The joys of being a Canadian fisherman

I don't like playing any live event, even a hundred quid crapshoot, unless I feel I can give it my best. In particular, I don't like playing side events when you are more interested in how someone else is getting on in the main. Lappin's continued involvement into day 4 of EPT Deauville therefore gave me the perfect excuse to take it easy for a few days. The company was good too, with a good crew of Irish players, some foreign heroes like Laurynas Levinskas, and some non poker degens like Mrs Doke (and her assorted family in France who visited us during the week) and David's girlfriend Saron (who as well as amazingly being able put up with David is tremendous craic). 

David eventually got unlucky with kings against sevens with 40 left. While railing David on day 4 and over tweeting to keep myself from dying of boredom (I'm a terrible railer: watching poker without hole cards just seems like the most boring thing you can do, with the possible exception of watching cricket), I got chatting to Howard Swains, one of the Poker Stars bloggers, who then wrote this very nice well written piece on David just after he bust.

It's fair to say David was a bit tilted in the immediate aftermath of his exit so we went for a consolation ice cream. It was a great run and a brilliant performance in his maiden EPT, but we come to these things hoping to win and as he said to me a few days later even the 16k brick in the safe in his room was no real consolation. In fact it merely served as a visual reminder of what might have been.

David's unlucky demise freed us up to play a couple of side events. In one of these myself Jason and David registered just before kickoff and were "rewarded" by me and Jason being put at the same table, with David at the next table from where he took this snap.

My last side event did at least provide me with some amusement in the form if a minor diplomatic incident after a hand between a very affable (and capable) Frenchman to my immediate left and the only other English speaker at the table, a baseball wearing kid. The Frenchman's flopped set lost out to the kid's turned bigger set and after he had paid off a river overbet, the visibly tilted loser decided to take a verbal pop at the winner.

"Why you bet so big on the river? If I don't have a set I don't pay"
The kid justified himself saying he felt the Frenchman was either calling or folding irrespective if bet sizing so he might as well bet big. The Frenchman was having none of this.
"It's because I am French, you think I am a fish"
The kid said diplomatically that the guy didn't really know what he was thinking but after steaming on for a little while the Frenchman said to his French neighbour (in French) "fuck these foreigners who look down on us just because we are French, we should kill them all".

At which point the kid piped up (in flawless French) "You realise that I'm Canadian so I understand French". That cracked the table up and instantly defused the situation. One of the many charming quirks a lot of French people have is to assume that you (as a foreigner) must understand French when they talk TO you but not when they talk ABOUT you.

We drove back from Deauville to Beauvais on Sunday with Mrs Doke as driver, me in the front  as navigator, and Jason and Lappin as the two kids going "are we there yet?" and playing (open faced Chinese) in the back until they were all tuckered out.


I was interviewed by Evening Herald journalist Michael Lavery last week about the live scene in Ireland. These are recessionary times with buyins dropping across the board and it could be said that with a 2k buyin even the Irish Open is no longer a major international event. But on the plus side we have some good new tournaments from Stephen Mclean like the Super Poker event which allows players to play a Vegas sized tournament with a big prize pool for a relatively modest buyin. I'm also looking forward to the Legends Cup which offers players the chance to build a day 2 stack by playing up to 4 different day ones (and combining stacks).

Before that, next up for me is UKIPT Cork. I am heading down there Wednesday and hoping to reverse my recent live fortunes. Most of the Firm are travelling down for that and occupying the rooms we collectively won in packages so hopefully one of us will do the business. Live players be warned: the baby faced assassin of the Firm, online beast Jaymo, is coming for you. He waltzed in to the Deepstack  for the 300 side event and got headsup. 

One problem with all these live poker trips is they cut into the online grind. I say grind but it's not a particularly apt description for something I love as much as poker. A few years ago, I found myself in a cab with Liam Flood and after he had asked me how it was going and I had said "well live, not so good online", he asked me if I preferred that to the opposite. I said I would prefer to be going well online as I saw that as the core of what I did. I managed to get in three profitable sessions in France (playing on Irish Eyes where I booked a tourney win, Stars Fr and Winamax) and straight off the plane launched myself into the Sunday grind. On my first attempt at the Sunday Million a couple of weeks ago I ran deep into the last 100, busting in 70thish. I went 30 better this time. I was up among the chipleaders with 100 left so wasn't exactly thrilled to bust in 40th. I ran bad at the death but very well to get there so I can't complain. A sizable rail formed online: that kind of support is always great. It's also heartening to know I still have the game to claw myself through these massive runner fields and be in a position to go all the way. One of these days...

