Well this was an excruciating bubble and it began after Dara O’Kearney and Leon Campbell busted.. It lasted for orbits and orbits and hands and hands, hours and hours, days and weeks and months. Entire transmigrations took place across time, space, and Siberia in the wait for just one player, the 24th place finisher, to reveal themselves.
Roelof Pepping doubled up Justin Tsui in an epic cooler, a set of nines versus a flush (and straight) on Jd 9d Tc, 4d board. So the Td was not an out as it would have given Tsui a straight flush. It didn’t come to that as the river was a complete blank.
The second closest we came to bursting the bubble was when yer man with three big blinds shoved under the gun and everyone at the table inexplicably insta-folded. We thought we were seeing things, but we weren’t. Was the €3,265 so important to everyone? Apparently so.
Dominik Nitsche, thank the poker gods, took matters into his own capable hands. He began moving all-in every hand, more or less. And people kept folding, because there were about three players content to blind out and see who blinked first.
That preamble established, one of Dominik’s shoves did eventually get called. The players at the table holding onto dust were super keen to play witness to a bad beat. It was what they would need to cash, because Nitsche had ripped with Ah 5h and Mauricio Ferreira had called, for about 10 big blinds, after a long stew, with Ad Kd.
“I guess you already know what hand I have,” Ferreira said to Nitsche. We don’t think Nitsche had given the matter a moment’s thought.
All rose and the dealer rolled out As Th 5s. It was bad news Ferreira from the start. There was a real feeling that this would end with more chips in Nitsche’s stack. The turn was the 6s. So it would have to be a king, a ten, or a six for Ferreira. It was the 9d. Certainly the longest hand for hand of the Irish Open so far concluded and the three players who had folded every hand they laid eyes on for hours rejoiced.
