Poker players pride themselves on their powers of observation, but one of the significant moments on the UKIPT/EPT London festival this week went unnoticed by all but an excessively select few.
Up in a single of the tertiary tournament areas within the Grand Connaught Rooms, throughout the late stages of a small buy-in UKIPT side event, a last table of nine was set when a short-stack went broke in a unconditionally standard spot.
There was almost no money jump between tenth and ninth, and almost no discernible reaction from eight of the remainder competitors. However while the tournament organisers began the redraw for the general table, a 25-year-old Irishman named Daragh Davey took himself into the corner of the room to pump his fists in jubilation.
Nobody else within the tournament even saw him, less would have understood what the fuss was all about. But for Davey that was the instant when he could feel confident that approximately 16 months of obsessive calculating, focus and alertness would finally bear fruit.
"Everybody was just, 'OK, final table, nothing's changed.'" Davey said. "But for me, it was huge."
At the tip of the festival in London this week, Davey will most likely be crowned because the Player of the Year for Season 4 of the uk and Ireland Poker Tour (UKIPT). A ninth-place finish or better in that small tournament meant Max Silver, Davey's closest rival within the leader board, would wish two sizeable results from just a handful of remaining tournaments to seek him down. That was difficult even for somebody of Silver's abilities.
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Davey knew he had taken a virtually unassailable lead in a race that started in London in April 2013 and visited Marbella, the Isle of Man, Galway, Dublin, Edinburgh and Nottingham, among other destinations, during a 13-stop marathon.
It tested players' abilities through all poker variants and across about 90 tournaments. It awarded a prize of buy ins and hotel accommodation for each stop of Season 5 at the UKIPT - potentially invaluable for a qualified poker player in these volatile times.
"What I FEEL is the best achievement of it's that it is not the measure of 1 little bit of luck in a single tournament," David Lappin, a chum and colleague of Davey, said. "THE ONE THAT wins a poker tournament is likely one of the one that ran best that day. The one who wins a 16-month leader board over 80 or 90 live events, he probably ran decently during that whole period but that's still a bit of more of an iron man. It's kind of more of a test."
Davey confirmed the significance of the steadiness the leader board triumph would supply. "There's huge financial relief because in an instant I'VE my buy-ins for the primary tournaments I play every year," he said. "Knowing that I HAVEN'T GOT to shop for into [the satellites] is a reasonably large relief. In relation to winning the leader board, and the notoriety, it's pretty cool."
Arguably essentially the most impressive consider Davey's run is that during some ways it was only to be expected. Davey is a member of a collective of Irish players known colloquially because the" Firm", at the side of the aforementioned Lappin and Dara O'Kearney. Despite involvement in a pastime that may be by its nature stuffed with variance, the members of the Firm have spent a few years understanding how you can reduce luck's influence to a bare minimum.
They are keen on coaching promising players, then staking them into tournaments and cash games, both live and online. They spend many hours discussing not just hand strategy but in addition probably the most profitable option to the business of poker as a whole, examining the fine print of leader board promotions, for instance, and honing game selection.
They operate as a small business, analysing applications for brand new recruits, plugging leaks to optimise returns of existing colleagues, and offering what amounts to a support network for individuals enthusiastic about what can often be some of the solitary and soul-destroying pursuits.
"Even just the day after day slog of being a poker player could be very volatile," Lappin said. "THERE ARE VARIOUS chats over coffee, pep talks backward and forward to one another. The camaraderie that we get from having this sort of collective is massively valuable because inevitably twice or thrice a year you are going to go on a foul run. And when that occurs it is a really lonely game, and also you do feel a great deal by yourself when you find yourself down-swinging. And to have that sort of collective...it does even out that variance, that we have got that sharing policy. It's morale up to it's anything else."
And here's the item: it works.
Lappin and O'Kearney both also had a good run within the UKIPT Leader Board this year, heading to the season finale in London in sixth and fourth place, respectively. One of the most Firm's current horses, Kevin Killeen, won UKIPT Dublin in February and is creating a deep run within the EPT Main Event. Jason Tompkins, a former Firm member who now lives in Australia, has also made final tables at both the EPT and WSOP.
