I have a bad feeling that my luck is starting to change. In fairness, it’s probably about time. On Friday before I left for Dublin I went to my local betting office to lift a bet and somewhere between there and my bank, I managed to lose £500 - and when I say lose I don’t mean I lost it on a horse or something - I mean I must have dropped one of the £500 bundles that they’d paid me, while I was putting them into my pocket. Then, just to rub salt in my wounds I came out of the bank to find a parking ticket stuck to my windscreen for the second time this week.

I’m not that superstitious, but I really didn’t think this was a good sign for the Irish winter tournament I was on my way down to the Citywest for. I busted out after 5 or 6 levels and while I don’t have a bad beat story about my exit hand, I do have a funny one.

I didn’t have that many chips and I managed to get my stack in on a 744 flop holding TT against my opponent’s QQ. Just as this happened and we were revealing our hole cards, Mark Muldoon happened to walk past our table and on seeing the position that I was in, decided to come over and stand behind me to vibe for a ten.

Now, a lot of poker players complain about their bad beats and seem to think that they are the most unlucky person to ever walk the earth, and Mark Muldoon is one of these people. The difference is - in Mark’s case there’s a good chance that this might actually be true. He’s certainly the most consistently unlucky player I’ve ever come across.

So anyway, when he said “Don’t worry, there’s a 10 coming”, and rubbed my back saying “I’ll give you some of my luck”, I replied that his luck was the last thing I needed and basically told him to get away from me. Just as this was all going on, the dealer burnt a card and turned over a 10 to give me a full house and make me a 95% favourite with one card to go, at which point Mark got more excited and started jumping around saying “I told you it was coming”.

You can probably guess what happened next, but whenever the Q came on the river I actually felt worse for Mark than I did for myself - for a second he must have actually felt like his luck had finally changed.

I’m off on the road now for 4 weeks solid, with tournaments in Budapest, London, Amsterdam and Warsaw. First stop is the Budapest EPT which I’m playing today. I’ve played 3 EPTs before and I haven’t managed to cash in any of them, so I’ll be trying my best to break my duck either here or in Warsaw.

I wasn’t sure if there’d be any Irish guys over for this, but I bumped into Brendan and Rebecca from Cardplayer at the airport as well as Fintan Gavin - who’s looking to add to his recent success in Barcelona, so we all had a few beers together last night. Fintan even managed to get us served in the restaurant after closing time by telling them that we were from the Irish Times and that we would be writing an article on the hotel and all of its facilities. I don’t know whether or not they believed him, but I’m sure they were glad that they served us at the end of the night when they got Fintan’s tip.

Marty