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Ch-ch-changes and choo choos

Three years ago Mrs. Doke accompanied me to Deauville for the EPT. This is noteworthy because since I switched from running to poker, she stopped coming with me on trips.A wholehearted helper in the world of ultrarunning, she gamely did everything asked of her while her husband ran ridiculously long distances (duties which included feeding me what a normal person eats in 8 days over the course of a 24 hour race, massaging me when I cramped up, keeping me informed of other runners progress, and some less pleasant duties it is probably best I don't go into here). With no such role in poker, she quickly decided that following me around to poker tournaments served no useful function.

That year, Stars installed their qualifiers in the Normandie Barriere Hotel, one of the grandest hotels we ever stayed in. Having gamely followed me around the world staying in a variety of hostels, athlete villages (usually just another word for hostel) and B and B's, this was the first improvement over running that she could see in the world of poker. She liked the experience of living like aristocracy so much she asked me to make sure I qualified every year from now on. I failed her the following year, and last year was unable to even try last year due to a scheduling clash with another tournament I was committed to. When I told her I had qualified this year, her excitement was several notches higher than any previous poker "win".

These are recessionary times however, and this year Stars decided to install us in the considerably less regal Royal Barriere, which while being a parfectly nice hotel feels a bit like the poor relative after you have stayed in the Normandie. Cue the lament from Mrs. Doke. I didn't have the heart to tell her that the way things are going in general in poker, we might be staying in hostels again or even worse (Travelodge!) in a few years.

If all is changing away from the table, the same can be said at the table. Last time I played Deauville I prospered on day one at a table where most of the locals thought it was acceptable to get several hundred big blinds in if you hit any sort of a pair, and finished up among the chipleaders. This time, the table talk was all about makeup and backers. It is becoming increasingly clear that the whole staking phenomenon is accelerating the pace with which young talents can move up levels. Guys who prove themselves in low stakes online can progress quickly up through the levels without ever building a roll (they just need to find the right backer) and be playing EPTs and WSOPs in no time. The downside of this is the fields are getting tougher quicker. Far be it for me (as someone who has done pretty well out of the whole staking phenomenon) to complain though, so I won't. Just saying there is a kind of race to the bottom going on at the upper echelons of poker right now.

As for my own main event, well it's hard to bust a 300 bb stack in under 4 levels but somehow I managed it. I actually made a good start, up to 35k in the first level, just through chipping up in small pots. Went into reverse then, and was back to starting at end of level 2.

Level 3 was something of a nightmare. I got rivered in one big hand after turning the nuts (a straight) but at least minimised my losses by checking behind on the river when the board paired. Then a weird hand where I open QQ to 325 in the kidnap (seat before hijack). Tightest player on table who has only played 2 hands to date (and shown down just one, AK, which he threebet pre) seemed to think about threebetting but instead flatted. English maniac squeezes button for 1225, I flat, and the tight guy instantly makes it 5k. Maniac folds as did I after a tank. My read was he had a monster which he considered threebetting but decided to flat with three maniacs behind likely to squeeze. Once the squeeze came in, he raised enough to make it unprofitable to setmine. He looked supremely confident as I was tanking so I figured kings or aces (I think he threebets AK as he had previously). Felt weird folding queens pre but I ran the hand by a few top players after and they all fold so I am happy with the fold.

The hand that did the real damage started with English maniac (good maniac though: won the Brawl recently) opening in MP. Bad French player flats, as do I out of the sb with tens, and the BB comes along. Flop AJTr and I check call a 50% pot cbet. English player had shown (and actually declared to English guy beside him) willingness to triple barrel live so I decided to play the hand passively to extract maximum value from his bluffs. Turn was a 9 and I check call again. River a 2, I checks, and he pots it. I was prepared to call a 50% pot bet quickly but I tanked this one as I'm only beating a bluff. I wasn't able to bring myself to fold against this guy though and unfortunately he had the hand he was repping (KQ). This was the only hand I wasn't happy with. I don't think the river call is horrible but possibly I could have got away at that sizing.

That left me in the 20 big zone a lot earlier than I had hoped. I picked what I thought was a good spot shoving in with sevens over a guy opening any ace any pair anything pretty from any position, and ran into AK behind in the big blind. K high flop, gg me.

As I said, hard to bust a 300 bb stack in under 4 levels, and particularly hard to do it and not feel a bit stupid afterwards. I could possibly have played less hands and nitted it up a bit more but my game plan was to try to accumulate in the early stages (similar to what I do online).

