With a little help from my friends...

Apart from poker, I'm not much good at much else (many would suggest it's even a stretch to say I'm good at poker). But one thing I have been good at all through my life and the different walks of life I've wandered through is making good friends, and choosing them wisely. The same can be said for my "enemies". If I were to compile a list of both Richard Nixon style at any point during my life, I'm pretty sure there would be nobody I would look at wistfully wishing they were on the other list. A few on the friends list have been given the benefit of the doubt for a short while before being banished to the other list, but once there I never wanted them back.

So it has been in poker. Early on, I was lucky enough to become friends with Rob Taylor (after an admittedly rocky start) and Mick McCluskey, both of whom were a huge help to me as friends and mentors as I moved from novice to full time pro. Rob and Mick were the first of many friends I made in poker.

I came back from Vegas this year in not the best of spirits. Not only had I bricked there, but I was having my worst year online since switching from stts to concentrating on mtts. Still a very good living and in healthy profit, but a fair bit down on my previous 2 years.

This made me determined to work even harder and turn the year around. I'm lucky enough to have access to the Firm brain trust so I started running a lot more hands by Jason, Daragh and David. I firmly believe that the day you think you are too good to benefit from the thoughts of proven winners like these guys is the day the game starts to pass you by. David Lappin in particular is our ace in the hole on the coaching front with a proven track record of taking guys all the way to the top online. I basically use David as a kind of informal coach (which has the advantage that I don't have to pay him). As my friend he has a better understanding of my psychological makeup than anyone else in poker and he is a naturally gifted communicator so he tends to know the best way to say everything. He has been very generous with his time and is always on hand to talk through a hand or a spot, or even do more detailed sessions. Since Vegas I have turned my year around, not just because of my Super Tuesday bink, but also consistent results. While still ticking along nicely in my bread and butter satellites, I am trying to get away from overly specialising in satellites (there are much more decent regs in them these days so they just aren't as profitable as they used to be). In the last week I had a couple of crossbars in the Big 162 before final tabling the Party major last Sunday for a five figure score. A recent Hot 33 third place, a win and two other final tables in Party's 20 rebuy and a third in tonight's Night on Stars (on Pokerstars France) are just a few examples of other decent-sized scores that have turned the year round online from my worst to one of my best. I give a lot of credit for this to the Firm, my informal poker support group, and again primarily to Lappin. I think most people who don't know him very well get a very wrong impression of just how perceptive and generous he can be. While the fact that he doesn't suffer fools gladly (or silently) is blatantly obvious, his other qualities take a bit of scratching beneath the surface. Within the Firm he is the guy who does most of the coaching (and handholding and pep talks when guys are on a downswing), so he deserves most of the credit for the success we have had staking players not just in terms of their results but also improving them as players.

Obviously variance tends to obscure everything in the short term, but I like to think the fact I have consciously put a lot more work into my own game away from the tables in the last few months is paying off. Not just running through hands with the brains trust, but also watching videos and more poker. The online metagame keeps moving and it's always good to get an insight into how other big winning online players play and think through their videos.

I guess the one thing needed to make 2013 a truly outstanding year for me is a major live result. After sitting out the IPO, I have two bites at that particular cherry in the next two weeks, starting with the Irish Winter Festival this weekend, followed quickly by next week's Isle of Man UKIPT. I'm raring to perform again on the live felt after my recent mini break so fingers crossed.

Finally, big congratulations to another friend, the Legend himself Dave Curtis on his new position with Stars. I've benefited from some well chosen bits of advice from Dave down the years and I'm delighted to see him land on his feet. No better man for the job.

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What a UKIP

It would appear that Stars haven't had any luck with the hotels they chose for this EPT season. After concerns about security after what happened to Jens Kyllonen in Barcelona, the Russell hotel chosen for the London stop looked good from the outside at least. Unfortunately everything else about it was less impressive, to the point that you wonder if they might have had to throw a bung John Cleese's way at some point to get him to tell people Fawlty Towers was based on a Torquay hotel.

