Back to work

I must admit to being a bit of a Christmas grouch, although I hide it well enough and the feast of sport on over the holiday keeps me someway sane.

It's back to work this week. Starting on Monday night with the fantastic $10,000 added Festive Frenzy tournament on Boylepoker.

It didn't work out too well for me as my AK failed to dog Aces early on I'm sure most of you would have qualified for this non-direct buy in event already it was a fantastic offer given the current climate not many online rooms are prepared to add $10k to any events these days!

Tomorrow night I'll be at the City West for the WPT Ireland. When I started out playing the game, this date was always filled with the Irish Poker Championship at the same venue and that event returns to it's spiritual home as a side event of the WPT starting the Friday.

The WPT is a hard one to call turnout wise. On a negative it's a relatively big buy-in for a country where disposable income is at an all time low. This makes it hard to see where the walk in buy ins will come from. There's also the clash with the PCA, which could affect overseas visitors.

The positive is the brand; every poker player in the country will fancy the title of WPT champion, and so a few mattresses will be raided to come up with the buy in.

I've heard people predicting very low turnout for the event, but personally I think the numbers will be decent. I'd call anything over 150 starters a relative success for this type of buy-in, in its first year. Hopefully it gets over 250 and establishes itself as a permanent way to kick off the poker year.

I, like every other Irish poker player, kinda like the ring of " Irish WPT Champion".