Poker Blog - GuestBlogger

Phil ‘flukesfla’ Flavin recently won $110,000 on paddypowerpoker.com by taking down six Fort Knox Jackpot Sit’n’Gos in a row.  This is Part II of his own account of the night he won six in a row and captured $110,000:

Game 4 (01:45 Feb 20th)

In the first hand of the fourth tournament with 8 (Spades) 10 (Spades), under the gun calls and has A (Diamonds) Q (Clubs). I’m on the button and I raise to 60. He calls. The flop comes down J (Spades) 2 (Spades) 7 (Diamonds).  I raise 75 (half the pot) and he calls. The turn is Q (Hearts). I bet 150 and he calls. The river card is 4 (Spades). I bet the pot (585) and he calls. Nice start to the 4th tourney

I eventually finish that player off about 3-4 hands later with 9 9 against Q 9. After that it went very quiet for a long time but I stayed chip leader, robbing blinds whenever I could.

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Time flies so fast! It only seems yesterday that I was hitting the “send” button for last week’s column and now I’m writing another one. I’ve been so busy it’s as if I literally haven’t had time to think in the intervening week.

There’s a reason for that – I’ve spent practically the whole week travelling. Planes trains, buses, tubes, taxis – you name it. After visiting a friend in York last week I made what was supposed to be a two hour trip down to London on Sunday evening. Well it would have been a two hour trip if we hadn’t got stuck right behind a train about 25 miles from our destination which had broken down because of a lack of power. We were too near to switch tracks and reversing wasn’t an option.

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Phil ‘flukesfla’ Flavin recently won $110,000 on paddypowerpoker.com by taking down six Fort Knox Jackpot Sit’n'Gos in a row.  Phil has been one of our top players for years and has already won his seat in the Irish Open 2010, so will take part in the €100,000 Sole Survivor promo (if he feels the need for another six-figure score!).  This is Part I his own account of the night he won six in a row and captured $110,000:

I started playing the six-seater tournaments at about 5 minutes to midnight on Friday 19th, after I had taken a bad beat in the 100k tournament. With about 100 people left in the 100k, I came up against AJ with my AK. AJ hit another J on the River and I was gone.

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Exciting news for anyone who likes free cash (I consider myself among that select group of people, by the way!): we’ve just announced Paddy’s Cashpoint, a new giveaway promotion that promises to pay and pay…there is no limit on how much cash we’re handing out in March!

Basically, you need to visit the Paddy’s Cashpoint homepage and Opt-In by inputting your nickname.  Then we take a look at the ten days during the period (runs until the last day of March) where you accumulated the highest Paddy Points total (so all PPP poker will count, be you a Sit’n'Go, tournament, cash player or all of the above!) and award you cash based on your lowest total during the 10 highest days.

So if you play 15 days during Paddy’s Cashpoint and earn 1,000 points on 5 days, 1,000 points on 5 days and 500 points on the remaining 5 days, we only look at the 1,000 and 500 points days and give you a cash reward based on the 500 points total!  In this case, you would be awarded $25 at the end of the month, as the award is $1 for every 20 points.

Even if you don’t earn enough for a cash reward, there is something to be won; just earn 1 Paddy Point or more during 10 days during the period (you have to Opt-In remember) and you’ll gain entry to a $2,000 Freeroll in April!  Obviously if you earn a cash reward you also will get entry to the freeroll.

For all the details, visit the Paddy’s Cashpoint page and be in control of the cash reward we give you at the end of March!

Alex ‘alextimi’ Pupsa won his seat in the Irish Open 2010 via a special IO freeroll tournament on Monday February 15th, ran in partnership with Poker Europa magazine.  He will now compete for an approximately €2,250,000 prizepool and of course the €100,000 Sole Survivor package…here is his report of his great victory:

The Poker Europa IO Freeroll started just like a regular tournament and my only hope at the start was to improve my game, my stats and in fact was only dreaming of finishing in the first 25 at the end, to win token to an online qualifier. Little did I know I was about to win it all!

