Odds-On Interviews with Roy Brindley, Episode 4 - Andy Black, Irish Poker Legend

ODDS-ON INTERVIEWS WITH ROY BRINDLEY — EPISODE 4
Andy “The Monk” Black, Irish poker legend
Recorded Thursday 1 October 2026 | Host: Roy Brindley | bestbettingsites.co.uk

Roy: Well, hello and welcome to the Odds-On podcast, brought to you by bestbettingsites.co.uk. My name’s Roy, and today delighted to be joined by Andy “The Monk” Black, Ireland’s most successful poker player. Andy, welcome to the Odds-On podcast.

Andy: And now welcome to you, Roy the Boy Brindley.

Roy: I’ve not been called the boy for quite a while. Right. First of all, OK, let’s explain the moniker “The Monk”. How did that come about?

Andy: Well, I think I was around 30 or so, and I’d come very close to winning the World Championship in 1997. The greatest poker player, arguably, of all time beat me, Stu Ungar. And I was kind of burnt out, and there was a lot of suffering going on, and I had lost perspective. So from doing nothing like this in my life at all, I would stumble along to a meditation class, and about a year later I found myself in a monastery for five years. And a lot of shit to sort out, you know.

Roy: That’s… That response is going to surprise many. You went to God, but your definition of God?

Andy: Well, I wouldn’t say God, because it’s more Buddhism. Most of the kind of wellbeing, personal development, a huge amount of it emanates from Buddhism, because in Buddhism you’re just trying to look at how you are. And the idea is that the more present you get and the less shit you add on, the happier you are, and you can keep pushing that. So an awful lot of the stuff that people do… I mean, when I went there, things like mindfulness, 20-odd years ago, nobody knew what mindfulness was. Now if you say mindfulness, pretty much everyone knows, or has some sense of it. So it’s basically a bunch of tools to help you be present, is the bottom line. So within a few months of coming out of it, six, seven months, I was a millionaire, which was great, because I…

Roy: Let’s back this story up to the start. So you’re referring to the 1997 World Series of Poker final table, which you reached. Where did you finish?

Andy: I was just outside the final table, the last couple of tables. So I finished 14th in that one.

Roy: So 1997, a lot of people, well, they’d heard of the term poker, but the explosion in popularity hadn’t happened. You didn’t take that good. You ended up in a monastery. But yeah, like you say, forward wind until the year 2003, 2005.

Andy: Yeah, I was in there till maybe 2003, 2004, and then by 2005 I’d used a lot of those skills, maybe with a little bit of talent, to actually win millions, basically. So I fell just short of winning the World Championship, but I still got like $1.75 million. You were there.

Roy: I was, too. And for some reason I was cheering you on a lot, because I did have a percentage of your action, which happened the night before, actually. We came to that agreement the night before in a very drunken conversation. Thank you again for winning me a serious amount of money. A lot of people are going to say, like, how can you have this Buddhism thing going on in your life, and at the same time you’re gambling? Now, you and I don’t necessarily see tournament poker as gambling. We see it as a skill game, maybe the same as playing golf. You pay your subscriptions, you join your club, it costs you money, you get enjoyment out of it, and you might win something. But other people might not look at poker the same way. But how do you justify it when people say to you, “Look, hang on, you’re a Buddhist and you’re a gambler. That’s contradictory”?

Andy: Well, the goal of… I mean, I’ve never… completely clear on this myself. I’ve got my own relationship with it. But you could say the goal of Buddhism is quite simply to be present, as simple as that. But the mind works so quickly that it adds stuff on. So the question more is, whatever you do, there’s a million different things you can do that can get in the way of you being present. Now, the thing is, you can do some things which… I mean, if you’re going around killing people, it’s probably harder to, you know, not have your head wrecked, let’s say, just to use an example. But in poker, you know, everybody’s going, “Hey, you know, this is what I want to do.” And it’s, you know, like, in a way, like a lot of gambling: you’re deciding to do it and you fancy doing that. So it’s not like anyone’s forcing you to do it. You just sort of fancy doing that. And it’s curious that, compared to 20 years ago… I mean, I predicted at the time that all of the poker players would start becoming more professional, like sports people, and they’d have psychologists, and they’d all be fit, and they’d be doing meditation, and they’d have therapy, and they’d have all sorts of different coaching. Much as all the other sports have in the last 20 years sort of vastly increased the amount that they use these kinds of tools, well, poker has as well. So in some senses, there’s many other things that would get in the way more of me being a Buddhist than actually playing poker. So getting angry, you know, being lazy, getting bored too easily. So I have a very long, long list of things which can get in the way both of me playing good poker and sort of reaching the zenith of Buddhism.