Normally I get over exits pretty quickly unless I made a bad mistake but this one took more out of me than most so I took a few days off rather than relaunch myself into side events. It's very much part of my whole approach and philosophy than no one tournament should ever matter too much, but I suppose I wouldn't be human if the big ones like my first EPT in almost 2 years didn't sting a bit. As I write this David Lappin is still very much in the mix (average stack as the bubble approaches) so hoping he will at least provide me with a good sweat. As ever with David, there has been quite a bit of quality stationing going on and his declared ambition is to become the first person to check call his way to an EPT title. Plan is to rail him and do some online and maybe a few turbo sides. Deauville's not a bad place to spend a lazy week at this time of year.

Unfortunately I had to miss my favourite Irish tournament of the year the European Deepstack due to the clash with Deauville. It pretty much all started for me there 5 years ago. The following year I mounted a credible defence of the title all the way to the second last table, and the year after that I became the first person (alongside Jason Tompkins) to final table it a second time. At the weekend, Marc McDonnell became the latest member of that club. 5 years ago, the final table swung on a big preflop confrontation between Marc and myself, my AK holding against his AQ. More than anyone else in Irish poker Marc always seems to get unlucky right at the death when it matters most. It is to his credit that he keeps picking himself up and coming back for more and I think most of the country were rooting for him at the weekend, myself very much included. Unfortunately it wasn't to be (well done to Declan Connolly who did claim the title) but one of these days Maccer, one of these days...

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Living it little and large

David and I both won packages for UKIPT Edinburgh and although we tried to get Stars to give us t$ for one, they were having none of it so we ended up with two hotel rooms worth over a grand for a week. The upside of this inflexibility was it meant we not only got to live like rich people for a week, we also got to be generous benefactors to two of our friends. Mrs Doke didn't fancy it much (the only other time we were there was for a 100 km race around Herriott Watt university, and we stayed near the campus, out past the less salubrious part of Edinburgh made famous by Trainspotting) so in my case I shared with (Oh My God It's) Jason Tompkins, while David elected to bring along a non poker friend, the ridiculously talented photographer Rob O'Connor. David claims that when he informed me of this, I responded with "It will be good to be able to spend time with someone that isn't you". My recollection is it was more a case of me saying it would be good to have a non poker companion so we wouldn't just talk about poker hands. In any case, Rob was an astute choice as he knew Edinburgh  well and his aesthetic sense meant we followed him along to some great places we would never have found alone (history suggests that on most away trips, we spend nearly all our time in poker rooms, hotel rooms, coffee shops and bars talking about flops and turns).

One of the twists of variance is that if you take a group of poker friends, it rarely hits them all the same way at the same time. The more usual scenario with three or four poker amigos will be that one will be riding on the crest of a wave while the other two hang on grimly to the underbelly of a downswing (I'm talking about live poker here: online is a different affair where thanks to increased volume everything evens itself out that much quicker). In our group, Jason has had the most amazing twelve months live (a High Roller win and a couple of high profile WSOP and EPT final tables) while David and myself have spent a lot of time in hotel rooms, coffee shops and bars this past year. Add in Jason's recent third in the Milly and it is not surprising that the first thing a lot of people wanted to talk to either me or David about was Jason. It's always nice to be able to talk about a friend's success and Jason deserves all the adulation he is receiving at the moment.

The egregious rates the Balmoral wanted to charge us for Internet access (75 quid for the week) meant no online grinding option. I think Stars are missing a trick by allowing this to happen (I imagine they could use their bargaining muscle to get a better deal, or if it comes to it, just pick up the tab....I'm pretty sure most people staying in the hotel for the UKIPT would have contributed more than 75 quid in rake if allowed to over the week).

My own assault on the main event was a bit of a non event. I toiled away for much of day 1 drifting back from starting stack until I got lucky with jacks. After I opened, the big blind defended. He check called a J43 flop and check raised the turn (a ten). At this stage I figured I had either set over setted the poor man, or he was playing aces or kings unconventionally again (in an earlier hand, he had flatted aces on the button after an open, a raise and a call) and stuck the lot in. He had aces and I doubled to 22k. A table move to a dark corner of the back room (I have never had such trouble seeing my own cards) late in the day saw me crash back down to 5k after two unfortunate incidents (a flopped set losing to a runner runner flush which I had to squint to see, and aces to j9o on a j high flop with no nine on it). A few reships late in the day saw me pushing back towards health with over 9k, and two in the first orbit on day 2 got me up past 15k again. Then an hour without cards or spots meant getting it in with nines and no fold equity over a loose early raiser. He had kjo and won the flip.