I tried to play as tight as possible but I was often tempted to play more hands, as lots of players were sitting out. The first important moment was, when holding KK after a raise preflop, two of the other players went all in, but one of them was shortstacked so I had to risk it. I was up against AA and JJ, but a King on the flop made my life much easier

I was left with a stack of 10K and and amazingly everybody else on the table was sitting out. It was a boring 20 minutes or so, until a live player  finally showed up, just after I managed to double my chips to 20K. At this stage, I said to myself that I have a good chance of getting in the top 100. Almost three hours later I managed to achieve this, but my stack wasn’t too promising and I must say that some lucky hands helped me go through, the most important one I can remember was a 3 on the turn to complete my 33 hand for a set.

When there were just less than 25 left, everybody was acting very different, but in a stranger way than you would expect, probably because we were playing for almost 5 hours and many of us were happy just to get the qualifier tickets! The final table started and although at some moment I was as low as 5th out of 5 players, some top pocket pairs helped me to scrape through.

Suddenly there were 3 players left, with two of us holding 2M chips while the 3rd one, a Russian who was chip leader most of the time during the last part of the tourney, had about 800K. The climax of the three-handed play was a strange 35 hand on BB, where I was raised by the player on 2nd place after a flop of 335. Turn and river were T and 7 and he went all in, so I had no choice but to call. He showed KK and was out, leaving me Heads Up with the Russian.

Having 4 times his stack made it easy for me and I won the Irish Open seat after a nice flush on the river. It was clubs, so just as lucky as Irish clover for me

I’ve never been to Ireland before, so I can’t wait to get there. It’s my first major live tournament and I will try to stay in as much as possible, mainly for the atmosphere and the feeling of such a great event.

Thank you Poker Europa and Paddy Power Poker for this opportunity. Cheers!

I’m going to tell you about a hand I played in a $100 tournament in Las Vegas which didn’t quite work out. I remember it now because I just heard about another hand played recently by a famous player in the European WSOP which ended in glorious failure.  I think there is a lesson to be learned from both of these hands.

First of all, here’s my hand from the summer of 2008. Like I said, it happened in a $100 tournament in Las Vegas, in Binions Horseshoe. It was about 45 minutes in and I hadn’t got any cards at all so I’d just been folding for the most part and had a tight image. I had about 2200 chips from a starting stack of 2500 and the blinds were 50-100

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What do you think of the copy I wrote for our new Irish Open 20-Seat Guaranteed super sat page?  We had to think of something interesting to grab people’s attention, and have a list of reasons why you should qualify for the IO with paddypowerpoker.com rather than other poker rooms (even though the €100,000 Sole Survivor should be reason enough, right?!!!!).  Check out the page HERE

Played a £100 well-structured Holdem MTT in the Vic in London last week while there for work; what a great location for poker!  I was well above average in chips after the first 2 1/2 levels, but was knocked out by the table chip leader just before the break when we both hit a flush on the river, he held AQ clubs and I held KJ clubs.  It was folded to me in the cutoff, I raised to 600 (blinds were 100/200), all folded but the villain in the BB.  The flop came down AJ5 with one club, he checked and I bet 2/3 pot, he flat called.  Very suspicious, I figured I was behind but might take it off him on a later street.  The turn was the 3 of clubs, check check.  The river was the 7 of clubs, so we both hit our flush!  He made a bet of 1300, I raised to 3500, he reraised to 7000 putting me all-in.  I knew I was almost certainly behind here, but called with a sigh hoping to be shown the Q-high flush or a set.  Bah humbug!!!  I’ll be back to the Vic tho

A big, massive, GINORMOUS Congratulations and Well Done is due to our own Phil ‘flukesfla‘ Flavin, who took down the Fort Knox Sit’n'Go Jackpot for a tasty $110,000 on Saturday morning.  He won six consecutive $50 Jackpot Sit’n'Gos (click HERE for more info on these bad boys!), starting on Friday evening and finishing a few hours later but over a hundred grand richer!  Phil is a long-time PPP player from Tramore in Co. Waterford and one of the nicest guys around; he’s also already qualified for the Irish Open with us so will be in with a shot at the €100,000 package in April…go go go Phil!  He’ll be writing up a blog report of his big victory, I’ll post it up later in the week.

