Even the great ones slip from time to time

I recently heard a wonderful story involving a well know Dublin poker player and MILF. Our hero, we’ll call him Tom (not necessarily his real name), was visiting Jamaica for the cricket world cup with a small group of friends. The group had booked into a holiday complex that was primarily a family resort. On day 4 while Hanlon and one of his travelling companions were descending the apartment block in the elevator, toms mate commented that there was a lot of MILF around. It was here that our hero made 2 mistakes, the first was a simple one that anyone might make, he asked what MILF was. The second mistake was far greater and absolutely unforgivable, he accredited his friend with far too much imagination and leapt to the wild assumption that he had made up the acronym MILF, and he loved it, it was their little secret.

This, of course, lead to the inevitable result of Mr T(om) standing in the middle of the pool a couple of hours later pointing at a very attractive young mother and yelling across to his mate,
“Hughie, MILF, MILF”, resulting in the entire crowded of about 100 people around the pool area falling into a complete and deeply shocked silence, broken only by the voice of an 8 year old girl asking "Mammy ,mammy, whats MILF?". As the light started to dawn on our hero, visions of an angry husband, police and having to pay a large cash fine to a local Jamaican magistrate filled his mind. But not our hero, lucky bastard that he is, he managed to pick a woman with a sense of humour, proving without doubt, I feel, that he is indeed the luckiest man alive, she simple stopped, looked at him for a few awkward moments and said,

“Yes, I do look good, don’t I”, and walked on proudly

At which every person in the vicinity roared with laugher. Tom regards the walk from the middle of the pool, through the crowd of people rolling around with tears running down his face to get to his towel as one of the longest of his life.

I suppose Tom was fortunate to have a group of friends with him that I am sure consoled him in his time of great embarrassment and who, he was sure, would abide by the credo ‘What happens in Jamaica stays in Jamaica”

Merry Christmas to all.

Just thought I would give you a quick report on the league final in the Eglinton, which was held on the 20th, please forgive the delay but just for my own piece of mind I had to embark on a rather perilous journey which involved some heavy duty mining equipment and a lot of digging, but i am glad to report that Hell has indeed frozen over. So baring this in mind I give my heartiest and unreserved congratulations to Dave "Mid-life Crises" Curtis.

I have no idea who else made up the top positions as I was only at the final table for a few brief moments, just long enough for Christy The Morbid to crack my Queens, and it’s a hard pill to swallow getting knocked out by someone that isn’t even there, and I know he couldn’t have been there, because the little trouble making shit kicker is barred. After that I was far to drunk to care what happen, actually I probably wouldn’t have known Curtis won the damn thing but for the fact that he spent the remainder of the night wandering around the club drink beer from the oversized trophy he got and singing “I am the Champions”. It’s at times like that you find yourself thinking, where’s a cataclysmic event when you need one.

But truth be told it was a cracker of an evening, with booze, some free money and as much gambling as any man could want. I mean where can you have so much fun for €3000 a night.

Anyway, I hope you all had a great Christmas and New Year.

I hope to be covering events live from the IPC, so please by all means keep an eye on the blog for updates.

And We're Back.

I have decided to move back to this blog as i never really felt comfortable writing under a different name. But it is Wednesday night again and we will be bringing you the trills and spills live from the €100 freezeout at the Eglinton Club. League points is all people are concerned with at the moment, with only 7 days remaining to get points to make the top fifty and gain entry into the €10000 tournament at the clubs Christmas party, rumor has it that money has actually changed hand to get someone who has scored points to give in a different name to the person tracking the points, seems a little sad to me, I really can't understand what all the fuss is about. And of course with the IPC just around the corner, tickets are the other thing at the forefront of everybodies mind. I tell ya, you could cut the tension around here with a spoon, big time poker is coming to the Galway, the men of the west are so nervous, there is nare a banjo being played and the sheep are fierce lonely. I for one am keen to see how many will make the long arduous journey from that smallest of english counties we call Dublin, I realise the even looking in a westerly direction makes some of the natives of this strange and often magical land go weak at the knees and the actual trip itself seems more daunting the scaling Everest, but lets keep our fingers crossed.

