Compulsive Viewing

Congrats to John O’Shea on his great run in the WSOP Main Event. I must admit to being very impressed with the fact that John needed to finish around 12^th in the main event to get out on the trip. Such a pity he couldn’t catch a few breaks inside the last 200.Would of made for some ending to the documentary Setanta are shooting about John. 

I played the Munster Masters in Tramore last weekend. The €250 buy in tournament only got 50 runners and I finished 6^th for a little over double the buy in. While the numbers were small, it was an enjoyable game with a good structure.

I lost a big pot with about 15 players left and never really recovered. Being in shove mode for so long it was inevitable that I’d get called at some stage and in reality I was a bit fortunate to even make the money.
I’ll be on lock-down mode this weekend watching the Open Championship. This is my favourite weeks golf of the year and I’ll be glued to the TV savoring every minute of the forty or so hours coverage.

I’m not going to try tipping a winner as I’m a bit perplexed and don’t really have a strong fancy. I had a few small speculative bets on the outright markets, but will mainly play that in running.

A couple of bets I’ll be having on other markets include; Mark Leishman at 10/1 for a top twenty finish with Boylesports. Leishman is a recent winner on the PGA tour and a player goes a bit under the radar. He’s generally over priced as is the case this week and is in the form of his life.

I’ll also be having a decent punt on Ben Curtis for his opening day three ball against two players woefully out of form in Trevor Immelman and Paul Casey. 18-hole three ball markets aren’t usually a place that I often get involved in, but this one looks too good to pass up.

Musical Chairs

There were two games on last Saturday. A €120 game in the City West and a €350 two day game which was part of a ‘Summer Festival’ in the Fitz. I opted for the latter, which unfortunately only attracted 26 players, the game in the City West got a massive 500 players.   

The Fitz game started with two tables and when a few more entered, I was moved to the third table. After 20 minutes on my new table I ran a King high flush into the nut flush of James 'Hawkeye' McManus. Meanwhile I looked across to my old seat, which was filled by Fintan Gavin, and he had quadrupled his starting stack in that time. I kind of felt it wasn’t going to be my day.

Nothing went right after and I exited in 16th after roughly 3 hours play, at least I lasted long enough for the legendry Fitz feed. I had travelled up with Ian ‘Bops’ Ronan and although we had swapped percentages, I’m ashamed to say I was more hoping he got knocked out quickly rather then win the thing. Bops is never one to hang around short-stacked, luckily he finished 14th.

I had dropped into the City West on my way to Dublin and the numbers for that game were astounding. Celtic poker tours with their regional partners, JP and Nick O’Hara in this instance, have been putting on these €120 buy in $25,000 guarantees for over a year now.

These games have become hugely popular attracting more and more recreational players to them, rather then playing the expense laden multi-day festival event. Professionally run; low buy in, softer fields, with a chance of a decent score at the end. What’s not to like? With the economy in the state it is Celtic Poker Tour have clearly produced the product that fits the current market well, and these event will be where much of the poker playing community will be getting their fix for the foreseeable future.         

Well done to Jason Tompkins on his WSOP final table in event #54 last night, a great performance getting through 3,200 players to finish 6th. BigMickG aka Mick Graydon is currently 12/22 in event #56 so hopefully another late nights railing lays ahead tonight.