I played a couple of side events and got deepish but no cigar (I was 7th in a High Roller sat with 5 paid). So lots of time for hotel rooms, coffee shops and bars, and sightseeing. Highlight was the Camera Obscura that Rob ushered us along to, where he took this photo I like, an illustration of the mirror opposite swings you will have to deal with in poker friendships where one friend is living it large on the upside of variance while the other hunkers on the downswing.

A few years ago, my oldest son came to me for career advice. Like a lot of oldest sons his initial thoughts were to follow in his old man's footsteps. I didn't want to go into specifics (Be a fireman!). I certainly kept it to myself that I thought following me into a career in technology (at the time: this was before I learned to click buttons profitably) was not a good choice for him (I was already bored of it, and my son is a lot more idealistic than I am). Instead, I just pointed out that when I thought back to jobs I had held and projects I had worked on down the years, my memories focused not on how much money I had been paid but on the work I had done and the people I had done it with. In the same way, I think I will look back on trips like these and forget the runner runner flushes but remember the hilarity of David Kilmartin Lappin slipping on ice and being dumped unceremoniously on his rear to the considerable amusement of myself and Jason, the great meal and chat we had with Kevin Williams, Jamie Burland, Neil Raine, Jabracada and a few of the other up and coming English poker talents, and all the other great people we ran into like brothers Willie and Dod (who won the 300 side and fted the 6 max), and one of my most favourite people Chihao Tsang (who had a deep run all the way to day 3 of the main). We had a whiskey back in the hotel afterwards with *Jabra, a very interesting guy who has the potential to have a very big future in poker. I always see these trips away as a chance to spend some time with people I wouldn't normally run into in a tournament in Ireland. We also shared a cab to the airport with Kevin Killeen and Fintan Hand, two of the young Irish crop of up and coming online beasts who are approaching the game professionally in a way that seems right to me and more likely to lead to long term success.

The day may come when I decide to do what many (Mrs. Doke included) would consider the sensible thing and withdraw from live poker to focus entirely on clicking buttons, but as long as there's fire in my belly to go out and give it my best shot to land the big one, as long as there's me believing I can compete with anyone and as long as there's young players to meet and exchange ideas and interesting chats with, and as long as there's guys like Rob O'Connor willing to act as personal tour guide to a couple of inward looking poker players, that day won't come soon.

Next up is Deauville for my first EPT in almost two years. Mrs. Doke is really looking forward to this one, and so am I.


* I don't normally do footnotes (in fact I think this is the first ever in this blog) but for anyone wondering on why I insist on calling Tom Hall by his online name, it's because that's what he is called in my life. I see him maybe 100 times a day on Stars (usually winning a flip against me) and maybe 5 times a year in person. I know he thinks of me similarly (when he ran into me in the hotel corridor for the first time last week, the words that came out of his mouth were "Hello SlowDoke"). That might seem odd or even sad to live players of my generation but that's just the way it is. I think of it as similar to the fact that when I refer to a friend who is successful in the entertainment world, I nearly always use his stage name rather than his real name. Oddly enough, nobody seems to find that strange or unusual.

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Keeping sending the begging letters out

OK, let's get the live unpleasantness out of the way first. My WPT main event campaign never really got going. Shortly after sitting down my phone beeped with a text from a friend at a nearby table informing me that the gentleman to my immediate left was a top notch cash player. He put me in my box pretty quickly, 3 betting me at will and forcing me to either be prepared to play a higher variance style than I'm comfortable with in the early stages (getting involved in 4 betting wars with junk) or to tighten up. I went with the latter option but the deck did not reward my patience or discipline. I made a big fold on the river (with a set) having invested a good chunk of my stack already (I actually had the third best hand), and then lost most of what was left with AJ on a JJ5 board. Then when I finally found a good reshoving spot (KQs over a serial raiser), I ran into Phil Baker's aces in the big blind. I was miles ahead of the opener's range (he had shown up with 53 already in a similar spot) so it was a spot I had to take. Some days there's just nothing you can do and this felt like one of them.

If anything my exit from the CPT side event felt worse. A combination of a rather curious structure (no antes until after the 400/800 level) and the table (a couple of livewires like George McMahon who don't consider folding a sensible option most of the time  just behind) meant I decided quickly that tight was right early on. Accordingly I spent a few hours folding mainly punctuated by winning the odd pot to edge up from starting stack only to get the lot in pre with aces versus tens just as it started to get interesting. The rather sombre nature of this paragraph is a clue to the fact that this didn't end well for me.