Just going to head into the club now so I'll be back soon.

Ok, since we last spoke, I have won a sat for the tourney and got myself onto a table with the craziest shower of bastards to come down the pipe. The Flying Dutchman to my left, Frank" I can't stop the voices" Healyto my right and Vinny Longlad looking straight across from me. God help us all.

And The Flying Dutchman has sank without a trace just 15 mins into the tournament. The voices in Franks head must have all screamed call in unison when Dutchy when all in on a stone cold bluff.

Oh dear, oh dear, the Longlad is gone, after losing most of his chips on some ass end up read, he launched the rest with 88 and ran into AA. If this keeps up there will be none of the top players left.

Acceptance Speech

One may have thought that the awards season had reached its peak with the Oscars on Sunday night, but you would be mistaken. In a poll which closed at 4am Wednesday morning, with a whopping 30% of the vote, I was crowned Boards Blog Writer of 2006.
I find myself wishing I had watched the Oscars to get a hint at how other great award winners carried themselves, but alas we will have to wing it. I believe the normal thing is to thank all the people without whom I could never have hoped to win this award.
Thanks to
Pat “I’ll be very surprised if I don’t win tonight” O Callaghan, for the nomination.
Len “The Impresario” Collins, for being lead in my favourite blog entry on bluffing.
Donal “Tight Weak” MacAonghusa and Conor “Just Tight” Maguire for (badly) proof reading my blogs.
All the other wonderful character that have made up the blogs, John “Finger Rims” Honan, Dave “Midlife Crisis” Curtis, John “The Mean Drunk” Cullinane, that wonderful Ferrari Laptop, and most importantly,
Paul “The Hangman” Roper, just for being you.
Also, I think my popularity on boards is no secret, so I really have to say thanks to the 18 bad mind individuals that voted for me in this poll.
To my fellow nominees I would like to say that there is no shame losing. Unless, of course, it’s by a lot, like a crushing defeat, ya know, if you found yourself completely outclassed and dominated. Not that this was the case here. So well done to you all and better luck next year.
Finally, I feel this award will spur me on to even greater things in 2007, I’m telling ya, before you know it I’ll be bigger then Jesus.

Poker - A game of Skill or Chance

This is a debate that has been going on for years, in university studies, the courts and I’m sure has been brought up in every poker room in the country at one time or another. Being a poker player and for the most part a sick degenerate gambler, I have always stood firmly on the skill side of the argument, but some of the things I have witnessed recently have started to make me doubt this position.
Last night for instance, I saw Pat “Connaught till the day I die” O Callaghan, an otherwise intelligent guy with a reputation as a poker player, limp first to act, call a massive raise preflop, flop 2 hearts, call bets to the river, hit a heart and move all in and get called by the poor bastard who flopped top set and turn over the 7-2 of hearts.And the cocky shit sat back with a satisfied look on his face as if he had just done something truly brilliant.
How about this one, Pat “There be no deals, I want to practise my final table play for the Irish Open” once again first to speck comes out raising and catches a massive reraise from a kid that has sat quiet for an hour without playing a hand, and I mean quiet, he had a hoody shadowing his pale gaunt face and was slumped so low in his chair he was almost under the table, he could almost have been an apprentice to Derek “The Sith Lord” Murray, Christy “The Morbid” goes all in for a few shekels and Pat calls the Kid. The Kid has AK, Morbid has QJ and Pat show AJ, no problem to him, a jack on the flop and that’s all she wrote. I realise that a lot of Pats superiority at the game can probably be put down to being from Cork, but all of it?
Moving away from my own recent personal experience, I put forward a view point of someone whom I am sure gets to witness every aspect of the game on a nightly basis. Sylvester, the boss man of the Corrib Casino, when asked who had won the €100 freezeout the previous Monday, replied “I don’t know the 2 who got heads up, haven’t seen them before, but I reckon if you tied them both together and shoved a copy of Super System II up their ass, ya still wouldn’t have the makings of half a poker player”. Almost poetic isn't it.
I am afraid it is indisputable, the idea that poker is a game of skill is simply a romantic notion we have that helps us justify the feeding of the sickness we all have within us. Remember lucky always beats good and

THE DEMON IS YOUR MASTER.

