Things were a lot simpler in 1996. There was the Irish Open and a few festivals in the Vic. When you travelled to the Vic, you had a choice between gambling on picking up Legionnaire's disease in Sussex Gardens or being robbed in the Metropole. The Metropole had a bar, so it was no contest.

I've probably spent six months of my life in the Bellagio but until the week before last, I'd never considered popping over for the weekend. Then again, I'd never had a friend at a November final table before, nor had I had a friend about to be inducted into the Hall of Fame, so I decided to give it a go!

I wasn't in Ireland for the Boylepoker IPO before I got a taste of the buzz that it was creating. The first taxi driver in the line of cabs outside the airport was a lad called John. I'd met John in his cab about two weeks before last year's IPO and on hearing about his genuine disappointment that that tournament was a sell out, I had managed to talk the good people in the Boylepoker team into sorting out a seat for him. This year, he'd left nothing to chance. He was in and ready to go.

A couple of years ago, I tried to beat a machine. It went something like this...About ten days after trying to withdraw several thousand from a site, I'd heard nothing from them, so I emailed them to find out where my money was. This was a mistake. I got :

The WSOP Europe was a bit of a disappointment for the Irish team. I led the charge by finishing a few spots off the bubble in the £1000 No Limit event. The good news was that I got knocked out in time to catch the last 20 minutes of the United v City match. The bad news was that if I'd known they were going to play 14 minutes injury time, I could have hung around and at least made the money. A couple of days later, Dave Callaghan and John O'Shea finished in a heap on the bubble in the £5000 Omaha which is a real dirty one because not alone did they do their dough, they finished within about 20 spots of a bracelet.

Lots of people like to watch a good train crash so it's not surprising that the YouTube hand where DeWolfe manages to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by mucking the winning hand in the showdown (actually only half a showdown) has been watched by zillions. It might only be millions because I know lots of people who are sick enough to watch this kind of thing several times.

People complain a lot about how unlucky they are. This is normally pretty good news as it's way better to have them spending their time doing this rather than trying to work out what really happened. It's good for the game. Having said that, sometimes people do become victims of things that are way beyond their control.

About 20 years ago, The Pink Elephant night club was a regular haunt of many Irish poker players. It was open late and for some reason or other, we used to get in for free. I was in there one night having a quiet gallon with Micky McGuinness (an apt surname!) when a few lads on steroids asked us to move to make room for some special customers.

After playing all night on race week Monday, I managed to get two hours sleep before Fintan Gavin phoned me to ask if I fancied joining him for lunch. As I was still half asleep, I lost a coin flip and said yes by accident. No would have certainly been a better idea, especially as before we'd finished eating, we'd been joined by Manus, Big Sean and Andy Black, all of whom seemed to think that it could be our last day on the planet and were acting accordingly.

I got an email from my liver in July, politely suggesting that I spend just four or five days rather than the usual week at the annual party (heavily disguised as a horseracing festival) in Galway. Instead, I added a wedding and a party onto the trip and turned it into a ten-day mission. If you start taking shit from body organs, there's no telling where it could all end up.

In 1999, Scott Gray, Julian Gardner and I made a point of going to all the big European nights at Old Trafford. United won the treble and within three years between us, we had finished 2nd, 3rd and 4th in the WSOP main event. Maybe we should have brought along a 4th guy!

I decided to adopt a new tactic for the main event this year and got married between Day 1 and Day 2. It didn't help the poker much, in fact, I think it knocked several people out of the tournament. It was a good laugh anyway.

Mike Sexton was at a table near mine in the PLO Hi-Lo the other day, so I dropped over to say hello. I asked him if he could really believe that there were nearly 800 runners in this event. He said that people have been playing for a month now and nearly everyone is broke, so it's not the game that matters anymore, it's the size of the buy-in. If it's 1500, everyone is in, if it's more than that, they're not.

A guy just out of dealer's school in Las Vegas a few years ago sent his resume to Binion's. It went something like:

Dan Quale was always good for a laugh. "I have made good judgements in the past. I have made good judgements in the future," is one of my favourites. He did get it right when he said that one lawyer for every 250 Americans was a bit over the top.

It's a couple of years since the lawyers won the main event here, but they are back in action in the side show this year. When you look at the walls in the Amazon room in the Rio, the winners of the main event look right back at you. Not all of them though. Bill Smith is missing. Allegedly the lawyers looking after the 1985 champion's estate don't want his picture there. Not for free anyway. It is said that Mr Smith was drunk when he won his title. He must have been pissed out of his fucking mind when he picked his lawyers.