There's no point getting upset or downbeat though as in the big picture no one tournament really matters all that much. All I or any player can do is keep trying and getting into position to get lucky. Next up for me is UKIPT Edinburgh, and then EPT Deauville. I've taken the more sensible route of selling some of my Deauville action even though I'm feeling particularly confident about my first EPT in almost 2 years. I personally believe the slow structure and field composition of EPTs suit me and there is some evidence to support this. I have cashed at most EPTs I have attended and had my deepest ever run in the last one I played (in Berlin in 2011, where I also final tabled a side event). Anyone interested in a sweat, I still have a few per cent left (it's €69 for one per cent).

Most of my friends were no luckier in Citywest. Smidge, Nick Newport and Lappin all made day 2 but were early casualties.

It was nice to run into a few people I hadn't seen in a while. Particularly nice to run into Tom Kitt as it gave us a chance to clear up an unpleasant misunderstanding in person and I was very relieved we were able to do so. There are quite a few people in poker that it wouldn't bother me in the slightest if I never had to speak to them again, but Tom isn't one of them. Tom is one of the most likeable people on the Irish scene and I'm delighted to see he's been going well online recently (this is being written just a couple of hours after he took down the main Nightly on Stars France).

Speaking of online, I've been going along nicely recently. No particularly big binks, but just a nice steady upward graph. Poker is an odd game in that in the short term variance obscures ability, and luck trumps skill. It's too easy to focus on the outlier results, the big binks, the ones that make the headlines. It might seem that the key to success is to bink big, but the bottom line is that in the long run, your profit will converge with the number of tables you play multiplied by your edge on each table (measured in ROI). So essentially you are just being paid a flat rate per table (if you play your best). That's true whether you take the high variance road of large tournaments with thousands of runners (and if you do, it's a bumpy road and you better be able to handle the downswings as well as those moments of glory when you bink big) or the less glamourous low variance road of smaller games with less runners.

On the bink front, it was a great weekend for the Firm, with Jason Tompkins coming third in the Million and Daragh Davey notching up his biggest ever score after coming second in the Stars France major. Maybe the most impressive thing about young Master Davey is that about 12 hours after his big bink, he was grinding the unfashionable (but immensely profitable) $4 Super Tuesday 3x turbos.


The title of this entry is from one of my favourite jokes as a kid. The full version went that after winning the lottery, a miser was asked what he would do about the begging letters. "Keep sending them out" was his response. This is a good analogy for poker: no matter how big you bink in this game, if you want to keep making money and survive as a profitable professional player, you have to keep sending out the begging letters. Young Master Davey has that one sussed.

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Gazing into the navel of 2012

On a night out in town before Xmas that was essentially the Firm's Office party, my friend and business partner David suddenly asked me what I had achieved in poker in 2012 that I hadn't before. As I struggled to come up with one, he supplied the answer...staking.

The fact that my strongest poker memories for 2012 as the year draws to a close are all railing friends or stakees on final tables (Jason's WSOP and EPT, Smidge's UKIPT and EMOP, David's EMOP and Daragh and Jaymo on countless online final tables) pretty much makes the point that while it hasn't been a bad year for me in poker, it has been a pretty non-descript and lowkey one, devoid of major final tables live or Major binks online. So while this review won't have the highpoints of last year's, let's look back at my year to see what conclusions I can draw and lessons I can learn.

Live
There's no nice way to put this: 2012 was by far the worst year live of my poker career to date. That's not to say I lost money doing it. I have basically broken even, but only because I sold significant action for my WSOP campaign, I was sponsored or bought into a couple of events and I swapped well (in particular with that wily old dog Mick Mccloskey who once again this year crushed the Irish live scene). Taking the more straightforward approach of comparing the total of my live buyins this year with the total of live cashes reveals the truth that for the first time since I started, I was a losing player live last year.

It's a good thing this downswing came 5 years into my career rather than at the very start when I was less familiar with the concept of variance. In all I played less than 100 live tourneys this year. That's about 3 nights online, and I've had much longer downswings online in my time. While I have continued to cash almost as often as I have through my career and even won a live tournament this year, you can't choose which events to run well in and in a sense I have run well in the "wrong" tourneys. There's no denying I've run badly at the crucial point in the big games: for example, when my aces were all in against queens preflop in the WSOP main event, it was essentially for over $50k in equity, so had they held it could very well have made my year live.

That said, I can't just notch it all down to variance and absolve myself from responsibility. While I feel I have played as well as I can in patches during the year (and I certainly gave all the big events my utmost) there have been times in small turbo side events where I have essentially been on autopilot while amusing myself on my Iphone. Jason suggested to me recently that I might benefit from his more selective approach to live tournaments and while I have always prided myself on my ability to play my best in side events, I may have reached a point in my career where it's counter productive to be taking to the field too often, so to speak.

