Time of the month

Played a slew of monthlies in the last 4 days.

Thursday: Fitz EOM. Absolute nothing unusual to see folks here, move on please: kings cracked by JTo on steroids early did for about 20% of my stack. Blinds did for some more before it became a shipping stack and AK was duly shipped into the BB's AA. Did I suck out? Do I ever?

Friday: Atlantis EOM. New premises, really nice atmosphere. Carlow is rapidly becoming one of my favourite places to play because
(a) Paul Lucey is a legend
(b) the locals are all dead on, really welcoming and sound
(c) I keep getting results there.
For the second consecutive month, I was officially second, although this one was actually a chop. High quality field that included Frances McCormack, Chris Dowling, Roy Brindley, Mike Foley, Fionn Sherry and a couple of extremely capable young Internet lads. Totally card dead early on but the structure is so sick it didn't really matter. Ended up headsup with one of the local whizkids, he knew what he was doing so I felt we were just gonna be flipping for 800, and disliking pure gambles where I have no edge happily agreed to the chop. Played as well as I have in a long time, not so much that I played any one hand particularly brilliant (mostly they were pretty standard) but the patience and ability to pick good spots that used to be my main strength was back, and my reads were sharper than they've been in a while. Usually I knew exactly what everyone had before the cards were flipped over.

Saturday: Newbridge, the new club run by Dennis Reyes. Lovely spot and the monthly is a good addition to the Irish tournament schedule. Structure is a lot faster than Carlow though, so patience is less of a virtue. My exit was (in my opinion at least, though not everyone would agree) a total standard 25 big blind reship with AKs over a raise, a call, and a reraise by three very loose opponents. One of them had aces, and did I suck out? See above.

Sunday: the new Westbury Sunday 100. Great structure again, hit the FT with twice average chips, which I managed to shrink to half average in just two hands. First I opened AQs from the cutoff and called a shortie ship getting 3 to 1. He had KJ and hit the turn. Next hand, I opened again, same dude called, I flopped a pair, he called my lead, I turned 2 pair which brought a possible diamond flush to the board. He shipped over my lead and getting almost 5 to 1 I had to call if there was any prospect my hand was good, which there clearly was as I was ahead of all one pair hands and one diamond hands. The presence of the ace of diamonds meant any made flush out there was of the non-nut variety, and I figured any half decent player wasn't flatting for 20% of their stack pre with suited connectors and flatting the flop for another 25% when they hit the flush draw. As it happened, he had the made nut flush (K9s). Did I suck out? See above.

Plan for this week is to grind away online and probably not play again live until my PokerStars RTE heat on Friday. Then it's down to Killarney, probably on Saturday, to take up Neill Kelly's kind offer to buy me in to the side event (after last year's missing chip kerfuffle).

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