*** Warning - This blog post may irritate due to severe whining at the beginning! ***
I was working the night before the first day of this event, got home about 7.45am & I felt like utter $hit! I'd developed a chest infection earlier in the week, managed to get an antibiotic, but it was finished & it appeared my chest infection had not. For this asthmatic, that meant more discomfort than for the average person, especially at night when breathing proved a lot more difficult than it should have. Rob was obviously playing the event himself so we packed up the car & headed for Galway.
Rob drove for obvious reasons, my plan was to sleep the whole way there. Unfortunately the wisdom tooth I was being introduced to had other ideas. So my journey involved no sleep in the end, it was more of a case lying in the car feeling sorry for myself & whining about how I always tend to get sick coming up to Christmas.
We arrived at the hotel in good time, dumped the bags in the room & headed for something to eat. Whilst waiting for the food I was feeling progressively worse. Decided paying €2k into an event was absolute madness given how bad I felt, also knew I was due to hit a brick wall soon in terms of tiredness. Told Rob not to buy me in & I would go for a nap when the tourney started & crush some cash games later that night. The cash games are always great value in Galway, & in particular the IPC always has great cash games which I had well profited from at the last festival.
Half way through the food I started to feel much better, I know now & also knew at the time this was only a short term boost of energy & it would be foolish to jump on the back of it risking €2k in the process. Guess I'm pretty foolish then because I couldn't help myself & literally at the last minute convinced him to run to the ATM to withdraw the buy-in for me to play.
They closed registration at 2 so they could organise the table draw & it was a good 20 minutes before they started seating any late entrants. After a bit of hanging about I was assigned a table which was a table of unkowns bar Peter Murphy & Markus Sippe, so yeah bar Pete, it appeared to be value central. I was active enough early on, most of the table were fairly weak so punishing limpers etc proved to be both easy & profitable. Everything was going swimmingly, got up to about 35k from a 20k starting stack & was very happy with table.
With a couple of levels left to play I was moved to a new table of which I didn't really know anyone until Neil Channing arrived not long afterwards. By this point my stack had already taken a couple of sizeable hits mainly due to raising with QQ then committed to calling a shortie shove. Neil's usually reasonably active at the table, so when he makes a standard raise I duly call with a medium pocket pair. The flop from memory was Q high, rainbow. He led, I called. Turn comes another blank/rag, he led again. At this point I am 95% sure I am good here, however calling again means I have to call the river, meaning I would be better shipping as he is most likely imo to have over cards & I'm pot committing myself by calling anyway. As I didn't see the need to put my tournament life on the line for a soul read I decided to fold the turn knowing there would be a better spot than shipping it with 3rd pair on the turn with blinds still being relatively small. Neil was chatting to Rob on day 2 & confirmed he was bluffing, which I obviously knew, but I'm still happy with my decision to let it go as day 2 brought a fresh opportunity to accumulate chips.
Day 2 started very slowly & bar stealing the odd blinds or re-shipping over a late position raise I maintained a very miserable stack. I'm sure I was never out of the bottom 10% in chips for most of day 2. With about 2 or 3 levels left I was moved to Padraig's table where it was complete & utter chaos to be honest. I was looking a double up obviously but needed something half decent to stick it in with as Padraig was calling at least 90% of shoves, especially if they were short. Padraig raised in early position, I looked down at pocket 8s & shipped. He was pot committed as his raise was quite large so he duly made up the difference & the dealer ran the flop. Padraig tabled AJ which I was obviously happy enough to see but at the same time would have preferred a raggy ace or the like to help my already slim chances as he was hitting everything in sight. The flop came down KK9 which was good but the counterfeit potential wasn't great. Padraig then starts calling for a 9 being the sicko that he is! Thankfully the board ragged out & I had successfully doubled up.
Soon after I was moved to a new table & seated to the left of Big Mick G. Reggie Corrigan also got moved to the other side of the same table soon afterwards so it was almost as lively as my previous table.I was fairly quiet on this table, albeit the conversation at least was great having Mick beside me, being both a player I respect & a very nice bloke. Not long before the end of play I managed to double up which meant I was going into day 3 somewhere in the middle of the field which to be honest felt great, for the first time in nearly 2 whole days play, I finally felt like I was in a good spot.
