Good day Bruce

Good weekend in Galway, and successful one.

No joy in the Eglinton IPC Party event. Worked up to 30K in early going until Big Mick's buddy took a chunk out of me with a well disguised gutshot. Got back up to 26K a 1/2 when I reshipped AJs over a late position raise. Standard enough reship, and after a lot of thought my opponent found the call with A8o, and was rewarded with an 8 on the flop.

We also did an Irish Poker Radio show from the Eglinton. Ignore the boring brag section from the co-host (yours truly) up front and skip ahead to some quality interviews with Big Mick G and Paul Marrow imo.

Next up was the IPR final table. Normal "running good" service was resumed: I picked up aces first hand, and also last hand. The standard was very high as you'd expect given the high quality of the field and nobody was making major mistakes so it was always going to come down to who ran best at crucial points, and thankfully that was me. Las hand was pretty funny: Graham Masters had gone low and decided to ship blind. I looked at one card, ace, and knew I was calling. The other card matched it. The board ran out A33xx and that was that.

It was back to running bad for the Eglinton side event. My exit hand was one of the funniest I've seen in a while. A local limping 95% of hands limped the cutoff, I raised to isolate on the button with QJs, and we saw a Q53 flop. He potted it, and I decided to call and re-evaluate on the turn. The turn was an ace of hearts giving me the flush draw. He again donk led for pot which now made it a big pot, and I decided this was a good spot to rep the ace and went for the semi-bluff shove. He called pretty fast, fast enough to indicate that second pair was no good and I needed to hit the flush, but no, he flipped over Q8o, drawing to two outs. Needless to say, he hit a non heart 8 on the river and that was that.

Great weekend overall, with some quality carousing in McSwiggan's. When Dave "The Phenomenon" Curtis is MC, you know it's gonna rock and rule. Any conversation immediately becomes 1000 times more interesting once The Phenomenon enters it. Thanks to all the well wishers who congratulated me on my success including Wally, Chris Dowling, The Phenomenon, Cat and Rob, Keith McFadden, Big Mick G, Nicky Power, Paul Marrow and Parky himself. Heard Parky was giving Nicky and Marty some stick over their golf habit. Fair play that man: about time someone did.

Haven't put in as much hours online this week as normal, but it's still going swimmingly. Played a couple of afternoon 45 mans on Full Tilt on Monday and got headsup in both, chopping one and finishing second in the other. Yesterday I played just one tournament, the 18.30 $8.08 rebuy on Stars and scooped my fifth Manchester package. $2076 profit for 2 hours "work" while I booked planes and trains and did email: sweeeeet.

Today I went in to Bruce to sign the sponsorship deal. It was a very positive meeting with Thomas and Chris and I'm really looking forward to representing Bruce to the best of my ability and contributing in any way I can. My first outing is this weekend in Killarney, always a great place to play thanks to Connie and Matt. There will also be an online component to the deal which fits in very nicely with my plan to concentrate more on MTTs this year as the MTTs on Bruce are very sweet. Bruce are organising an online "Welcome" tourney for me at some point: more on that later and I'm hoping all my poker friends will support it.

I'm probably going to take it easy pokerwise until I head to Killarney on the train on Friday morning. First I've decided to treat Mireille to a celebratory night out tomorrow. Being married to me is an awful ordeal at times but somebody has to do it and she does it brilliantly. She was my main supporter and number one fan through my running career and this has carried on into my poker career.

Also, happy birthday to my eldest son, Paddy (Poke). He never fails to make me proud and the fact that being his Dad has been way way easier than it should is all down to him.

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