And that's just within the live tournament environment. Despite recorded winnings of about $400,000 in bricks and mortar games, O'Kearney is better known in poker as "SlowDoke", the moniker with which he has become a web-based satellite monster on PokerStars.
Such is his dominance in these particular games that O'Kearney had essentially locked up the UKIPT "Online Qualifier of the Year" prize about six months ago, and had won 87 packages even before UKIPT London, pushing beyond 100 up to now month or so. (His closest challenger, uWannaLoan?, had 53.)
The prize for topping that leader board was an extra package, plus a seat in a different Champion of Champions tournament hosted here in London. Although O'Kearney (and Killeen) both swung and missed in that event, losing out at the chance to fasten up a Season 5 passport to Dean Hutchison, their very participation offered further proof of the Firm's merits - and extra evidence in their fierce competitive spirit.
"I was gutted," O'Kearney said afterwards. "RELATING TO equity, that is the most important tournament that I've played within the last couple of weeks. Except for the money, I MIGHT have loved to have won it simply to have that on my CV."
O'Kearney, who's now 49, came to poker relatively late, taking over the sport in his early 40s on the end of an somewhat unconventional athletics career. He graduated from running "regular" marathons to races over 50 or 60 kilometres after which to six-hour and finally 24-hour races. The stamina he built up, both mentally and physically, is now put to make use of on the poker tables in what can often be formulaic situations.
"I developed a capability to do something really boring for an excessively long time, that is what poker really becomes beyond a definite point," O'Kearney said. "Poker is far more exciting when you find yourself learning the sport and you've got to consider more situations, but if you reach a definite level, most of the situations are automatic and you're doing the similar things again and again again, particularly if you find yourself grinding online. [It's beneficial] just having the mindset that you are actually capable of do this without losing your mind."
O'Kearney and Lappin founded the Firm three years ago in Dublin when they were introduced by a chum and fellow poker player Jono Crute. They immediately discovered a shared outlook at the game, content to regard poker as career through which they may hope to make a good living doing something they enjoyed, instead of chasing the intense lights and unrealistic dreams that experience cost many others their livelihood in poker.
Davey, who was a low-to-mid stakes live cash-game grinder -- a "live nit" in his own words -- became the primary player O'Kearney staked - and for reasons beyond his raw ability.
"I thought that he had the precise temperament, that he would handle the swings, the way of life in general, and learn really quickly, not get upset if he had an extended bad run," O'Kearney said. "Basically it was just stability of temperament, which many of the other guys who would was seen as really talented players on the time did not have. And they are gone from the sport now because longer term that's more important than how good you happen to be at poker at that precise moment."
Lappin agreed. "THE QUANTITY of men I've seen come and go over the eight years I'm playing, who were significantly better poker players than I am, a lot more creative minds," he said.
Davey added: "It's labor. Somebody is usually a much better player than you and you'll make more cash than them when you work harder. I DO NOT BELIEVE any of the 3 people claim to be the most efficient. We are not even anywhere just about it."
Yet within their very own parameters, the Firm are indeed doing something exceptional. They've managed to develop a safeguard against being chewed up and spat out by an industry that may often be as ruthless because it will also be exhilarating.
"That's what I BELIEVE is brilliant, while you see poker players having ostensibly normal lives," Lappin said. "That's actually the stories that are supposed to be championed. If a couple of hundred people in Ireland and Great Britain could make a living from it, and use it on making the lives of individuals around them better, and having a gentle life, I BELIEVE that are meant to be the objective, from my point of view."
Follow our coverage of the EPT London festival via the primary EPT London page, where there are hand-by-hand updates and chip counts within the panel on the top and have pieces below. And, of course, you'll be able to follow all of it live at EPT Live.
Read More... [Source: PokerStarsBlog.com :: UKIPT]
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