Things are heating up for the Irish Open

Names are coming in thick and fast to the Irish Open registration desk here in Paddy Tower following the live and online qualifiers held over the past few days. Eight players qualified online via the Paddy Power Poker Super Satellite tournament on Sunday, a further eight bagged their place at Europe’s richest poker tournament at a live qualifier in the Sporting Emporium on Tuesday and last night another two lucky players won tickets online in Wednesday’s Super Satellite tournament.

Irish Open 2007 Main Event

Don’t miss out on all the buzz of this year’s Irish Open, there is still time to qualify online via Paddy Power Poker or live via card rooms throughout Ireland and Britain. We’ll see you there!

Saturday night in the SE, who cares what picture cards you see?

After rocking out to a new band in Whelans last Saturday night, I wandered into the wonderful Sporting Emporium in central Dublin with a fistful of cash and the dream of crushing the live cash tables. I’m sure I wasn’t the only person with this dream, as there were a number of cash tables going and more punters arriving every few minutes. After a brief period of enforced blackjack (waiting for a seat to free up in the poker room), I was called by John to sit down at one of the €1 / €2 Pot Limit tables.

The regular crowd had shuffled in - students in hoodies, professional types wearing suits, a sprinkling of women dressed to impress and the usual poker fiends! Many seemed to have a bit of drink taken too, as you might expect, top-drawer poker was not being played by anyone. I had to stop myself from limping with 85 suited and the like UTG a few times, that’s the kind of game that is played in the wee hours on any given Saturday night!

In any case, after about an hour of play, the following hand occurred at my table: I was on the Small Blind with Kh 4h, three players limped, I completed and the Big Blind checked. The flop was 5d 6d 7d, which gave me an up-and-down straight draw but otherwise was not very good for me and something I could get away from easily (with a hand like K4 suited, you either want to flop a monster or nothing at all, otherwise these kinds of hands can cost you a lot in the long run!). I checked, the Big Blind (Up From Kildare Man) bet €10, two of the limpers (let’s call them Angry Young Lad and Drunken Lawyer Guy to better keep track of the play) flat called, myself and the other limper folded. The turn was a Qd and now the action got exciting!

Up From Kildare Man bet €40, Angry Young Lad raised to €120 and Drunken Lawyer Guy pushed the rest of his stack in for about €350! Without much ado the other two players’ stacks were thrown in, building a huge pot of over a grand. The Jc was dealt on the river, it wouldn’t help anyone I thought, obviously one of them had the ace-high diamond flush, but which one?

Confidently, Angry Young Lad turns over the Ad 8d for the flush. Drunken Lawyer Guy mucks his hand, muttering something about two pair. Now the surprise: Up From Kildare man shows 3d 4d for the straight flush! Angry Young Lad looks as though he’s been told the McDonald’s Euro Saver Menu has been cancelled - shell-shocked and sick to his core! Up From Kildare Man pulls in the chips with a florish and takes his time sorting his stack out, while the rest of the table looks on enviously. Maybe I’ll win the next big pot, we all think.

If you still haven’t secured your ticket for the biggest poker tournament to be ran in Ireland, the Sporting Emporium is running an Irish Open Satellite next Tuesday March 11th at 9pm.

Odds 'n' Ends

What are your odds of dating a supermodel?

The ability to quickly calculate odds is considered by some to be one of the more important skills possessed by the best poker players. What are the odds you’ll flop a set with your pair of ducks, 22? Quack quack, it’s 8.5 to 1 of course. How about the odds of flopping a flush when holding 2 suited cards? Why, isn’t that 117.7 to 1?

Our resident geeks have even introduced a cool PPP Odds Calculator to crunch those pesky numbers for you while you’re playing the game of your choice, which makes it easy for those of us who play 6 tables at a time while simultaneously surfing the internet, changing the baby and watching the footie! Click here to download the PPP Odds Calculator - authorization code paddyfreecalc is valid until the end of February.

But how many of you think about the other odds that could impact your life? The odds of being on a plane with a drunken pilot are only 117 to 1 – now tell me that doesn’t scare all you jet-setters! The odds of causing injury to yourself while engaged in your daily (or monthly, if you are a true cigar-chomping, whiskey-swilling Hold ‘em player) shave are a mere 6,585 to 1.

And the odds of dating a supermodel? Well, for the masses it is 88,000 to 1; luckily, that number is much, much, MUCH lower for those of us working on the Poker floor in the gleaming Paddy Tower. Oi! Gisele, Heidi, come ‘ere, giz us another backrub…

A United Nations of Poker?

Irish Open 2007 Final Table

It’s funny to think about the universal appeal that poker has. It stretches across cultural, ethnic and generational boundaries and, from knowing some of the players I’ve faced across the felt over the years, even boundaries of decency and taste!

I’ve been looking through the list of registered players for the 2008 Irish Open and there are all sorts signed up; Welsh, Bulgarians, Finns, Texans, Corkonians and others with difficult-to-comprehend accents!

It’s part of what makes poker great, when you can have English and Irish, American and Russian, German and Pole, Northsider and Southsider sitting across the table from the other without screamed obscenities or a threat of military action. In my opinion, that sort of stuff is better left for when we’re online and the set we’ve hit on the flop has been undone by a runner runner flush!

Last year the final 3 players competing for the Irish Open title were an Irishman, an Englishman and a Canadian. So how many nationalities do you think will be represented on the Final Table in Citywest on March 24th 2008? I’m thinking at least 4….