to relax more and try to have a bit more confidence.
I played three s’n’g tournaments over the three days, winning a €500 re-buy and finishing 2nd in the main 1K freeze-out.

They started off as winner-takes-all but there were deals made at the later stages in all of them, and overall I made a half-decent profit for the trip. They were all great craic too, with a lot of good-natured slow-rolling, bluff-showing, and general piss-taking by all of the players.

It was also good to see Nicky Power taking down one of them for a bit of a return to form.
Before heading to Galway I made the trip down to Tramore for the 2nd annual Waterford Masters tournament. I was second in this tournament last year, although it was a bitter-sweet result, as I had to hand Nicky €1400 afterwards because of the 10% that he had won off me on the golf course. This year he won 20% before the start, so there was no chance I was going to win this tournament and hand him 3k. I was starting to get a bit worried when I finished day 1 with x1.5 the average but I got the hand I was waiting for early on day 2, when my Q-Q ran into A-A and didn’t improve.



Tramore’s one of my favourite tournaments of the year. It’s strange; when I first drove into the town last year I thought it looked a bit dated with a bit of a Blackpool feel to it, and I wasn’t really expecting much, but when you look past the fun-fair rides it’s actually a lovely area. The people there are as nice as I’ve encountered anywhere. I really hope the tournament becomes a regular fixture and I can’t see any reason why it shouldn’t.