Roy: Wow. Wow, OK. Now listen, I mean, 1997 World Series of Poker, obviously the world was a very different place, and poker was, I mean, in that era, a mystical thing. People hadn’t heard of or seen poker. I mean, you know, the Americans call it the Moneymaker effect. I like to think Channel 4’s Late Night Poker… Well, no, but listen, we had revolutionary under-table cameras long before the rest of the world. We had that on mainstream TV. And, you know, they say the boom happened at this point, but when a million people were tuning into Channel 4 at an obscure time of night, you know, 11pm on a weekday, to watch six guys play poker, I think we can claim that we played a big hand in that. But you predate that, even. I mean, when did you start? In the mid-90s?

Andy: Mid-80s.

Roy: Whoa. Tell us about those times.

Andy: Wow. Well, I mean, there’s a story which describes it the best. So there would have been very, very little money around. You would have done things like played £1 freezeouts with people. The first tournament I played, it was a free entry, but if you had a rebuy it cost you a fiver. And for the first six months I went in there with no money, because I didn’t have any money. And then one day I brought a fiver, and I had lots of free sandwiches and coffee. So I was a kind of broke student at the time. But to give you an idea of the size of the thing, I always remember that if somebody walked in that people who were regularly there didn’t know, all the heads would turn around, hoping that this guy, whoever it was, or girl, came in would have some money. So you’d be looking at their dress, and you’d see what they did first, but try not to look at them. And let’s say they did have money: if they won, everyone was screwed for a few days. If they lost, that would kind of finance things for a few days. So it was like, you know, there were the odd wealthy businessmen, and a few people like Donnacha O’Dea, but at this point he was playing in England. So he was a former swimmer and probably the most famous poker player back in those days. But really, it was a lot of kind of hustlers, grifters and, you know, small business people. There wasn’t a lot of money around, you know. It was more working class as well. To give you an idea, at that stage in the 80s, there were 180 people, by the late 80s, in the World Championship. We get to when I finished 14th, there were 300, in 1997. And then when I finished fifth in 2005, there was 5,600. So it’s a very, very different world. And when you went abroad first, you’d be one of the three Irish guys there. So the Europeans would almost be the same nationality, there were so few of us. So when you went over to America, it would be like, you know, there’d be Europeans, and then there’d be Americans, and then amongst the Americans there’d be Texans, because you could sort of tell that they were sort of different. So still at that point… Funny enough, when the World Series in the late 70s was played, at one point there were six people left, and it was the Jews against the Texans, because there were three Jews left and three Texans. But this would have described the demographic of the time. There wasn’t a foreign-born winner of the World Championship until the late 80s, and it started in 1970. So Johnny Chan, who was immortalised in the film Rounders, which some people might have seen, with Matt Damon, he was the first foreign-born winner. But that took until 1988, so it took 18 years. So I remember when I played in the World Series, there was only actually…

Roy: Would you… would you recognise that, Andrew?

Andy: Yes, there we have it. Well, do you know what the funny thing was? And you might remember this, but he has a small part in my documentary.

