I was standing around at the Killarney tournament recently and the talk was that the bar had been raised. Some of those who weren’t paying attention fully went on a complete tilt because they thought that they’d have to climb over rubble to get their next drink. But they calmed down when they realised that it just meant that a new standard for Irish tournaments had been set. The IPO certainly met that standard, thanks to a fine piece of organisation from Stephen and a marvellous team effort in the hospitality department from the Boylepoker team. They don’t use the term team lightly.

The cynics say that it’s every man for himself in poker these days. They had a bad weekend. The number of pros and celebrities who went to a lot of trouble to turn up showed quite clearly that not all the fun and loyalty have gone out of the game. They didn’t just go through the motions either and try the “double up or get to the bar quick” tactic you might expect. When they saw how hard the amateurs were trying, they got in on the whole buzz of the thing and tried their hearts out. I know. They told me. And they got beat.

I played day 1 and was out by eight o’clock. Some days, you can only do as well as they allow you to, and I got away with absolutely nothing. I didn’t win a hand after five o’clock and I got the feeling that if they gave me more chips, they would have taken them off me as well. Good luck to them.

As I got moved from table to table, I got a chance to have a laugh with Teddy Hickson about old times. Teddy opened the Griffen Club which later became the Merrion about twenty years ago. After a few years, things got a bit tight money wise in the Irish poker economy. In fact, nearly everybody was busted. The only way Teddy could keep things going was to extend credit to lots of his regular punters who became known as “the envelope club” because for some reason, Teddy kept everybody’s account details on the back of their own personal brown envelope. If you won, you paid half off the tab and kept the rest for squandering purposes. If you lost, you borrowed a score from Teddy for the cab home, the bus back in, two pints to warm up and a packet of fags.

As you can probably work out for yourselves, while all this was great craic it had a few flaws as a business model. Eamonn Daisy O’Grady, himself a founder member of the “envelope club” was having a coffee with Teddy one morning. Teddy was on tilt and complaining that the club was losing him £1,500 a week. Daisy suggested that he close down, which was very kind of Daisy really as it would have put him out of business as well. “Close?” said Teddy, “I can’t. It’s my livelihood!” “Why don’t you find a livelihood that will only cost you £500 a week?” replied Daisy. Luckily he didn’t.

On day 2, I couldn’t make the final table of the journalist tournament despite the fact that there were only two tables. I decided enough was enough and went off to have a few beers. Unfortunately I thought I was Marty and stayed up till seven in the morning, which made day 3 a bit of a blur. Ciaran thought a sandwich might help to revive me. It didn’t. I went to bed and woke up in time to catch the last hour of the final table.

I finally hit a bit of form when Mr Smyth bet me 5/1 that I couldn’t get two pints of Guinness at five o’clock in the morning. I wish there were more of him. At six, he cut me to 3/1. Unfortunately, by the time seven o’clock came around, that nice lad Ruairi had won the tournament, the champagne had started to flow and I’d lost one hell of a good customer.

Padraig