More news: if you are based in the Nottingham or London area (obviously in the UK, not London, Texas!) you may be interested in the live satellites we’re running over there in March.  There is a 5 package guaranteed live tournament in the Vic card room in London on March 17th (St. Patrick’s Day!) and a 7 seat guaranteed live tournament in Dusk Till Dawn in Nottingham on March 19th.  Both events are going to be fun, and some of the team from Paddy Towers will be in attendance as well

I heard a funny one the other day: my girlfriend is so fat that when she fell down the stairs last night I thought Eastenders was starting.

We’ll be getting on to Eastenders soon enough but I shall begin with a couple of poker anecdotes which I heard about this week.  Poker players love prop bets and challenges and this week I learned of two unusual ones.  The first one involves three poker playing mates - Joe Sebok, Gavin Smith, and Jeff Madsen. 

The bet is a form of “last longer” bet that poker players sometimes do in tournaments. The tournament in question is the 2010 LA Poker Classic and the losers of this bet will have to get a tattoo. It gets worse. The first person to bust out will have to get the faces of the remaining two players tattooed on his body (I don’t know exactly which body part). The second person to bust will only have to get the remaining player’s face tattooed, and of course, the one who wins the bet comes out of it unscathed.

So the three of them will each have a pretty much 66% chance that he will end up with a tattoo of at least one man’s face on his body. He could get AA cracked by KK on the very first hand of the tournament and because of that have a tattoo of two blokes’ faces on his back for life. The lucky winner won’t get a tattoo of a man on his body. (And that, as far as I can see, is the only upside, unless you are weird enough to consider “upside” to mean seeing your own face tattooed on another man’s body). 

Can you imagine in the year 2045 when Joe Sebok is sitting at the pool with a Jeff Madsen tattoo on his arm and his grandchildren ask:

“Hey Granpa Sebok, who’s that guy you got tattooed on your arm? Was he famous, did he play baseball? Was he the President or something?”

“No kids. It’s Jeff Madsen, a bloke who won some poker tournaments at the turn of the century”.

“You prick Grandad”

“Yep”

But it has potential to get worse, much worse, in fact nightmarishly worse.  Let’s say for argument’s sake that you did that bet with a young Gary Glitter, a man so hated that record shops removed his albums from stock out of disgust for him. Imagine what would happen to you if you walked into the Bricklayers Arms with a tattoo of Glitter on your neck? It might seem OK doing these things on the spur of the moment but you just never know what the future has in store when you get a geezer’s face tattooed on your body. 

I think that to spice this bet up a bit they should stipulate that the first man out should have the tattoo done on a different body part according to what hand he was beaten with. The unluckier the demise, the more prominent the body part should be. So if you got one pair beaten by two pair, no dramas there -  have it done on the sole of your foot. But if you got three of a kind beaten by a full house, well you have to have it done on your chest. And so on. 

They could also stipulate that the earlier you got knocked out in the tournament the bigger the tattoo had to be.  So if you did well, made the final table but your mate did even better, it could be the size of a stamp. But if you go out on the third level, you have to get a photograph sized tattoo done. 

This could get dangerous. Imagine you are Joe Sebok and you get a straight flush turned over by a Royal Flush on the first hand. Subsequently, many years later Jeff Madsen does an Ian Huntley, while all the time you’ve got a massive tattoo on his grinning mug on your forehead?

See the dangers…?

But that would teach him for making such a rubbish bet!  I understand that Joe Sebok wants to back out and I don’t blame him. Besides, this will affect their performances in the tournament. If I was playing against them and I had more chips than them I would stick them all in whenever I fancied. Would they be happy calling with pocket 10s preflop? Percentages would go out the window when they are facing the tattooist.

The second challenge was issued a while back but it only recently aired on ESPN. It was made by Antonio Esfandiari to Phil Hellmuth and it happened during the European WSOP after Esfandiari knocked Hellmuth out.  Hellmuth held J-8 against Esfandiari’s Q-J and he called all-in on a board of 8-10-Q-10-10. Despite having a worse hand before the flop, on the flop, on the turn and on the river, Hellmuth threw his toys out of the pram and whinged: “How the f**k do you get so lucky and hit a 10 so you can move in there?” He then bitched and moaned, in typical Hellmuth style and so Esfandiari offered to play him heads up for $100’000. Nothing new here – a lot of Hellmuth’s outbursts end with a challenge to play for money and it is at this point that he usually bottles it and pipes up. But this challenge had an interesting twist: the winner would also shoot the loser with a taser gun.