Over the course of my career, I've gone back and forth on the issue of how different live and online poker are. In the beginning I saw them as two separate disciplines requiring different skillsets. Then as I reached a point in my career where essentially I was an online player who also played a bit live, and I was having considerable success in online
 mtts, I started to wonder if I might be exagerrating these differences, and if the fact that I seemed to be a better online player might indicate that I should just play my "online game" live. I have now reached a point where I feel I may have taken this too far, and I'm no longer adjusting adequately to live players when I play live. I don't think online players can just show up at live events, play their normal game, and expect to succeed. You have to work at the particular skills that live poker demands, or rather I do. So one of my new year's resolutions is to put more work into my live game. Before I knew how to play the game technically, I got a long way purely from reading people well. As I improved technically, I depended less on those skills and more on "Well, I have hand A in position B and the effective stack is C big blinds so the most profitable play long term is D" thinking. This is basically what good online players do as it gets the money in the long run and prevents you from being exploitable. However, the problem with doing that live is that (ubnlike online) there is no real long run in any meaningful sense of the word, and the fact that you can see and be seen by your opponents live adds a considerable dimension to live play. A good observant player who reads and manipulates opponents well can gain a much bigger edge from these live skills than knowing the profitable push fold hands. I think I read people well naturally: I just have to allow myself the opportunity to do so. I've also started watching more poker to practise my reading skills. I'm confident this more balanced approach to live will pay dividends in 2013, hopefully starting in the next few weeks with WPT Dublin, UKIPT Edinburgh and EPT Deauville.

Online
For the fourth year in a row, the vast majority of my income came from online mtts, and for the fourth year in a row I believe I am one of the most profitable Irish players in online mtts. However, my profit this year is down almost 20% on the last two years, despite the fact I increased my volume, so like a lot of Irish people I basically worked more last year for less. However, I'm not going to complain about it as it is still a very healthy livelihood and I'm lucky to be able to earn it doing something I love. Most mtters would agree that last year was a tougher year for us all. I also feel I've run badly on Sundays. I had no major Sunday binks this year and essentially this is the difference between this year and 2010 and 2011. The fact I can have a very profitable year without any major scores is heartening at least.

One area I need to sharpen up on in 2013 is game selection. 2012 was the first year when I didn't more or less uniformly crush on every site I played on: this year the profit came almost entirely from Stars, the French sites, Ipoker and Irish Eyes (Cake). I either won or lost small on the other sites. The point is I need to be more clinical in identifying which structures, sites and field compositions I have the biggest edge in, and stick to those. Historically much of my profit has come from satellites and low runner rebuys on less glamourous networks. These are less glamourous and don't tend to show up on PocketFives or OPR but this game is about making the money, not the top of some artificial ranking system. So in 2013 I intend to concentrate more on these. It's already started paying dividends as I binked two EPT Deauville satellites.

Staking
I started 2012 as something of a staking neophyte and ended it as the person in Ireland most heavily involved in staking. It has been a learning curve and while it has been successful overall for me, it's not the "free money" a lot of people seem to suspect. First, as Jono warned me at the start, you have to allow for "breakage" (for every few staked players that make you money there will be at least one who loses). Second, the time commitment is a lot more than I initially expected, both for administration and coaching. I'm pretty sure that if I took the amount of money I made in 2012 from staking, and divided by the number of hours I put into it, I'd get a much lower number than my online hourly rate (or my coaching rate). That's not the point though. If I wanted to make the most money possible in any given year from poker, I'd just stay in, and do nothing other than grind online. That might seem like a recipe for short term success, but sounds like a recipe for burnout. I think the big reason why I've managed to maintain my enthusiasm and love for poker going for 5 years to the point that I start every day looking forward to my job is I have continually found ways to keep it interesting for myself, whether it's writing this blog, talking to other players, posting on forums, chasing virtual badges, travelling or more recently staking. If I can help other similar minded people to achieve their potential and make a career as happy as the one I've made for myself in poker, that's a big plus in my book too.

My staking involvement is likely to expand further in 2013 in conjunction with my partners in The Firm. I don't want to pre-empt anything (there are a few major developments in the pipeline) so I'll leave it at that for now.

