Letter from Doke (2nd November 2011)

Hi,

Doke here again. Well, after a bit of a break from live poker, it was
back on the horse this week. I played the Fitz End of Month where I
didn't really get going, and then the Irish Winter Festival in the
Burlington. Pretty much nothing went to plan in this one, even my
wardrobe. I'd qualified online for the Sole Survivor online so had to
wear the Sole Survivor gear. In previous years this consisted of a top
and optional hoody, so I turned up at the Burlington in my usual poker
gear thinking I'd swap my shirt for the tshirt and keep my jacket.
Unfortunately there was no tshirt this year: just a hoody. Matters got
worse when it emerged the hoody was far too hot to actually wear in
the room. And got even worse again when having got permission to take
it off and put it on the back of the chair, I found that the inside of
the jacket had molted onto my black shirt which was now covered in
green fluff. There's a rather horrible photo of this floating around
:)

The poker didn't really go much better. I moved a little up from
starting stack but after dinner everything went wrong. A series of
small pots and minor setbacks left me short and having to push, and
when I did with AJs, I ran into AK. I played two side events without
troubling the scorers. I got a good start in both. In the last one, I
4 bet shoved kings into ace king which pulled ahead gamely on the
turn. That pretty much summed up my weekend on the poker front, but
you can't expect to cash every tournament and claim to be sane, and
given that this is already my best ever live year nobody should be
expected to put up with me whining about going a few games without a
cash. My good friend and Irish Eyes teammate Mick Mccloskey told me
that one of his many fans told him recently that his 10th Hendon mob
cash this year made him the most consistent Irish player this year in
terms of numbers of live cashes. Mick was feeling chuffed about this
until I pointed out I have 15 on my Hendon mob for this year :)

A few of my good friends went deep in the main event. One I tipped to
Neil Channing as one to watch for the future was Daragh "Other Daragh"
Davey. Daragh has a tremendous attitude and has all the skill
discipline and patience needed to get to the very top in this game. He
went deep in the recent European 6 max, and again here. He always
seems to get horribly unlucky in the end (this time he got it in with
AK v A4 in a massive pot with 20 left) but if he keeps getting into
position it's only a matter of time before the big one comes. Another
Irish Eyes teammate Feargal "MidniteKowby" Nealon got even unluckier,
losing twice to an underpair. Other honourable mentions to Colette
"Smurph" who went deep yet again, Niall Smyth who looked like a rather
unique treble was on for a while, and Chris Dowling who keeps popping
up at these final tables. I did some live stream commentary on the
final table and Chris was unlucky not to finally claim an elusive big
title. A big well done to Noel O'Brien who has only been playing at
this level a couple of years but showed himself to be fearless and
unfazed. Noel's on a bit of a run at the moment too and I expect to
see him at more final tables in the future. Noel told me in the bar at
the weekend he's an avid reader of these letters.

The ultimate winner was popular Northern Irish bookie, John Keown.
John's been a good friend of mine for almost as long as I've been
playing poker and like everyone else he's had to ride through his fair
share of lows so I was delighted to see him land a big score.

This week's strategy section is on the importance of stack sizes. I
saw a lot of amateurs making bad stack size related mistakes at the
weekend. The main big one was raising with 10 big blinds or less and
then folding to a reraise. If you have 10 big blinds or less, you just
can't be doing this. If you decide your hand is strong enough to play,
either shove all in, or raise and be prepared to call anything.
Between 10 and 20 big blinds, you should not be doing too much raise
folding either, so as a general rule only open with hands that can
take a reraise. You certainly shouldn't be 3 betting and then folding
to a 4 bet, as I saw one player do on the final table this weekend.
This is bad for 2 reasons: first you put in too much of your stack to
have to give up if you get 4 bet, and secondly when you do get 4 bet,
you're getting too good a price to fold anything.

Good luck to Eoghan O'Dea next week in Las Vegas. I was talking to him
at the weekend and he told me he was flying out Saturday morning to
give himself a full week to acclimatise. I think Eoghan has a
brilliant chance to take this down, in fact, I'd make him favourite at
the moment to do so, with Ben Lamb his main threat. Back home, we have
our own version of the WSOP with JP's mini WSOP to look forward to
this weekend in the Maldron Hotel in Tallaght. This is a brilliant
tournament, one of my favourite of the year.

Good luck at the tables - unless I'm at the same table :)

Doke