Now that would be funny to watch. I don’t know if Hellmuth accepted but I presume he did not. Maybe he should accept and use it as publicity for his book “Kill Phil”.

Anyway, on to the big news of the weekend: tonight Eastenders celebrates its 25th birthday. That’s 25 years of bleakness, misery and depression. But I am being harsh here. I cannot seriously disparage a programme which has brought us Frank Butcher, Nick Cotton and the king of the web-cam – old finger licking Dirty Den.

I confess - I have been watching Eastenders lately.  Having not watched it for years I started tuning in again for the sole reason that Phil Mitchell had lapsed back into alcoholism. Phil Mitchell, it must be said, is the greatest piss artist in the world*.  And in the spring of 2009 he provided all sorts of amusement when he fell off the wagon. Much to my chagrin, he climbed back on but it was too late by then. I had started watching again and the scriptwriters’ cunning plan to get the viewers back had worked.

* remember the cake at his son’s birthday party? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMkSskKycyA

The producers are getting quite excited about this 25 years malarkey. Recently they have even had a countdown of the top 100 “duff duff” moments (for “duff duff” read “endings” if you don’t watch Eastenders).  If you were watching Eastenders last night you will have seen an hour long special where there were two weddings -  Ricky & Bianca and Bradley & Stacey. Ah, isn’t that sweet…

Well no, actually. Eastenders is getting so far-fetched, I thought. Two gingers getting married on the same day? Come off it, what is the chances of that happening in real life? And another thing, everyone knows that gingers turn milk sour, so why would the BBC’s Health & Safety department risk two in the same area at once, let alone on screen together? That sort of irresponsibility could lead to a whole herd of cows dying. Plus it’s the other actors I feel sorry for - two gingers - the smell of piss must have been terrible - like a CS gas cannister going off in a mini. Shocking.

Just kidding.

Anyway, in tonight’s episode they will be revealing who murdered Archie Mitchell on Christmas Day. And it will be filmed live! It should be interesting. If an actor is in one scene in the Queen Vic and then has to be in the Square, he will have to leg it out there to make his scene on time.  So I will be watching keenly to see if Phil Mitchell has any beads of sweat on his forehead when he appears in scenes close together. Now I admit I have been following but I really have no idea who battered Archie to death with the bust of Queen Victoria that sits on the bar.  So many characters had a good motive that I just can’t pick the murderer. So I have a very open book on “Who Dunnit”. 

Jack Branning – 7/2
Ronnie Mitchell – 4/1
Peggy Mitchell – 4/1
Bradley Branning – 5/1
Janine Butcher – 6/1
Phil Mitchell – 10/1
Stacy Branning – 10/1
Ryan Malloy – 12/1
Ian Beale – 16/1
Sam Mitchell - 16/1
Jean Slater – 25/1
Max Branning – 50/1
Roxy Mitchell – 50/1
Billy Mitchell – 50/1
Lucas Johnson (for his hatrick) – 100/1
Pat Butcher – 100/1
Minty – 100/1
Minty’s ex-missus – 500/1
Minty’s ex-missus son (the one in the wheelchair) – 1000/1
Patrick Trueman – 1000/1
Nick Cotton -  1000/1
Dotty Cotton – 2000/1
Dot Cotton – 5000/1
Tiffany Butcher – 10000/1

I’ve got Peggy in a bit shorter than I would because I know she leaves the show for good but as I said it was Jack right from the start I will be sticking with him as my tip. 

Just as importantly though I will be watching to see which actors lose their bottle and fluff their lines, or fall over or something.  If the actors’ characters were anything to go by I would make snivelling Ian Beale my favourite to fluff his lines. But to be fair, he has been in the programme for 25 years and is probably quite good at remembering scripts. But you never know.

Better still, Robbie (Dean Gaffney) has put in cameo appearances in the last couple of episodes. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Gaffney sprinted out of the Queen Vic in a rush and smashed his handsomely chiselled face onto the kerb?

Now that would definitely be a top 100 duff-duff moment.

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