Dublin vacation (aka French Police and surgical strikes)

I'm currently in Dublin for the Irish Poker Open. It's been a mighty interesting trip thus far. Flew through CDG to get to Dublin, and while transferring I got chased out of the loo by several well-armed police officers dressed in camoflauge and automatic weapons. Turned out there were two unattended bags and this resulted in them closing down part of Terminal 2. After two plane changes, I finally got to Dublin after some 18 hours of travel. One $75 dollar taxi ride later, I got to the hotel where this tournament is being held. The hotel is quite nice. Was told Bono held a private event here at this hotel just last week. Dunno if that's true or not, but this sure seems like a place where he would do that. There are 4 helicopters, numerous limos, and six different Rolls Royces parked in the drive. Not me though, I arrived by taxi.


Before going to check out the conference center, I decided to take some pictures outside while it was light. I'm enjoying the wonderful scenery around the hotel and look over my shoulder only to realize a bird had perfectly executed a surgical strike on my nice shirt. The bird must have thought I arrived by helicopter. Of course, my first thought wasn't about the shirt, but instead to check to make sure the Nikon survived the carpet bombing. Of course, if it had been a Canon, my first thought would have been about the shirt.:-)


I went back upstairs and changed shirts, then went to the conference center and checked in for the tournament. The room at the conference center is very nice, and the TV set is envious. Would be fun to get picked for it. :-) They are showing the tournament all weekend here on national TV with a feed on the internet. I also noticed that they had some cash games going. Mind you, I don't like playing cash games. I prefer the tournaments - buy-ins are cheap, its a game of competition rather than gambling, because simply digging into your wallet to rebuy isn't an option in a tournament, once you're out, you're out. I had said to myself I wasn't going to fish out the wallet while I was here. But I figured it might give me an advantage if I played a couple of dozen hands to see how good the poker talent was in Ireland. So I weighed my options on the cash game, picked the cheapest one and decided it might give me an advantage tomorrow. Plus I needed to get some dinner, and that would make that very easy. I can say the talent here is very, very good. I might be in over my head here. :-) If the cash game is any indication, tomorrow will be a very difficult day - usually about half the field won't make it past day one. I didn't get any real good cards at the cash table, so once dinner came and went, I left promptly. I got what I needed anyway. Several top pros are here, but I've yet to see Jennifer Tilly. I just hope I make it past day one.