A Birthday That Changes Everything When Shaun Deeb turned 40 earlier this year, he crossed one of the stranger thresholds in poker in that he suddenly became eligible for the Poker Hall of Fame. It’s an odd milestone and one that has never really made sense to me. Maybe during
An Ocean Of Variance In Graham Greene’s ‘Loser Takes All’ (1955), there is one memorable Monte Carlo Casino passage which follows the character Bertram as he becomes absorbed by the roulette table. Initially inexperienced and uncertain, he treats gambling almost like a puzzle rather than a reckless risk. Instead of
Freudian Insights I read a lot of Freud in college, both the try-hard, rigorous Freud who was deeply respectful of the scientific method and the playful, after-dinner Freud who waxed lyrical on psycho-sexual motivations. I was studying philosophy and, within that broad subject, I drifted towards existentialism and its overlap
Cards, Cash and Guns There have always been concerns about game integrity in poker. In the late 1950s, Doyle Brunson and his motley crew of fellow Texas road gamblers travelled from town to town, seeking out the biggest games, carrying decks of cards, wads of cash and a cache of
The Don When the final table of the 2015 Irish Open Main Event reached its climax in Dublin, it carried the weight of decades of European poker history. The second oldest poker tournament in the world had seen legends like Colette Doherty, Noel Furlong, Liam Flood, Joe Beevers and Neil
A Partial Mirror Poker players are often uncomfortable with the idea of role models. The game attracts a lot of independent thinkers, sceptics and a people who tend to bristle at anything that smells like hero- worship. Yet whether we admit it or not, most of us were pulled into
The Meme Partypoker ambassador and The Chip Race newsman Barry Carter is a master of both the long and short form. He is an award winning author whose books with Dara O’Kearney and Jared Tendler have received widespread acclaim. He is also the King Of Poker Twitter with his pithy
When JP McCann and Paul O’Reilly took over the Irish Open, they were not inheriting a booming juggernaut. They were taking over a brand heavy with nostalgia, still capable of stirring emotion, but one that had, to put it bluntly, “lost its way a little bit.” It was 2016 and
The first rule of marketing is understanding the product that you are trying to sell. With that in mind, is poker gambling? Is it gaming? E-sports? Is it a mind-sport? Is it deigning? And, If it’s all of these things, is it one more than the other? The second rule
Something Irrational? A few weeks ago, Patrick Leonard put a question to the Twitterati. He asked: “What’s something irrational that really tilts you in poker? I hate [when] on the river the dealers count down the remaining deck whilst people are thinking. I know they have to do it /
Yifrach Outlasts Boivin and Shahade to win the NAPT title On Wednesday evening, as the sun was setting in Las Vegas, the embattled alleged money-launderer Gal Yifrach took down the North American Poker Tour (NAPT) $5300 Main Event after an unlikely comeback against Belgian highstakes beast Thomas Boivin who utterly
Making Mental Notes At The Irish Open 2012 It was the Spring of 2012 and I was starting to dabble a bit more away from the virtual felt. I had a bit of live poker experience, maybe a hundred or so tournaments played, but I was predominantly a 40-tabling online