Anyone following players in London on Twitter will already be aware that a litany of First World woes were aired there, from bed bugs through rude staff to boxy rooms. I can't imagine these elicit much sympathy from people struggling to make a living back home ("Oh look, those pampered poker pros don't think their luxury hotel is all that") so let's just leave it at that after adding they also tried a bit of Basil Fawlty style shysterism on double package winners. My UKIPT package ran from Tuesday to Sunday, while the EPT package of my roomy Jason Tompkins ran from Saturday til the end of the EPT. When Jason presented himself on Saturday to claim the additional room, he was informed they had only allocated us one room. This despite the fact that two rooms for the Saturday were presumably paid for by Stars out of the prize pools of the satellites we won. At this stage I am presuming Stars will retrieve the money for the additional night and refund us.

After starting the year with three successive UKIPT day 3's, now it seems I can't even make it out of day 1 alive. Early on I stationed unsuccessfully with overpairs to get shown unlikely two pair hands. That left me short and while I managed to survive on fumes for hours and did eventually get it all in threeways with the best hand, I was walking back to the hotel wondering how rude the doorman would be this time before dinner on day 1.

I played only one side event (preferring to grind online: in fact I bust the UKIPT main so quickly I was back at the hotel in time to win a package to the next UKIPT in the Isle of Man that evening). Was good craic hanging out with the other Firm lads (six of us played the UKIPT main event, with Jason and David both cashing), whether it was crowding around a laptop to watch South Park...

or some open faced Chinese after the Sunday grind.

Also, a shout out to the American branch of the Firm (also known as Clayton Mooney), who gave us the obligatory Firm final table rail in the London Cup to chants of "US Clay, US Clay".

Jason and I stayed on in the EPT, my first since Deauville at the start of the year. Early on in it, the pattern was I kept losing hands with flopped sets. One fell to a runner runner flush, and two to higher sets, one of which only got there on the turn (in that hand I did at least manage to find the Fold button on the river). I was contemplating hitting the Fold button again when a set of twos got raised on the river by French rapper and graffiti artist Kool Shen (also a Winamax pro), but after reworking through the hand in my head and deciding the only hand he could have that beat me was t9 (which seemed unlikely given that the hand started with him opening under the gun) I called to find him turning third pair into a bluff.

After that shaky start I was happy to hang in there and made some progress late in the day. I peaked at 60k about an hour from the end but lost a chunk with AK v JJ in the very last hand of the day. Still I was pretty happy to still be there after the shaky start and to be bagging up 42k.

My day 2 table was very tough as it included two Ultimate Poker pros (Dan O'Brien and Jeff Gross), online beasts Timothy Adams and Daniel Reijmar, and a chipped up Devilfish. I was chatting online that morning to my friend Max Heinzelmann and he felt I could potentially exploit a very nitty image, so I cultivated that image in the early going. I was holding my own until my exit, which seemed like a good spot. After Daniel Reijmer opened in early position and Daniel Laidlaw flatted, it seemed perfectly reasonable to shove in my 23 big blinds with nines, hoping to either add 25% to my stack uncontested if it got through, or win a race to have a decent stack to attack the bubble if I did get called. Unfortunately, neither transpired: Reijmer folded but Laidlaw snapped with AQs. I was winning the race til the river, but a queen sent me packing. No regrets about taking the spot though: chatting to Feargal Nealon at one of the breaks (who gave an excellent interview on the Stars blog which is well worth seeking out), he made the excellent point that in a field of that calibre, if we are honest we have to admit that our edge if we have any at all is preflop, so we have to push our marginal edges there. I think I was doubly unlucky: first to get called (I think nobody else at the table would have called me with AQs, but Daniel had just arrived at the table and was unaware of my image having seen me shove and reshove two of the previous three hands), and second to lose the flip. Those 20k in equity flips are the ones you really want to win.

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Online, not orange

In an interview shortly before his departure as Irish football manager, Giovanni Trapattoni ruffled a few feathers with an off the cuff comment that "Ireland doesn't even have a football league". Strictly speaking he was wrong, but as anyone who has ever suffered through a League of Ireland match (once described memorably by one commentator as typically being "two bad teams having an off day") will recognise that in principle, Gio wasn't that far wrong. While it may exist, the idea of it offering up truly international or world class players is pretty ludicrous.

The fact that we have never had a top class domestic league hasn't stopped us from regularly producing players and occasionally entire teams capable of competing with the best in the world. But these players have always ventured abroad to play their club football. At the risk of ruffling a few feathers myself, I can't help but wonder if Irish poker is going the same way as Irish football.

