How I Won The Irish Poker Open Part I

Well for all of you who don’t know me I’m Niall Smyth and was lucky enough to be crowned the Irish Open winner 2011.I was also the first sole survivor to win it. This is an account of my experience playing the event.

In many ways I was quite lucky to even take part in the Irish Open and it all started with a with a lucky punt on the Grand National and a horse called Ballabriggs. I hadn’t realized the race was even on until my girlfriend Kim told me she had a tip so I logged onto my Paddy Power account, did a little research (for what I know about horses I might as well have stuck a pin in the paper) and went with Ballabriggs.

I had 10 e/w on him at 14/1 which netted me close to 200 euro. I decided to move this over to the poker section and take a shot at a last chance saloon sat. Due to the great value (€7,000 of prizes and €4,400 collected) and my total lack of patience, I played the one that night.It turned out to be a very easy tournament for me. With every card I played seemingly turning to gold or chips at least.

I head up to Dublin on Thursday evening just so I can be settled before the tournament (nothing to do with the reception for the online qualifiers from Paddy Power and the free drink off Paddy). However me being me I manage to arrive over at 11 o’clock, 3 hours after the reception and I can’t seem to locate any of the team.

So our group console ourselves with a drink and settle down in a seat listening to the Devilfish knock out a few songs with the band. I’m just sat there thinking about how much I love the atmosphere of the Irish Open. As the night pushes on there is a lot more drink consumed and I get to bed at 4 in the morning.

Friday Day 1
Ouch. I wake up on the floor of the brother’s apartment, one hour before the tournament starts and I’m seriously contemplating going back to sleep on this surprisingly comfortable carpet. I manage to convince my hungover body that this is -ev and head over to the Burlington. I sit down and as the tournaments starts I’m shocked at how comfortable I feel, this must be the hangover speaking cause I honestly didn’t care if I got knocked out on the first hand. I decided to try and use this to my advantage, against anyone else I thought was feeling nervous. Big mistake.

I end up running some bad bluffs into made hands and I’m down over half my stack after the first hour. So I tightened up and also went a little card dead and plugged away until I moved table. The table I was moved to had a very good, aggressive Swedish guy who seemed to be opening every second pot. With my ever shortening stack he was hard to deal with. The only hand I can fully remember from Day 1 was when I was all in for my tournament life.

I’ve crawled my way back to 15k and it’s folded around to by button for the first time since I sat down. I look down at K-10 off; I don’t think this mattered as I was raising any two cards. So I make it 1.5k and I get min raised to 3k by the small blind. For some reason I really didn’t think he was too strong although that could have been the tilt talking. I’ve already made up my mind to push any flop that didn’t contain an ace so I make the call.

The flop brings J-10-2, the small blind bets out 3k. I quickly shove all in for my remaining 9k and after a minute he calls with A-Q. I manage to fade all his outs and double up to 31k. Nothing else major happens in the last hour and I finish the day with 30k.

More soon!