The main event at Macau is a great tournament, with a pretty good value field and a great structure. I was intending to take it a bit more seriously than I did the PLO.

I've finally gotten off the mark for the year, winning my first live tournament at the Castle Card Club in Castlebar. In fact, it's the first live tournament I've won since the Poker Million in 2008.

Finally, I have some good news regarding poker. I feel like I'm kind of clutching at straws, when I'm reporting a couple of results in 1 table S'n'Gs as good news but after Vegas I'm happy to take any result I can get.

Unfortunately things have not got any better over here. I played the 1K PLO re-buy in the Bellagio and had a good run in it, but came unstuck with 9 players remaining when my top set was outdrawn by my opponent's big draw.

I arrived in Vegas two weeks ago off the back of a nice holiday and full of optimism about the World Series. I'm now without a cash in seven attempts and with only 1 or possibly 2 tournaments left to play here, I'm in desperate need of a late rally to salvage some kind of respectability.

Five years ago I went travelling with my then-girlfriend and two friends on a 9 month round-the-world trip financed by the ridiculously soft online cash games that were available at the time.

Just arrived in Vegas after a 30 hour trip from the Cook Islands and got stuck straight into the action with one of the 1K NLH crapshoot events.

Just got back on the mainland after being on an island off the coast of Australia for most of last week. It's amazing how much you can miss in just four days of being without internet and mobile phone coverage.

Looking at the way the points are distributed, it seems to me that you want to have players who'll be competing in the events that will have small fields, like the stud, horse, etc.

It seems like every time I write a blog these days, it starts with something along the lines of 'sorry about the lack of posts', but the only poker I've really played since the Irish Open has been a couple of online MTTs.

Since my last blog I've been pretty busy with playing the Irish Open, getting drunk, getting handcuffed to a dwarf, and getting married. In that order.

I had signed up for both the Poker For The Homeless tournament and also Neil Channing's 'London Live' event in the Vic, before I realised they were on the same weekend.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I've gotten fed up with slaving away for hours on end multi-tabling small cash games and sit and go's, and have had a bit of a break from internet poker over the last week and a half.

I said in my last blog that I was gonna be staying at home for a few weeks and grinding back the money I'd lost in my disaster of a night in Brisbane. It hasn't quite worked out like that, but it's not for the want of trying.

I'm just starting to settle back into things at home again. I had a couple of days back in Belfast last week, then went to Newport in Wales for a golfing trip with Paul Spillane, Nicky Power, Julian Gardner and a few of Paul's mates from England.

In the 1650NL event I had been playing very tight and re-raised from the BB with AK, after an opening raise from mid-position. The flop was Q63 and I made a normal sized continuation bet which he called after thinking for a while.

This time last year I wrote a blog in which I mentioned some aims for the year ahead. I don't generally like to do that and when I do, I always try to set the bar pretty low to avoid disappointment.

It's been a pretty quiet couple of weeks for me. The last poker tournament that I played this year was also the first one that I played in 2009, as we came back to Galway for the IPC.

Apologies for the lack of news lately, but it's a lot harder to think of anything to write about when I haven't been playing much, and when I have played I generally haven't lasted very long.

The World Open was a similar story as the Poker Million, that I described in my last blog. I played well at the start of the tournament, at one point making a winning call in a pretty big pot with just A-high on the river, when there was four to a straight on the board.

I went into this year with 4 titles to defend: The Poker Million, World Open, WSOP Omaha and of course the 300 euro Macau Festival PLO side event. As I write this I'm still technically the Poker Million champion because they haven't got around to playing the final yet.

After the early action in the first half hour of day 2, the rest of the day went fairly smoothly for me. I got up to 115k, which was ahead of the average, with my QQ v KK double up. I was reasonably comfortable for the rest of the day, eventually finishing on around 180k.

I think this time last year if I'd finished 10th in a tournament and picked up £38k whenever first place paid over £800k, I'd have felt pretty disappointed at ending up with a relatively small amount after getting so close to such a huge score. This time my circumstances were very different though, and when I busted out of the London EPT in 10th place I was just delighted to have had some kind of return to form after the way things have gone for me this year.