Cool head unfazed by the highest stakes

POKER: MALACHY CLERKINtalks to Irish poker player Eoghan O'Dea, who has emulated his father Donnacha's achievement by reaching the lucrative final table at the World Series of Poker Main Event in Las Vegas this November

IT WAS gone four o’clock on the morning of July 20th by the time business was concluded at the Rio Casino in Las Vegas. It had taken 12 days and countless thousands of hands to distil the 6,865 entrants for the World Series of Poker Main Event down to the nine who would return in November for the final table. Each of the November Nine had been playing for eight days straight and in the closing stages the ability to concentrate was by far the most precious resource they had to hand.

For Eoghan O’Dea, the final few hours had been reasonably plain sailing. Day Seven had been a bonanza, with one hand in particular against a fatally aggressive Australian player more or less guaranteeing him a spot at the final table as long as he didn’t do anything silly. He’d nipped and tucked and tended away at his chip stack and could afford to sit back in second place while those below him worried about being the last one to go before the shutters came down at nine players.

“Near the end, it’s so tiring,” says the 26-year-old from Dalkey. “You wouldn’t sleep that much in the last couple of days. But there’s just so much adrenaline pumping through you in the late stages and it keeps you going. When you’ve been playing that long, everybody’s pretty tired, so concentration becomes harder. You can see people’s minds wandering at that point sometimes.”

Making it through to the November Nine has the potential to change O’Dea’s life, of course. The very least he will walk away from the table with next month is $782,115 (just short of €600,000) and the first prize on offer is a shade over $8.5m (or €6.25m). It’s going to buy him a new car when he gets around to it, possibly a new place too, depending on the size of the cheque he banks.

What it bought him in the very short term back in July, however, was a long-put-off drink with the group of Irish card players who had hung around to watch him and wish him well.

One begat another, which begat a nightclub visit, which ultimately begat a no-show at the press conference arranged for midday alongside the other eight contenders who had made the final table. In other walks of life this might have been a big deal but poker is a little more indulgent when it comes to that kind of thing. The surprise wasn’t that O’Dea failed to get out of bed, it was more that they managed to get the other eight to turn up.

His life since then has been ever so slightly surreal. After a month spent in Vegas playing near enough every day, he needed to go into quarantine once he got back to Ireland. He did his best to stay off the computer and away from the cash games and threw himself into more healthy pursuits. Along with a couple of friends, he did a triathlon in Belfast. He played a fair bit of tennis, a sport he took up to a decent enough standard when he was a teenager.

The professional poker player lives to gamble, though. That’s the life, that’s the job. Just because he took time away from the baize didn’t mean he wasn’t going to try and earn a living. He bet on tennis and football mostly, the stuff he knows. By the end of August, he was back playing cards almost full time.

Which leads you to wonder what the attraction is when it comes to poker. Is it the game or the gamble?

“I guess it’s both,” he says. “It’s a gambling game and it wouldn’t be the same or have the same attraction if there wasn’t money on the table. I really enjoy the game itself but it’s the gambling that makes it enjoyable. So you can’t really separate them.

“I mean, I think I’d definitely keep playing the game even if I took first place in November. I don’t think you could stop playing just because you won a lot of money. I might even play more. I definitely wouldn’t want to stop, definitely not.”

Hard to imagine he could. Poker is the family business, after all. When he takes his seat in the Rio next month, he will be repeating the achievement of his father, Donnacha, who made the final table in 1983 and in 1991. It makes the O’Deas the first ever father-son combination to both make the final table of the WSOP Main Event. The odds against it ever happening again are beyond the ken of even the Vegas compilers, given how much the event has changed over the years.

When Donnacha came sixth in 1983, 108 players made up the field. Even as recently as 2003, it was a more manageable 839-strong. But the explosion in poker across the world since then has undeniably turned the Main Event into something of a lucky dip.

Peaking at 8,773 players in 2006, it has turned into a marathon task to survive to the end now. In 1983, there was one Irishman and eight Americans at the final table. Next month, Eoghan O’Dea will line up against three Americans, a German, a Ukrainian, an Englishman, a Czech player and one from Belize.

To be still upright after all that smoke clears obviously takes an enormous amount of skill and brainpower but even he admits the luck involved plays a bigger part now than it used to.

On Day Three back in July, he got involved in a hand with two other players at his table – one of whom he knew he had covered, but the other he wasn’t sure about.

In the end, the size of the betting between him and Player A got rid of Player C out of the hand and he took the pot but if Player C had hung in there and trusted the pair of queens in his hand, O’Dea’s trip to Vegas would have been over. Tiny slings, tiny arrows. All vital to anyone making it this far it the world’s biggest poker tournament.

“I’m getting used to it now. Obviously the first four or five days, I couldn’t believe it. But then after that, it became reality. I got used to the idea that I’m going to be there. I put it to the back of my mind as best I could. I didn’t go wild when I got home. I’d rather stay private and not be over-flashy about it.

“I don’t ever feel the need to keep myself in check or anything. I know it can happen to a lot of people that they win money playing poker and go mad with it but that wouldn’t be my kind of thing. I would never feel the need to go and have parties every night or anything like that.”

The next few weeks will be about getting in some preparation and a little study of the other eight at the table. He’ll play in the hugely popular winter festival in Dublin in a couple of weeks and then the day after will be flown business-class to Las Vegas and put up for five nights in his own suite with the main event starting on November 5th. After that, it’s all down to him.

Small blind, big blind, one hand at a time.