Day 3 meant another seat redraw & new faces to contend with.I had the great company of Nicky Power on my immediate right, so we got off with a few laughs, the craic was great. To Nicky's right were 3 young aggressive English lads, one of which, Matt Perrins, had enjoyed some recent success on the tourney scene & was the chip leader coming into the day. Unfortunately Rob became an early victim of Paul Morrow exiting in 34th & obviously came straight over to me to give the entire details in an emotional rant.Rob's timing as ever is second to none. One of the English guys had open shipped from the button & I look down at AQ. Whilst trying to half listen to Rob I'm getting a count on how much it is to call the shove. I know with me not instant calling the guy thought I was effectively slow-rolling him which was obviously never my intention. When I snap out of my trance I obviously make the call & have him dominated as it turns out as he tables QT. My AQ holds & I'm off to a flyer as the tourney is now down to about 32 players.
The English lads to my right kept up their aggression which to be honest proved to be costly more than profitable for them. Nicky made some very nicely timed moves, shipping over their raises, picking up a fair few chips in the process. There were also a few times when shorter stacks shipped & they had to call & lost even more chips in the process. We were told at the start of play that ours was the 2nd table scheduled to break & it seemed like no time at all before that time came. I got moved to Parky's table & was seated in between Parky & Big Mick G. Mick had been doing really well & had a very healthy stack. Parky was still flying & still had the chip lead.
I was fairly quiet bar reshipping the odd time over Parky's raises. To be honest he made some sick lay downs all of which I was looking him to call. As we got short handed & down to about 12 players there were 2 key hands that got me chips. The 2nd of which was based more on adrenaline I think. After doubling up the hand before, there was a mid position raise from an aggressive player, a re-raise from one of the English lads from my previous table & I look down at JJ. JJ had been a bit of a bogey hand of mine & yet I felt like I could only be patient for so long. JJ is a premium hand & I felt like the re-raiser was as likely to be behind/racing against my JJ than ahead. I decided the initial raiser was likely to fold & took my chances with the JJ. Initial raiser folded as predicted & re-raiser called with AK. This was it my chance to get a serious stack together or bow out gracefully. The K in the window proved to be a false alarm as the dealer proceeded to flop me quads! A good sign? I think so!!!
It seemed like no time at all before play ended for the day & we were down to the final table. Rob was playing the side event & I decided an early night was in order. I felt quite good about the final table, always good to make any final table, particularly of a major Irish event.
I woke up pretty early so we decided to head downstairs for breakfast. We had been doing this every morning to be honest, then had time for a nap afterwards to get even more rested before the day's play.The first disappointment of the day proved to be the table draw. There were 2 impressive young guys on my left who had already established themselves very accomplished results online, this was certainly far from ideal.
I got off to a decent start, knocked out the short stack when he shipped in late position & I discovered AK in the blinds. I also managed to flop a set but unfortunately didn't get as much action as I would have hoped, perhaps it warranted a lil more slow playing than I allowed it. The cards were starting to hit me which after so much scraping by was steals and re-steals was very welcome.
A few of my raises then started to get picked off, & when missing the flop completely I had no option to fold imo. I was very disappointed with my exit hand & with hindsight honestly feel like I could have played it better. Basically I managed to get my stack in with top pair top kicker to discover I was drawing dead as my opponent had flopped a set. The few hands leading up to that one made a difference to my play as there's only so many times you can be pushed about before you have to play back & it seemed like AQ on a Q high flop was the time to do it. Doh! Gone in 8th for €11k. Fail!
Yes I was hugely disappointed, yes I feel like I under-performed, but by fcuk do I hold myself to a high standard. Obviously going so deep in another big tourney was awesome, I was well chuffed with myself. I feel like I'm becoming one of the more consistent Irish players & I'm still relatively new to the game, onwards & upwards into 2010 & the more poker success I am confident I will achieve.
Huge thanks to everyone for their support at the event, both in person & online. It's great to know I have so many people wishing me well & rooting for me in tourneys, the support can obviously only ever help me continue to succeed.
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