Other
I'm delighted to be continuing my role with Irish Eyes. It's been a trying year for Irish Eyes due to events entirely outside our control. With the demise of what was Entraction, the obvious alternative was simply to move to a new network. I for one am glad Irish Eyes decided instead to go for an offering which allows Irish Eyes customers to play on several different networks. I genuinely think this is the future for all non-Stars sites. Recreational players have the chance to try different rooms and more games, and players like myself who already play on all the different sites have the hassle and cost of moving money around greatly reduced. As an experiment, I recently moved €100 around the sites on my old accounts. It took 7 weeks and when it got back to my Neteller account it was just under €85 (after having been hit by ubiquitous forex charges at every port of call). I did the same thing last week on Irish Eyes (moved the money around, moved it between the different sites, then back off to Neteller): it took a few days and the full €100 arrived back.

When David asked what I had achieved in poker in 2012 that I hadn't before, I could have answered "Won a couple of awards!" While I do subscribe to the view that the only awards that really matter in poker are the Benjamins, it was nice to be recognised for this blog at the Irish Poker Awards. It's even nicer when people take the trouble to tell me in person at tournaments or whereever how much they enjoy this blog. 5 years and almost 400 entries on, it's getting harder to think of new stuff to say, or new ways to say it, so in 2013 I may be slightly more selective. Rather than just thinking "It's Monday, better put up a new blog" it's probably better if I wait until I have something I think is worth blogging about. I think my blogs in 2012 were similar to my live tourney performances: at times as good as they could possibly be (given that it's me doing them), but at other times phoned in.

Thanks to everyone who has read this far and shown interest in my blog and continuing poker career in 2012. May we all have a 2013 to look back on with pride.

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Irish Eyes new site launch

Irish Eyes relaunched earlier this week, providing access to a number of different poker rooms. At present the main ones are Revolution (formerly known as Cake), Merge, Ideal and Enet. More will be added soon including I believe OnGame, Ipoker and 888.

In this blog, I'll give some information on how to update your existing account or sign up.

Existing customers

Follow these steps:

(1) Update your password


In order to access your Irish Eyes account you must get a temporary password first, and this password must be changed before you can use any product. You will get the temporary password via email. If you have not received this email, you should go to our site www.irisheyesbet.com or www.irisheyespoker.com and then click on 'Log-In' at the top right hand side, and once on the Log-in page, click on 'Forgotten Password or Username'. This link is at the bottom of the Log-in page.

Once you have done this, you will be sent an automatic email with your temporary password included.

If you do not receive this email, it may be because the email address registered on your Irish Eyes account is not up to date. Perhaps you now use a different email address. If this is the case, please email support@irisheyespoker.com and ask them to change your registered email address to your new email address, and then try the 'Forgotten Password' process again.

If changing your email address does not work or if you know your email is correct on our system, and you still do not receive a temporary password email, you can email our customer support and ask them to manually change your password and email it to you directly. Once you get your temporary password, you must log in at our website, update your profile, and change your password. None of the products will work with the temporary password you have been sent. Everything must update within the Irish Eyes system through our website before you will be able to log into any poker client.

(2) Update your profile


When you are asked to 'update your profile' please note that there are mandatory fields you must fill in. If you do not fill these mandatory fields in, the update will not take place and you will be asked to 'please update your profile' repeatedly.

Updating your profile also means you will be asked to choose a 'username' for each of the platforms we offer. The usual thing to do is copy your Irish Eyes username into the boxes for each product. If there is a conflict with your username for any product, you will be prompted to change. This is because the username you have on Irish Eyes that you want to use on the other product might already be taken on that product. A slight change to your Irish Eyes username on this product should suffice.

Once your profile has been updated you will be asked to change your password from the temporary password emailed to you. Please note, the password must be letters and numbers only, and must not be more than 10 characters. This completes your profile update.

(3) Download the software

You need to download the poker clients on which you want to play, and this can be done on our 'Download Software' page. There is currently no 'multi-installer' that would download and install all software products to your computer in one go, but we are working on delivering this in the near future.

The main attraction for players (such as myself) who play on a number of different networks is the ease with which money can be moved around between the different sites covered, instantaneously and free of Fx charges.

On a completely different (and much sadder) note, I was very sorry to hear that Mick Hamilton (pictured below, courtesy of IPB's Danny Maxwell) passed away. Mick was a close friend of Miick Mccloskey. An archetypal "London gent", he loved coming over to Ireland to play poker. He was also something of a gourmand, and I had a lot of enjoyable meals spent in the good company of the two Micks. RIP Mick: you will be missed.

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Fitz 7 Firm 0

I was playing in the Fitz EOM the other night. Daragh Davey jokingly tweeted that I had staked 10% of the field (a slight exaggeration) which prompted Mark Smyth to tweet the following gem which gave me a chuckle.