Roy: Right, OK, let’s go that way then. Your documentary. So…

Andy: So just before… So after, in 1997, I finished 14th in the World Series, and then when I came back I kind of discovered meditation. And by the time I got to the 1998 World Series, all I wanted to do… So Stu Ungar had won the World Series for the third time, but he had serious addiction problems, you name it. You know, he was a savant, the best gin rummy player in the world, but he had profound addiction problems, with drugs, gambling, you name it. And so all I wanted to do was beat him the next year. But he didn’t make it down. And what I did was, I brought a documentary crew over to make a film called The Million Dollar Deal, which is on YouTube. But Ungar didn’t make it down from his hotel room. He was just wasted. He couldn’t make it, yeah? He didn’t actually even make it down to play. He was too messed up. He couldn’t even walk down the stairs. And we had a big decision as to whether to let the documentary crew go up and try and speak to him, and I said, “No, no, it’s not right,” you know, because I had a sense of how bad he was. But coincidentally, at the same time, they were filming Rounders. Rounders had just been filmed, so Matt Damon was playing in the World Series. So we actually interviewed him and put it in our documentary. So Matt Damon was in my documentary.

Roy: I’ve got to say, I don’t think you can claim “your documentary”, because there was a good cast, including Donnacha O’Dea, as you mentioned, and, you know, people like the Devilfish, et cetera. It was a fantastic… And it actually got me to playing in public, as opposed to what I did before, which was played privately. Narrated by John Hurt. And yeah, there’s a couple of versions. There’s an American version with a different voiceover, but the original one, made by an Irish documentary company, was a huge success as well.

Andy: Well, no, the reason why I said it was my documentary is I created that. It was my idea. I got the documentary makers. The documentary maker was a friend of my ex-girlfriend. The thing was partially funded by U2. And initially they just wanted to do it on me, but it was my idea to film loads of different people, because I thought it would be a bit boring. So when I say my documentary, I wasn’t thinking me. I had to say it like that because it was my idea, and I got the documentary crew together, so I think of it in those terms, you know. But it stands the test of time now, and John Hurt was amazing as a narrator. I never knew there was an American version, though, so maybe that’s AI.

Roy: Yeah. No, no, it was re-voiced over, and a couple of scenes were sort of taken out of it and whatever. It doesn’t run as well. I mean, it was a huge success, and let’s not forget it was made long before YouTube existed. I mean, you can find it on YouTube now, but at the time it got a lot of airtime on the Sky channels, and yeah, I think it turned into a profitable exercise for the makers, which is quite unusual for documentaries.

Andy: Yeah. My favourite line in it was… there’s an English grinder who was a very, very brilliant poker player and a dour character, yeah? And David Mosley was his… I mean, I think he just used that as a pen name anyway. He’d another name, yeah? But he just ironically used the name of the sort of Nazi sympathiser, David Mosley. But I always think of him as David Mosley. At one point there was an Irish guy who got down, Mick Magee, and there was 27 people played, and the Irish guy had a load of chips, and he messed it up and finished 28th. And whenever David Mosley was interviewed, he said, “Well, that was just a terrible thing to do, you know. There’s 27 prizes. You have money. You’re guaranteed doubling your money, 20 grand, if you get to 28th. And to not do that,” he said, “well, it’s a sin, really, you know, making this kind of mistake,” you know. But there were lots of bits in it, you know. Funny enough, there’s a man at the moment, he’s on my mind. He didn’t make the cut. But he is not very well at the moment, you know. And… sorry, the name’s gone for me. It’s Mick… Mick, do you know, with all the badges and everything?

Roy: Mick McCloskey.

