Letter from Doke (12th December 2011)

Hi,

Doke here again. I'm back from a week in Manila. Not a profitable trip unfortunately, but an enjoyable one, although I seem to have picked up some Mystery Manila Malady.

I didn't get too much to play with all day one of the Manny Pacquiao World Poker Open but managed to work my way up to double stack near the end of play by making the most of what I did get. It wasn't the kind of field where you could do anything fancy without cards, so I stuck to value betting much bigger than I normally would. A series of minor setbacks late in the day saw me drift back from 30k to finish with 21k, 21 bbs when we came back for day 2. We'd lost two thirds of the field so I was well below average but still reasonably optimistic as it was a very soft field.

Day 1 ended early, around 9.30 PM, a pleasant change from tournaments back home where you play til 4 AM and have to be back less than 12 hours later. I was in bed by 10 and slept straight through until almost 7 AM. When I woke and saw the time, I decided to try for another hour or two's kip, since we weren't due to start back until 1 PM. Next time I opened my eyes, I read 1.46 on the clock. I hurled myself out of the bed and into my clothes, and on the sprint to the Pan Pacific, I frantically tried to work out how much of my stack if any I likely had left. Up 5 flights of stairs and into an empty casino except for cleaning staff. I figured I must have blinded out but where was everyone else? Checking the time on my mobile phone (which was still on Irish time), I found it was almost midnight back home.

Subtract 8 hours, so it's 4 PM? No, wait, that's Vegas that you subtract 8 hours from GMT, here you add 8, so.......8 AM. I slunk back to the hotel cursing the clock in my room which I was convinced had malfunctioned. But when I got there, it read 8.15 AM. Somehow I'd read 7.46 as 1.46.

As bad as that false start was, my actual day 2 was even worse. I got off to a flyer, working my way up to 55k in the first couple of orbits. Then I picked up aces, got the lot in preflop against the only guy at the table who covered me. A king on the turn sent me packing back to my hotel. Had my aces held, I'd have been propelled into the chiplead, and strongly fancied myself to go on and win from there in the softest four figure buyin tournament I'll probably ever play.

I wouldn't be human if I didn't feel a bit sick on that walk back to my hotel. It's a long way to fly to sit and wait patiently for more than a day just for that to happen. One of the things I like about online poker is that no one tournament ever means too much if you do it right: it's ultimately just one in a sample size of tens of thousands. But live is slower and you play a much smaller number of them, so it seems like every tournament matters more.

However, I shrug these setbacks off quicker than most. My English mate Mark who arranged the whole trip, great friend that he is, took only a few minutes to learn of my demise and come over to check up on me. He said he expected to find me committing hara kiri, and was astonished at how positive I seemed. It generally takes 10 minutes or so for the mists of disappointment to clear, but once they do I'm done with it and already thinking about the next tournament. Maybe that's something I also learned in ultra running, where I pretty much destroyed my body in every race and crossed every line thinking "Never again" but would have recovered mentally within an hour and physically within a week.

Don't forget, Season 4 of the European Masters of Poker kicks off in Prague on 2nd to 5th Feb next. Satellites are on Irish Eyes Poker for EMOP Prague now.

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

Doke