It's a strange affair to see 80% of the 465 field made up of non Irish, playing a tournament in Dublin, but that's what we got. I personally don't get all the hate towards French players; I find them cordial and generally good fun to play against. I'd love to see them here in these numbers every week.
My tournament went well for the first five levels adding 40% to my stack. After peaking at around 
70,000 - I then lost a couple of decent pots holding big over-pairs; once folding and once calling. This left me relatively short with 30,000 which I got in spectacularly bad. I held 55 and pushed after I had 3-bet pre-flop on an AJ7 rainbow flop. I looked pretty stupid when my opponent (Alan Fleming) showed up with AA, ah well!
The structure for the deep stack boasts a 50,000 starting stack. I'm not a fan and feel it's a bit of a gimmick, as inevitably the average big blind gets pretty low when the meat of the tournament is reached.
The structure came in for a bit of stick on the Irishpokerboards.com forum, when it dropped to eighteen big blinds average approaching the bubble. Mike Lacy the founder of the event came out with one of the most bizarre statements I've ever herd, 'It was nothing to do with the structure why the average stack to big blind ratio got so low'. So I suppose it must have been global warming or planet alignment.
In fairness, Mike has done great work for Irish Poker over the years and has always been innovative and trend setting in his events, so I shouldn't be too critical. As I said, I just found the statement totally bizarre.