It seems to be pretty widely known these days that I do a bit of staking. What started a while back as just buying %'s in people in one off events has gradually mushroomed.

In his PocketFives interview, Danloulou made an excellent point at the time that one thing he felt was holding Irish poker back was the lack of a genuine staking culture. In my view, staking is both misunderstood and regarded with suspicion by a lot of Irish poker players. There seems to be a sort of general view that stakers are almost parasites or pimps (I've actually heard us referred to as pimps quite a bit). The view seem to be that stakers prey on the young without bankrolls, introducing them to a life of servitude in cyber sweatshops and living off the fat of their profits. In some quarters, staking is seen as a form of cowardice. I recently sat through an attempt by David Lappin to explain the benefits of staking (to the staked player) to a very sceptical Irish poker player who was arguing that anyone good shouldn't need to be staked. This is a historical perspective: the view that the way you "make it" in poker is to grind up your own bankroll. This was possible a few years ago when lower and even mid stakes were so soft a player could grind their way up quickly.

In a future blog, I will try to explain the benefits of staking to all the parties involved so watch this space.

The night after the Fitz EOM (where I failed to cash but Jaymo at least notched up his first live Hendon Mob result) was originally meant to be the night that Team Old Nits defended our title won last year, but was cancelled due to lack of interest (or teams). It was replaced with a rebuy which I decided to skip. Was pretty happy that I did when I went on a mini rampage online winning the Night on Stars Fr, getting a second on Party and a few other bits and bobs all adding up to my first 10k night online in a while. A lot of Irish players have been celebrating binks lately. Marc McDonnell had a bink earlier in the week on Stars Fr (beating no less than Christopher Brammer headsup), while on the same night John O'Shea reminded us that he can still play a bit of poker , binking an IPOPs and a PLO tournament on the same night. Love him or hate him (and he's one of those unique individuals it's possible to do both simultaneously) few would deny that Irish poker without John O'Shea would be a much duller place. After a recent bad run that he has been brutally frank about on his own blog, it says a lot about John's character and resolve that he can come back and do this.

The following night it was back to the Fitz for the Main event of their festival. With a decent structure and many of the best players in Dublin otherwise occupied at a boxing match across town, our hopes were high as no less than seven "Firm" members lined out. Pride came before a fall: we fairly got our asses handed to us with no more than zero of the seven surviving to Day 2. After meeting up in town beforehand, we found ourselves shivering on a corner of Grafton Street while David Lappin queued for......ice cream. Yes. Ice cream. Only in Ireland could you find yourself shivering on a street corner waiting for someone who wants to make himself even colder eating ice cream. Speaking of David, check out his cameo performance about 8 minutes 20 into this video of UKIPT Dublin.

http://www.pokerstars.tv/poker-video-18913-ukipt-season-3-dublin-webshow.html?channel_id=172

Colin "Hammo" Hammond stayed in my house for a couple of nights, so he was grinding on his laptop next door in the kitchen while I did my 10k session. Hammo has been beasting it online this year and I've already eulogised on this blog so I won't repeat myself. What I will say is that after spending a couple of days with Hammo and listen to him talking about poker and watching him play online and live, he's gone up even further in my estimation as someone who has all the tools and temperament to be a superstar. He takes everything in his stride: I can't imagine we'll ever see Hammo kick or throw a chair after taking a beat. In fact he's so calm that when I had dropped to a few tables and moved into the kitchen for dinner to find Hammo on the final table of the OnGame 50 rebuy, his reaction to his bustout was so muted that I had to ask him if he had busted. When I see people throw a tantrum after a beat, I don't think any less of them as people (we are all entitled to the occasional emotional outburst and we all have our own way of expressing ourselves) but it does make me question their long term future in a game that will keep serving up the beats for as long as they play it. In my experience long term success in this game depends a lot more on temperament and emotional control than it does on pure poker talent. The reason so few people have the capacity to succeed long term in this game is that it requires diverse character traits rarely found in the same person. You must be both patient and aggressive. Most patient people are not aggressive, and most aggressive people not patient. You need to be calm but competitive. You need to be able to get over the past, live in the present moment, and focus on the future. In mtts, the big money decisions have to be made in the emotional cauldron of the latter stages when you are most tired and distracted.

One person who knows all this and has all these characteristics is Nick Abou Risk. Just when you thought Nick couldn't possibly be any more legendary, he goes and posts this on Facebook. Enjoy.

http://www.break.com/usercontent/2007/12/dude-sings-both-male-and-female-parts-in-aladdin-415548?st=fb&ai=0&zi=0&ds=1

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