IPC Report

What a hum dinger the IPC was, 310 runners in the main event, 160 in the €750, 116 in the €500 and more sit n’go action then you could shake a shitty stick at. The hangover hasn’t passed yet but I am starting to feel almost human again.

The weekend started of well with a Mega Sat on the Thursday that attracted 140 players, a good omen or what. 20 minutes into this I found myself sitting at the bar with Lawrence Gosney enjoying a pint. This is not a bad result as Lawrence is one of the great gentleman of the poker world, who loves a pint and a joke and absolutely hates poker stories, so much so that whenever a player, Paul “The Hangman, I know this should not surprise me but he has hangman business cards” for example, wandered by and decided to stop and tell us some riveting bad beat story, Lawrence would turn to me and ask my opinion on some feature of the building architecture. Harsh but fair I feel.

The main events started at 6 the following day and it was an absolute blast. I have never played in an event this big and deep stacked before, so I was happy to make it to day 2 ,especially considering I wasn't getting good cards. I got to meet and watch a lot of very good players in the course of the event and found most to be pleasant and full of chat. I am sure this changed when it started to get close to the money. I did encounter one incident of ugly behaviour when Stephen “The Brat” McLean threw all the toys out of the pram after a hand for no apparent reason, he did win the hand, and tore into an English guy at our table called Tikay, whom both before and after the incident seem to be nothing but a complete gent. He did have some connection with the SkyPoker team that was filming the event so I don’t fancy Chalk Dusts chances of appearing in too much of their coverage.

No sooner were we out of the Main Event then we were playing in the €750, hang the expense I’ll just pretend that it was someone else’s money. This I really enjoyed, I went really deep, just missed the money, and got really corked to not cash. It was a bit depressing but I played well and feel the cash is coming. I did have the pleasure of being at the same table as Padraig Parkinson for a few hours when we were down to 4 tables, and wow that was something to watch, I recommend it to everyone that wants to play poker. In 90% of the hands he played the cards were irrelevant, he would simple put people into impossible positions where they either give up a hand or gamble for it all with no real idea where they were in the hand. He pulled of a beautiful bluff on a German dude at the table who had he own cameraman filming his tournament. After the German folded Padraig showed the outrageous crap he had played with and the German’s head started to steam. As he sat there mumbling to himself Padraig said “Jasus you’re a hard man to read………. but your cameraman didn’t think much of your hand”, I nearly wet myself I laughed so hard, and needless to say filming stop immediately.

Later that night, in a haze of alcohol, I lost my hole playing notes poker with Pat O Callaghan, John Cullinane, Eoin Olin, Mike Lacy and Keith McInerney. It was 6 the following evening before I felt healthy enough to venture out into the fresh air. Myself and Conor “I can’t believe I came up here to play poker and somehow Fintan the bastard roped me into doing live updates on the forum for the weekend” Maguire hit the road for home. As I was leaving the Poker room in City West ,just as the €500 was getting under way, a tired and broken man, I heard the booming voice of Sligo John calling after me "Hey, Manus are you not playing this Mong Fest". I was never so happy to be leaving.What a beautiful description of an event. It doesn't matter if you are good, bad or just ugly, at this stage of the weekend your brain is a pile of Kentucky fried chicken and all the players would be much better off dragging their knuckles back to their cave and sleeping for a week. Like Racing has its Bumper, now for me the final day event of a poker festival will forever more be known as the Mong Fest.