Andy: Mick McCloskey. So anyway, Mick McCloskey, it’s just somebody was talking to me and saying he was maybe in the last stages of life, yeah? And, you know, he’s got dementia. But he’s actually probably going to go in the next kind of week or so. But anyway, I remember him being interviewed for this, and Mick, a wonderful man, but a very boring interview. Yeah. And I just have this memory of him being interviewed, and he was giving detailed analysis of hands. It was never going to make the cut. And the interview went on for about 45 minutes, because I was just there for quite a bit of the interviews, you know, getting the players and stuff like that. And he just kept talking. But in a way, it was iconic, because at that time no one interviewed poker players. So Mick got a chance to, you know, give his piece about anything. It never made the final cut, like a lot of stuff didn’t. But there was another guy who had a bit in it, Cowboy Wolford. A very old guy with a hat and everything like that. He looked like a real cowboy. And famously, they had the World Seniors Championship every year, and he was the host of it for many, many years. And I was told… So you have to be over 50 to play in the World Seniors Championship, and they get 2,000 or 3,000 runners in it now, or more than that, maybe it’s even more, 4,000 or 5,000. But he would do an introduction at the start of the World Seniors Championship, and everyone… you will be told that his introduction would go on and on and on, right? So the first year I turned 50, the tournament started at, whatever, 12. So I thought, right, I’ll show up half an hour late, yeah? Then I won’t have to listen to this. And sure enough, I show up and he’s apparently still talking. I went, “Wow, he’s gone on.” And he finished about five or ten minutes later, and I was told, “No, that was a short one for him.” So he actually spoke for about 40 minutes. We had all of these iconic people in the documentary. The Devilfish is probably the best-known one, English poker player, who died just a few years ago. He described how he got his name, the Devilfish. It was kind of interesting. But you really have to understand that, say, someone like the Devilfish… When I went to Vegas first, in 1996, one of the first things you saw when you went to look at the poker tables was these guys selling jewellery, watches and stuff like that, and they were sort of laid out on poker tables. And he was one of those guys. So it was such a small affair. You’d be surrounded by slot machines and stuff like that. And yeah, it’s quite something, you know. Instead of things being computerised, people’s names were written up. When you entered the World Series main event, when you paid your money, it was written on a giant big whiteboard. So they just write down the names on a giant whiteboard. So it’s…

Roy: Very, very, very different time. But look, that’s really sad about Mick McCloskey. I wasn’t aware of that. A real popular character in Irish poker. So, that’s sad. The documentary is called The Million Dollar Deal, and I thoroughly recommend you watch it. It was a great job, Andy. So we’ll move on, because we’re almost 30 years in the rear-view mirror. The game has changed unbelievably so. We’ve all got our own theories about why and how and when it exploded. Unquestionably the Chris Moneymaker effect: a guy that qualified for peanuts and won the World Series main event as a total amateur, and then with the name Chris Moneymaker appeared on all the chat shows across the States. That did, of course, cause an explosion. But are you happy with the way the game has gone? Were they better times? Because now you turn up, you’re a number, everything’s computerised, and it’s one big money-making machine for me. I mean, the reg fees, the percentages take out the pools… I don’t know, it doesn’t… Let me go another route.

Andy: Yeah, I mean, to explain the reg fee thing, that is… when we were playing… so people don’t… you know, what you’re saying about the reg fee. So you would buy in, and then they take a percentage of the buy-in. But then they had rebuys, which they wouldn’t take a percentage of. But at some point they changed the word rebuy to re-entry, so they could take the percentage off that too. And nearly all tournaments in our day were what’s known as freezeouts, you know, so you couldn’t buy in. Or, you know, I remember tournaments when I first… the first Irish Open I played in, the first person who got knocked out was allowed to buy in. And I think they made that up on the fly, because whoever knocked out was someone… it was like that one guy walking in, you know. That was somebody who was important, and we wanted to give him a kind of option. Or the organisers did. But now it’s changed to endless rebuys, endless Day 1s. So let’s say you’re playing in a €100 tournament. You can have two or three rebuys on, like, six Day 1s, so you can spend, like, two grand on a €100 buy-in tournament. There are very few freezeouts. But the other thing about it is, there are more people playing. You know, there are more people. And then maybe the reason why any of us might like stuff when we’re younger is because we’re younger. We’re getting a bit old, a little bit grumpy. We don’t have the same sort of open-mindedness that we might have had when we were younger. It’s hard to say. I think both things are probably too true. I kind of miss that, but then I look back at some of the stuff that went on then, and it was, in a way, less civilised in many ways. But I kind of like that, you know. So, yeah.

