European Deep Stack Championships, Dublin

This weekend I’m going to an event with a difference. The European Deep Stack Championships starts in Dublin on Friday, and will lead the field in providing the best structured big buy-in poker tournament. With blinds starting at 25/50, a 50,000 starting stack is incredible, and this event will hopefully lead the charge towards meeting a growing demand for properly structured poker tournaments. Many congratulations for the organsiers for putting on such a great event!

At the other end of the spectrum of structures are the TV Crapshoot events. They are very exciting events, but, almost necessarily for the TV, they have very poor structures. I’ll be playing in my heat of the Party Poker European Open next Wednesday, and have just recieved the line up for my heat. I was hoping it might include some weaker players, but sadly it’s a strong line-up including Liam Flood and Annette Obrestad! Anyway, it will be lots of fun to play against Annette_15, looking forward to the challenge.

In fact, February looks great for poker. It looks like I’ll have to give Copenhagen a miss, so the next two events I will play will be at the Broadway Casino, Birmingham, and the GUKPT in Walsall. For a rare couple of weeks, I’ll be able to sleep in my own bed at the end of the day’s poker, and it will be tons of fun to have the poker so close.

So, I’m off with my mates Omar and O’Paul to Dublin, which will be alot of fun after having to travel on my own alot last month, and to random places in the middle of France and Holland! I’m really looking forward to the trip, but there is one thing threatening it. This snow just keeps on falling, and Birmingham airport seems pretty much shut today. I would be so gutted if it was tomorrow. Come on snow, it’s been fun to have you, but you weren’t meant to be here this long!

Updates, of either deep stack poker or snowman building in Birmingham, will start here tomorrow.

Snow update

Ah! It’s not looking good. Almost every flight into Dublin airport today was cancelled today. They say the airport will be back to normal tomorrow, but it’s not feeling too good at the moment!

Day one update

After all the problems getting here, there now seems to be an internet problem! It will have to be a short update, which is a shame, as yesterday was a lot of fun.

Well, success in poker requires  a lucky string of avoiding bad luck, and the first hurdle was the tough one of getting out of Birmingham airport. Our 11am flight had suffered an unfortunate cycle of being delayed by another hour on approximately every hour, and was ready for a 4.10pm departure. For a tournament that was starting at 2pm, this could be considered quite a blow.

Seemingly out of nowhere, our flight was brought forward to 2pm, and we could now arrive at the tournament only  two hours late. Of all the events to miss so much poker, the Deep Stack is of course the right choice. The structure was just fantastic yesterday, and it is an initiative that should be highly applauded. Ireland is just a wonderful place to play poker, and I had a lovely day enjoying great craic and some good luck to get my 50k stack up to 113k.

Looking forward to the start of play at 3pm today; I’ll update as much as I can on here!