I thought it was about time I checked in with you guys now that I’ve had time to decompress from being away for a few days. From Wednesday last week until this Monday evening, I was away at the UK & Ireland Poker Tour event on the Isle of Man, the home of PokerStars themselves. The last couple of days I’ve been catching up on sleep and getting back on the online grind, so it’s good to be able to find some time to write this update.
Having won the first satellite I played for the event a couple of weeks back, I left for the IOM on Wednesday as I said, with a train from Southampton followed by a flight from Gatwick. It was fun seeing so many poker players on the flight out there – it’s amazing how easy it is to tell who’s a poker player and who isn’t in some instances. There was even a guy on the flight wearing an official EPT Season 8 hoodie. I got to my hotel (or rather, bed & breakfast place) pretty easily thanks to the shuttle bus from the airport that was laid on by Stars – they really do take amazing care of their players.
On arriving at the hotel I met up with a friend of mine from #TeamFoldto2nd, the stable I play for, who goes by ‘klauskraft’ on Stars and FTP. We agreed to share a hotel room and split the cost – standard procedure for pros at live tournaments, I guess. After a quick stop down the road for a takeaway pizza (the first of many unhealthy meals throughout the weekend which would leave me feeling pretty awful in general), we headed back to the venue and hopped in the first side event of the week, the £165 6-max event. It was my first live 6-max tournament, and I really enjoyed it. Ended up getting somewhere around 23rd out of 89 players after running A6cc into 77 vs a ridiculously aggressive and splashy player. Over the course of the tournament I met up with the other #TeamFoldto2nd player who made it to the IOM, ‘ozzieowen’ – he was actually at my table early on! The three of us hung out for the majority of the trip, and it was cool to meet in person a couple of the guys I talk to every day on Skype.
The second day of the trip was my most successful – I got 4th place in the £110 turbo event for around £1,110. This was actually my first cash in an official live tournament – all my others were in local casino events back in Dublin. It got me my first Hendon Mob flag, the elusive IOM flag which so many others were chasing during the week, and I am now officially 8,009th in the all-time money list of English players! Couple of other guys I met on the trip were very jealous of the flag. I ran pretty good during the turbo obviously, and I felt like I had a decent edge at the final table, but the stack sizes were insanely small by the time we got four-handed, so the only thing I could really have done differently would have been to hold up with T8s all-in vs 86o instead of chopping it up. Or the chipleader with 70% of the chips in the big blind could have not folded to a 3bb shove from the short stack just before I busted!
The day after that came the main event, the big one. My first UKIPT main event. I was really happy with the soft nature of my starting table, and I was really looking forward to the day’s play once I saw so much limping and check/calling everywhere. My table broke after level 3 though, and I got moved to a seemingly much tougher table that then turned out to be more or less equally soft. At 100/200 I lost a huge 3bet pot when a villain shoved 13,500 chips over my 1,200 cbet on Qh8c5c – I called it off with AcKc, all the equity in the world against almost any hand he could have, and he turned out to have 8s7s, not something I thought was in his range and an almost unequivocally terrible play. He held up, and I was down to 5.3k.
I managed to double back up to around 13k thanks to KK>77 on K73Q, but a couple of hands later I picked up KK again, and this hand wasn’t about to go so well. UTG opened to 500 at 100/200/25, and he was a relatively passive player who did seem to have a clue. I make it 1175 next to act, and then it folds around to a young Eastern European guy in middle position who asks how much I have, and makes it 2275 after some thought. Back around to UTG, and he thinks for a moment and makes it 4875. I more or less puke in my mouth, and briefly consider folding, before I realise I have KK and end up shipping it all-in. MP snap folds, UTG snap calls, he has AA and I do not bink. I spoke to some better players than myself – mement_mori and MissOracle – and they said they would have folded. I guess I’m just not good enough to fold KK in those spots yet!
After the main event on Friday came the PokerStars party at Tahiko nightclub, which was a really fun night. I had drinks with a bunch of different guys including the aforementioned mement_mori and MissOracle, as well as SamSquid, Chuck Bass, and Kate the Dealer (I couldn’t not brag about that last one). I also hung out with some guys I met over the course of the tournament including a couple of Full Tilt Poker employees, one of whom was the man responsible for originally implementing synchronised breaks into a poker site for the first time (amazing!) and I had a couple of really good chats with Corey ‘ProdigyXII’ Desmond about TV shows, screenwriting and some other bits and pieces. We then discovered that the free bar that was lasting from 9pm-11pm in the main room was continuing all night in the side room, and lots of beer drinking ensued. Highlight of the night was probably me pretending to just be cool as Daniel Negreanu wandered past and struck up a brief conversation with Mickey Petersen just as I was also chatting to him. I got starstruck and didn’t introduce myself – facepalm.
Saturday came a pretty sizeable hangover, and the £330 Isle of Man Cup event. I enjoyed the structure but my table was relatively tough, and it didn’t go too well. I spent most of that evening hanging out and watching Match of the Day with ozzieowen to recuperate. Sunday brought the £110 super-deepstack turbo and another cash, for a 21st-place finish, and a brief online session in the evening – with no cashes online, that was it for the week. Back to the airport on Monday after railing the main event final table for a little while, accompanied by ozzieowen and ‘thehempy’, who I met during the 6max event while playing at a table that also included Niall ‘firaldo87’ Farrell – incidentally, firaldo87 shipped the Isle of Man Cup event for around £15,000, to continue his big 2013 heater. He’s a really talented player who may very well make it right to the top of the MTT game quite soon.
Got home on Monday night and went straight out for dinner for a friend’s birthday, and subsequently came home and crashed for a day/night watching some of the WSOP Main Event final table before week five of my TV Drama Writing course up in London. Right now it’s late night on Thursday, and I’ve had a couple of online sessions since then – got 2nd in the Multi-Fifty on FTP last night, but apart from that I’m still downswinging pretty hard. It’ll turn around soon. I’ve taken on some more coaching students to make sure I stay focused, so anyone who’s interested should feel free to PM me on TPE or tweet me @theginger45.
That’s about it for now – my next video series, focusing on the Saturday Night Live tournament on Stars.fr, will be going up starting on Sunday this week. I hope you all enjoy it, and I will see you on the forums very soon!