The unemployment figures over here look pretty depressing but I think they may be way worse than even the experts think. During the first break of the $2500 Holdem/Omaha tournament, I mentioned to Neil Channing that I strongly suspected that none of the players at my table had a job.

Channing told me that he'd be amazed if any one at his table had worked a day in their lives. There may be a little light at the end of the tunnel and I would strongly suggest that Ben Grundy should be put in charge.

My WSOP trip got off to a great start, in the airport anyway. The immigration guy was Irish. His mother's family is from Co. Mayo, which coincidentally is where Phil's mother's family comes from, so if he runs bad this year and needs a job, at least he's got some connections.

The guy suggested I should approach Guinness about a sponsorship deal. It would probably be the biggest rakeback deal in history. We headed downtown and as usual, I went to Binion's in search of inspiration, but had to settle for chicken noodle soup instead.

When Jesse May came up with the idea of doing a live poker radio show, I thought he was nuts. He told me we'd be doing it for a few hours a week from home. I must be nuts too, as before I knew what I was doing, I had agreed to sleep on a couch somewhere in East London for five half-weeks while we broadcast from a studio. Not ideal preparation for the WSOP, but about par for the course when Jesse is involved.

The Irish Open is alive and well. In these tough times, players will travel to the events where they are best looked after and a good time is guaranteed and the fact that seven hundred turned up in Dublin reflects this. Congratulations to Liam Flood, The Jackpot Club and Paddy Power on making this happen.

As usual, there was a shit lot of dead money around. This year, it was the Boylepoker team. Though that wasn't the fault of the online qualifiers who showed us all up. I had breakfast on day three with Andy Ward whose top 400 finish was an example to us all. Ciaran O'Leary had told me that the numbers in the Bellagio were way down this year and Andy explained that The Camel and several others weren't actually in the Bellagio but were in their rooms banging away in the something coop.

When one of the English tabloid newspaper's market share began to fall, they responded aggressively by appointing a new editor to liven things up. He began by ruthlessly firing several of the staff who he thought had gotten a bit stale. He wasn't without a sense of humour though, so when he decided the astrologer had to go he fired him in a letter that began, "As you will already know..."

Irish poker and heart have often been mentioned in the same sentence, and rightly so. But heart is about more than shipping the tank in with air. It's about putting your hand in your pocket when it may not be full to help out those for whom a poker bad beat story would be a luxury. It was no surprise then that the Jackpot Club's March Madness weekend, sponsored by Boylepoker.com, got great support and explains why it was so much fun.

After four weeks without alcohol or tobacco, I decided to push the WSOP preparations a little further by playing a bunch of events in the Aviation Club. I'm not sure if it's working good or bad because on the plus side I was going deep with chips and on the negative side I wasted a lot of time. On the very negative side, Veronique cashed in one of the events I bubbled in, so I had to listen to it all the way home and pay the cab fare.

Hanging out with Surinder Sunar is usually good value. He's the most superstitious gambler I've ever met. We were in Dublin airport recently on our way to play the European Open TV event, when he spotted me purchasing nail clippers. This got him very excited as we'd swapped a piece and he explained to me that playing poker with long nails was desperately unlucky. Especially the feet!

I sat down to play the deepstack tournament in the Red Cow and noticed that six guys at my table had headphones on, so I went for a walk, figuring not much was going to be happening for a while. I met Brendan Murray who was talking to 'Roy the Boy' about his book (Life's a Gamble), which is hitting the shelves around now. I was a bit surprised that Roy knew enough about anything to write a whole book on the topic, but Enid Blyton probably hadn't even met Noddy or Big Ears and that didn't stop her writing about them.To be fair, Jesse says it's a good read and that's good enough for me. When I rejoined the tournament, Scott and I had a great laugh with Flipper. We were asking Flipper if it was a coincidence that after an 18 months gap he'd started updating his blog again right after he'd won a tournament but it didn't bother him in the least. 

A couple of weeks ago, I played poker in Clonmel for the first time in over 20 years. Back then, it was kind of an accident. I'd been working in my first proper job for just a few weeks and had to phone in to explain I wouldn't be coming to work as I had to go to a funeral in Clonmel, which went down very well as you can expect. The funeral was great craic and eventually turned into an all night poker game in a local Gentlemen's club.