IO general thoughts and stories

So as I said in my last post I was going to be dealing at the Paddy Power Irish open. It turned out better then I hoped and in general it was a pretty good week. I dealt for 57 hours and pretty happy with the money. General perception from most people is that was a successful and very well run weekend and in general I would agree with that. As much as I personally don't like the CityWest Hotel I do have to say it is a good venue for a poker tournament and Paddy Power do a very good job doing the room up and generally marketing and branding the tournament. The bar area was very nicely done up, with bucking bronco thing, computers set up in the lobby etc but most of you probably already knew that. A few things you may not have known about though.

The treatment of the dealers was a bit mixed. On the Friday which was Day 1b I think the room was very very hot. This was a problem throughout the weekend with the room either being very hot or cold, they never seem to be able to find an in between. Other problem was they were a bit short staffed on the day so it meant we didn't get a break for ages. This caused 1 of the dealers to just walk as she wasn't given a break to have a sandwich. Another one walked later on as she was pissed of with treament (so I was told) and then during the women's tournament 1 0f the floor staff wanted to get 1 of the male dealers sent home because he 1) didn't smile and 2) didn't layout the cards TV style when there was an all in called. I asked a few people and none of us do that for an all in. He was really angry about it and tbh I don't blame him. He didn't get sent home, just got a polite warning but when you have people walking out, people being sent home for not being up to the job and your short staffed then trying to get someone sent home for nothing is not a clever thing to be doing.

This seem to be a bit of watershed moment though as after all this things got much better, we were generally dealt with more respect, they were very appreciative and couldn't thank us enough. There was a nice moment when Liam Flood going on mike after the main event ended and asked the players to give the dealers a big round of applause so I think some of the criticism by the dealers who walked probably went a long way to turn it around.

Another interesting tit bit was on Day 1a, all the players got one 5k chip but about 2 or 3 hours in they were taken out of circulation and not used in Day 1b. I asked why just out of curiosity and nobody seemed to know. I eventually got told by TD he tell me when it was over. The 5k chips were eventually introduced mid to late into day 2 but were never really used all that much. When it was all done I asked David the TD about it he said the reason was they suspected that the 5k chips were being sold off, as it turns out they got it wrong hence they were re-introduced. I am not sure what led them to believe they were being sold off originally and how they found out otherwise but I always think they should use different chips each year to make sure this sort of thing doesn't happen but I guess it would be pretty expensive to buy them every time.

1 final story which I found interesting and sort of disturbing. I was chatting to some of the people involved in the production side and they said that some of the players were not putting their holecards on the little window where the holecard camera lied until the very last second. This was sort of annoying them and they went to try and see why. It turns out what was happening was some of the players kept looking around at all the cameras and they picked up on something, when someone had a big hand the camera would zoom in on them before action had reached them so these players wanted to hold off putting their cards into the area assiged so that the cameras couldn't give them away to others at the table. If all of this is correct then that shouldn't ever happen but it is symptomatic of the biggest problem with the tournament as a whole. They whored it out for TV. This is true in both years I have worked at the IO in that they try to run the tournament to suit TV instead of how it should be done of TV being made to work around what is best for the tournament and the people who play in it.

Hopefully they sort out these issues next year and maybe make the structure a bit better mainly because I may try to qualify for it. I am hoping 2009 is my year for playing some big live tournaments.

Away from the IO, my sleep pattern is much better and I woke up today feeling pretty refreshed. I am likely not going to play today but hopefully start up by end of the week and get myself playing and running more like I did in February