I've commented before that Irish live poker, if not exactly dying, already has a cleric administering last rites. While people will probably always play poker in pubs and clubs, and there is certainly an appetite among recreational players for 100 quid games with decent guarantees, there are now almost no games on the Irish calendar worth travelling to. The domestic live scene is now like the League of Ireland: not only does it not attract top foreign players but even the top Irish players are looking abroad first when planning their schedule.

This point was driven home at the Winamax 6 max in the Regency. Over 1000 French players, and less than 50 Irish (three of whom were all Liam O'Donoghue, availing of the reentry option). When organiser Mike Lacey saw me arrive on day 1a with four other Firm members he said, only half joking, "Oh good, we might make double figures for non French". The fact that just about the juiciest live tournament this year in Ireland with guaranteed value in the form of almost 1000 recreational French players and a prize pool of over half a million euro for (I would have thought at least) an affordable buyin at a convenient location could only entice a few dozen locals to enter says more about the dire state of Irish live poker than any words in this blog could ever.

And yet, it's not all bad. When I started playing what seems like an age ago now but is actually just over half a decade, I remember noting that while there were several decent sized live events on the calendar that attracted top class foreign names that were also heavily supported by locals (this was before we all woke up and realised the Celtic tiger had eaten our children's futures), the Irish in the field thinned notably as you got to the business end. It wasn't unusual for a tournament that was 80% Irish in composition at the start to have slimmed to 50/50 by bubble time, 30/70 by the time the final table formed and for "best of the Irish" to bust in 4th or 5th. Now, the reverse seems to be happening. While the locals may have made up less than 5% of the field at the start, by the time it was own to the final eight, things had evened up and three Irish players remained.

How is it possible that standards appear to be rising while numbers decline? The answer, I believe, lies in online poker. While the live scene has stopped producing truly international class poker players, the online scene hasn't. If anything, in a perverse twist, the death of the live scene in Ireland has probably sped up the production of top class players. Live poker, with its slow pace, small player pools and statistically insignificant sample sizes, has always been a very imperfect breeding ground. Basically, variance swamps everything. Sample sizes are always tiny, so short term run good is a bigger determinant of visible success than anything else. There are live players (not just in Ireland but everywhere) who are widely seen as successful players (and they are in terms of their results over a tiny sample size) and therefore viewed by many as top class players who are technically atrocious. These players will never win online over any meaningful sample size, not because online is rigged, and not because online is different (it is, and there are certainly live skills that can increase a players edge live, but the reason these players lose online is because they simply aren't good enough).

Five years ago, around the time I went full time, I asked another professional how many players he thought there were in Ireland making enough money online in a year to make a decent living. He held up one hand with five fingers. If I were asked the same question today, I'd need at least twenty hands to answer in the same manner, as I suspect the number may have pushed into triple digits. While live pros tend to be recognised by ordinary players, the vast majority of successful online players would go unrecognised even in their local club. When I joined Jesse May to do some live stream commentary in Galway recently, he asked me if I knew anything about a couple of young local players who appeared to have no pedigree. I recognised them immediately as two of the top young players in Ireland (known to the few of us who do know them by their online screen names rather than the names their parents bestowed on them). They come from a generation that started playing online, and only after they had honed their games over millions of hands and thousands of online mtts did they venture out to play a live game (usually because they won an online satellite tournament). It's probably no coincidence that these players are more likely to pop up in places like Mountmellick, Clonmel or Drumlish rather than Dublin, as the total absence of a  local live scene leaves them no alternative but online.

Irish online players punched way above their weight in WCOOP. Irish live final tableists at EPTs and WSOPs are still rare enough to be very newsworthy, but in WCOOP they just kept coming. One event had no less than three Irish on the final table, with Gavin "gavinator" O'Rourke and Big Mick G battling it out heads up (Marc McDonnell having come fifth). The following night was also pretty notable in that all three final tables that night had Irish participation. One of the young players I commentated in in Galway, uwannaloan, final tabled the Holdem event, while ledicus chopped the PLO 6 max. Throughout the series Irish players were going deep (Jason Tompkins fted the 4 max, while Niall Smyth got second in NL Omaha HiLo, while khopman chopped the an event on the final day of the series, to name but three). All of which leads one to suspect that while the Irish live poker scene  may be the equivalent of the League of Ireland, online poker is breeding enough Irish players to allow us to punch way above our weight on the international stage. To misquote a well known advertising slogan, the future is bright, the future is online.

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