Dick from Nottingham

Most of last week was devoted to the European Deepstack. I played the main event and a few side events, and kept running into aces, except in one of the side events where I had the aces. Sadly, they were no match for KTo on that occasion, the only time the aces didn't hold.

I had a spell on the feature table late on day 1A. I'd gone for dinner with Jason Tompkins (who had just won the High Roller - well done lad!) and his lovely girlfriend Joy, Daragh Davey, Nick Newport and David Lappin. I'd stated my intention if I did find myself in the last hour with a 20K stack to get it in a lot lighter than I normally would in the hopes of either doubling up or busting (so I could re-enter 1B). There was general agreement that this was the soundest strategy in a deepstack event where you think you have a fairly big edge over the field: any loss in equity taking sub optimal gambles being compensated by gained equity from giving yourself a second full run at amassing a stack. In the event, my shoves all got through (I had a very good image at the table), which at least saw me move from under 20k to over 30k.

After busting the main event and the turbo side on Saurday, I played a few online games in the room. I late regged for the nightly Night on Stars on French Stars and ended up winning it for just over 10K, so once again it was a case of online to the rescue. The French at my table in the side the following day had heard of my win and were suitably impressed. Humble as ever, I pointed out that I'd actually won this tourney three times in the past few weeks, even though I've only played it about half a dozen times. One of French commented wrily: "You must like French fish". The win moves ne to my highest ever P5 rankings just outside the top 200 in the world. It would be cool to break into the top 100 this year (but I probably need to play a lot less live and more online to get there).

This blog is being written just after busting the main event at UKIPT Galway. After a ropey start I got up to 35k near the end of the day, comfortably above average. I then lost with tens versus jto when I called a 15 bb shove, and kjs v Aj when I'd opened and was priced in to call the reshove. AJ is this week's bogey hand: I was crippled today when I shoved qjs into it, and busted the 6 max side with it versus king 7.

The UKIPT itself seems to go from strength to strength with the number of runners way up this year despite the increased buyin. On Thursday Quentin (one of the Stars managers in the UK) invited the serial online qualifiers out to dinner and was interested to hear our thoughts on what appealed to us about the online sats and what improvements could be made. I think there's quite a widespread view of Stars as an arrogant market leader, so it's always good to see that they are willing to listen and maybe learn.

 I don't normally sell my action in live events any more but my German friend Max Heinzelmann asked if he could buy a "lucky 1%". Max won EPT Player of the Year last year for his achievement of getting headsup in back to back EPTs (Berlin and San Remo) so I figure his lucky 1% could be very lucky indeed. Unfortunately it wasn't to be though.

I still have a few sweats with horses in the main so hopefully one of them binks or else  I'll just have to try to win another online tournament to get out.

At the Deepstack, David Lappin pointed to a tall young guy and simply said "Dick from Nottingham". Finding myself standing beside him later as we filed out to a break, I asked "How are you getting on Dick?" The reaction to this polite enquiry was somewhat unexpected. Mainly because his name wasn't Dick. Turns out Lappin meant dick from Nottingham.

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