Manky Manchester

Fairly safe to say my first attempt at a UKIPT leg in England didn't exactly go to plan. I started reasonably well in the main event but the persistent pattern was get to 20K, then get knocked back, repeat. Eventually the blinds caught up with me and I ended up having to ship Q8s on the button into KJ in the big blind. The board rather amusingly ran pot AQJQT.

Less said about the 110 side event the better, basically just one of those tourneys where you just wither away and without ever winning a pot and lose your first all in.

The 330 side event looked like being another of those tourneys where you just wither away until a real heater saw me go from 3500 up to 55k in a few orbits. Too good to last though, and I did 20K late on day 1 with aces v 43s. I was still optimistic coming back on day 2 with over 33K, well above average, but my optimism or my involvement didn't last long. I raised queens utg, the big blind defended, the flop got J44, my opponent check raised me and then decided AJ was good enough to be calling a shove with, and was rewarded with an ace on the river.

The 220 side event was another wither away event, although this was a rapid leukemia version of same. So all in all, pretty dismal.

There was a good contingent of Irish over there which at least added a bit of joviality to what otherwise would have been a pretty drab affair in truth. Hopefully we'll all have better luck on the subsequent legs.

In between the playing live and jogging around Strangeways, I had a crack at a few more 3x turbos on Stars and scored a Berlin EPT package almost immediately. I followed that up with another the following night in a 8000 fpp qualifier, and those combined with a few smaller results added up to an almost 15k weekend online. Why do I ever leave the house again?

Marty Smyth has already outed Nicky Power as an ostentatious snorer on his blog so there's no point in me compounding the problems for the dodgy coin flipper I shared a room with on this trip. In Nicky's defence, I will say his snoring is not even in the same league as Mick McCloskey's.

While I was in Manchester, I was very saddened to hear about the tragic death of John Hennessy. I got to know John after he knocked me out of the Waterford Masters last year in Tramore. John was a great player (in my opinion, he played as well as anyone and better than most at my second last table in Tramore) and person who brought a quiet dignity to everything he did, and my deepest sympathies go out to his family.

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