Have a good lot to cover in today’s blog post!  Firstly, a quick trip report (and excuse to brag); I played in a €55 double stack tournament in the Sporting Emporium club last night, my 1st live tournament in a month since chopping a €125 tournament in Dublin’s Fitzwilliam Card Club in early July.  There were only 34 runners, but I gained the chip leader with about 20 left and held onto it until there were 6 players left.  Top 5 were being paid, and once we got into the money I kept doubling up the two short stacks, my no good versus , my no good versus and so on.  After losing the chip lead as a result, I started to move from being one of the three big stacks to joining the other two small stacks, but got lucky after the new chip leader made a brave call with on the button against my re-raise all-in on the big blind with …of course I hit a flush with my 4!  Never lost the chip lead after that and took it down, making a good deal heads-up where I only had to give up €40 to 2nd place and ended up taking home €630 to his €480.  I played very well to be fair, really upping my standard of play compared to a year ago and victory was not undeserved in my unbiased opinion!   Haven’t been playing a huge amount of live poker over the last few months as online is where it’s at, but it is nice to remind the live community that I haven’t gone away quite yet…

OK, down to business!  The PPP Olympics kick off tonight, and with 14 money-added tournaments scheduled between August 8th and 14th, there is no excuse not to get in there, mix it up with the other Poker Olympians and grab some of the free money we’re throwing into the prizepools!  All of the tournaments are named after real Olympic sports (such as Women’s Beach Volleyball, the most watched sport of all), and with $250 added to each prizepool and $1,000 added to the PPP Marathon tournament on August 14th, you’ve no excuse for not getting stuck in.  And of course we leave the best ’till last: play at least three of The PPP Olympics tournaments and you’ll be eligible to play in the finale, the Gold Medal Freeroll, which has over $15,000 in cash and prizes up for grabs!

Next up: we’re running the very first Deep Impact PPP Deep Stack $1k Guaranteed tournament tonight (Friday) at 8pm.  Players will get a 4,000 starting stack and with 20 minute blinds, we’ll expect everyone to go balls deep into the early hours of Saturday morning!  If it proves a hit, we’ll run it again next week, so get to registering people…

Another caption competition using photos from this year’s Irish Open final table - this time it is Neil Channing and Tim Blake in the spotlight.  Enter as many times as you like; the 5 best captions will win a prize (only one prize per person).  Remember to leave your Paddy Power Poker nickname so we can credit your account with the Irish Winter Festival $6.50 feeder token if you win.

Good luck and have a great weekend!

This entry was posted on Friday, August 8th, 2008 at 4:00 pm and is filed underionapaul, Online Poker, Live Poker You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.