Roy: Yeah, I mean, funny enough, I mean…

Andy: One other thing. Yeah, one other thing is, as you get older, then the conversations that happen around the table, there are less things that you’re interested in. So if you play with a load of 20-year-olds or 30-year-olds, and you’re 50 or 60, you know, they’re communicating about different things. They have different things that they’re talking about. Whereas whenever you were that age, you know, remember when we were younger, “Oh, they’re just old guys.” So it’s quite interesting. That started happening to me. Now, I thought, because of my reputation, you know, it didn’t happen for quite a long time, but it has started to. You know, you can see: “You’re just some old guy.” You know, it’s hilarious, really.

Roy: It’s a lot more intense these days, and I don’t necessarily think there’s so much chit-chat around the table. And it has to be said, and this has always been the case, but if a random person walked into a poker tournament area, they would probably more so think they were at a wake or something or other. I mean, I always say a model could walk through naked, and these guys would look up briefly and get their head straight back into their cards, you know what I mean? So maybe for that reason, TV tries to make it all exciting. But we all know, you know, the World Poker Tours, et cetera, when they’re made into TV shows, all the laughing and the clapping is fake. All the people standing up cheering, et cetera, has all actually been pre-recorded before they started playing. I mean, it’s surprising that poker did as well on TV as it did. It’s no longer on TV. What can we do to bring it back into the public’s…

Andy: Well, I mean, it has moved back to ESPN, the World Series, but that is an outlier. So you are right. And so even though the amount of people playing has increased, it’s not a great TV product. So why is that? They’ve made attempts this year to do that. Now, some of the attempts are good and some of them aren’t, but they’re at least attempting. So for the first time in years, it’s actually got back on to ESPN. It’s going to be interesting to see what they’re doing with it. But in a way, with the absence of the kind of characters that are chatting and that you can identify with, it’s less likely that it’s going to appeal like it did in those days to, you know, somebody rocks in after a few drinks and a kebab, you know, at 12 o’clock, yeah? And they turn it on and they go, “Oh, there, there’s your man, and I wonder what he’s going to say.” And then also the fact that people would put their money in very stupidly in those days. There was always that possibility, whereas now it’s vastly reduced. So the idea of somebody going on a complete flyer with no logic behind it at all, the number of people who will do that has vastly decreased. The amount that people talk has vastly decreased. The amount that people spend time thinking about things has increased, yeah? And yeah, I mean, I tried to get involved a bit in trying to say to people why things need to be different, or how they could be different in terms of how it’s presented. But it’s hard to get through to people. So people don’t understand, when they’re in the industry, that if somebody even uses one or two bits of terminology that the viewer doesn’t understand, you’ve already lost a load of people. And what’s actually happening is they’re using a bunch of terminology. What they’re doing is, the main commentator, usually, on the vast majority of these, and I find it kind of interesting because I’m in poker, they go into detailed analysis of what you should do. And it’s very, very technical.

Roy: Yeah. I very much agree. To me, a commentator’s role is to observe. And yet suddenly they bring in a commentator who really fancies himself, and, let’s be honest, we probably all do. But then they decide to take over: “Oh, what he should have done here, when he’s over this position…” And ultimately there’s now not an expert commentator, but a smart-arse that’s, you know… not necessarily being critical, but saying what he would do. And viewers don’t need or want that. They actually want some colour and…

Andy: Well, the people who are very interested in poker want that. But you should start from the position, if you are somebody who is wanting to make it accessible like it was before, you need to make sure that all of the pieces are pieces that people can relate to. And it doesn’t take much. The test is, if your girlfriend who doesn’t play poker, or your mother, if there’s some chance that they might appreciate a bit of that, that’s the real test, you know. That’s the real test, in my opinion. And I think that’s what happened, because you meet people back, and they sort of remember. You know, they didn’t know what was going on, but they liked the fact that people would have emotional responses. You know, they liked the fact that the commentating wasn’t technical and there was a bit of character to it. But it’s coming back a bit. You know, but I don’t know. It’s a big shift for people to bring it back fully. You know, I mean, in the World Series, it’s not like they brought in a load of new people who are aware enough to bring a bit of life to it. They’ve got the same people, and those people are still a bit locked in, you know.

