For the last 10 years, I spent the better half of summer in Las Vegas, trudging back and forth to the Rio every day; full of optimism in the mornings, and misery in the evenings.<\/p>\n
This summer, I decided to adopt what I call the \u2018Steve O\u2019Dwyer Super System\u2019. As you may know, Steve O\u2019Dwyer is currently the #1 ranked player tournament player in the world (according to GPI), but few remember the origins of his remarkable ascent. Steve also used to spend his summers in Vegas, but eventually he decided to skip the WSOP preliminary events in favour of attending tournaments in Europe,and because so many of the top professionals make the journey to Vegas, the events in Europe become softer than usual.<\/p>\n
Over the last few summers, Steve cleaned up during the summer, and parlayed his winnings into major scores around the world. So when I heard there was a World Poker Tour National event in Cannes during the first week of June, I knew it was a perfect fit for Steve\u2019s system.<\/p>\n
I arrived early on Day 1A of the event, gave the \u2018Shuffle up and deal\u2019 announcement, and found my seat at a table full of unfamiliar faces. Nothing remarkable happened that day, but I won more pots than I lost, and dragged a couple large ones at the end of the night. I had nearly quadrupled my starting stack of 30,000, and earned a day off to enjoy Cannes during Day 1B.\u00a0I was feeling focused at the start of Day 2, and won some hands leading up to a table change. I landed at a table full of chips; many of them belonging to a boisterous French-Algerian player named Omar. Although he didn\u2019t speak much English, Omar could tell we both liked having fun at the table, and addressed me as \u201cmy friend\u201d any time we contested a pot.<\/p>\n
Omar took some of my chips before the table broke, but we were moved to the same table, and the talking continued as Omar used his massive stack to terrorise our opponents. I\u2019ve been playing live tournaments for 11 years now, and I\u2019ve never seen someone abuse a bubble the way Omar did that day. He was raising so many hands (I\u2019ll guess 80%) that I happily shoved A8 suited over his under-the-gun raise just two players from the money. To my horror, a player behind me cold-called the raise, but then Omar came over the top, which caused the third player to fold. Omar tabled AKo, and had given me a chance to triple up if I could beat one hand, which I did by drilling an eight on the flop. \u201cJust for you my friend\u201d Omar said at the appearance of the eight.<\/p>\n
After that hand, I had above-average entering the money, and sat back while the short-stacked players flung their chips in the middle. Just as the action started to slow down, I found a rush of cards that brought my stack over 900,000, which put me among the chip leaders in the tournament. Yet again our table broke, and yet again Omar and I were sent to the same place. He\u2019d eased off since the bubble broke, but he was still the most active player on the table, and had the chips to do as he pleased.<\/p>\n
Tune in next week to see how Tony’s European adventure finished.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Get all the latest partypoker updates from your favourite social media outlets. You can Follow us on Twitter<\/a><\/strong> and Like us on Facebook<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For the last 10 years, I spent the better half of summer in Las Vegas, trudging back and forth to the Rio every day; full of optimism in the mornings, and misery in the evenings. This summer, I decided to adopt what I call the \u2018Steve O\u2019Dwyer Super System\u2019. As you may know, Steve O\u2019Dwyer<\/p>\nKeep up to date with all things partypoker!<\/strong><\/h3>\n