Roy: Yeah. And the cameras still follow around the same individuals: the Negreanus, the Hellmuths, the Phil Iveys. You’re in a room with thousands and thousands of poker players, and the cameras will make you believe that there’s only three or four people that can really play poker. I think that’s very wrong. I think that’s very, very wrong. Listen, we’ll move out of that area. Let’s go another route now. Let’s talk more so about yourself. I mean, you’ve got, you know, officially 10 million, thereabouts, in banked tournament winnings…

Andy: Well, I think it’s only five or six million, I think. I can’t remember. Where’s the other five million? Where’s the other five million?

Roy: With the greatest respect… Oh, only five or six? Oh God. Well, actually, back when I was acting as your agent…

Andy: Well, no, I have been at the top, apart from two months, I’ve been at the top of the Irish all-time list for 22 years.

Roy: That must be… Those couple of months clearly grate on you.

Andy: Well, it was actually… the good news is it was an English guy, which is great, because Ireland’s a bit like that. We have English people on our football teams, you know, and stuff like that. So it was an English guy, married an Irish girl, so his nationality changed, I don’t know, five or six years ago, or ten years ago, something like that. And it pissed me off. I really want one of these young guys to overtake me, because that might be the key to further success for me. That someone overtakes me, and it just pisses me off, you know. Because, you know, when you’ve been the king this long, it’s a bit weird, you know.

Roy: Well, the king hasn’t won… You know, and I’m not getting to you here: you’ve not won a World Series of Poker bracelet, you’ve not won an EPT or a WPT. But that’s probably testament to the fact that you keep getting results, and you’ve acquired that without the one big life cheque, you know. Is there an Irish Open in you? I know that’s always been one of your goals, and that’s become incredibly difficult to win, because of the rebuys, because of the re-entries, because of the numbers of people. You know, the final table comes around every year now, and you know, you don’t know anybody at it. And maybe that’s the randomness of hold’em. So is hold’em too random at this day and age? Should we get a game that’s slightly more skilful, or add some elements to it that make it a bit more skilful? What’s your thoughts on that?

Andy: No, it’s always had the right balance. And particularly for… I mean, for anyone watching this who would fancy playing just a bit of poker, right? These main events, national championships, are the best value. Why are they the best value? So normally, the Irish Open is a thousand euros into it, and now, with rebuys and extra days and all the rest of it, they have about 4,000 entries, I think. It’s around 4,000 or so. Now, on average, people have a buy-in and a rebuy, so there’s probably 2,000 individual people. I’ve worked this out. So it averages out at that. So you’ve got, like, 2,000 people coming along to play a €1,000 tournament. Now, if you organised a €1,000 tournament in Dublin, you might get 50 people would play it, normally, yeah? So the difference is, you’ve got 1,950 people who wouldn’t normally play this tournament. Let’s knock out another 100 or two for people who are coming from around the country, people who are coming around Europe. You still have a huge amount of people who wouldn’t normally play a tournament of that size. Same with the World Championship. You know, for a $10,000 tournament there’s now about 10,000 people playing, but there’s only 500 people who should really be playing that, who have the skill to play it. So actually, if you’re going to play poker just a little bit, if you’ve got your week or two… I know people who’ve got, you know, the wife allows them a week or two a year to play poker. Well then, playing something like this is not a bad idea. And you’ve actually got the best chance of winning, better than, in a way, smaller tournaments, because, you know, there’s a lot of people who shouldn’t be playing a tournament of that size relative to their skill.

Roy: Yeah. For the general gambler, you’re not going to walk into a betting shop with a thousand euros and walk out the door winning 200,000. That’s not going to happen. No matter how brave you are, your bets won’t be accepted at a certain point. But of course, people aren’t going to parlay a thousand to 200,000 anyway. In poker, that can be done and achieved. So, I mean, it’s got a great deal going for it.

Andy: Yeah. And about half the people, maybe, or something like that, will have qualified by satellites, or a huge number. So you can rock up to one of these things with 150 quid and try and win a satellite. You know, one in 10 people get a ticket, or something like that, for 120 quid, and if you don’t get there, you don’t get there, you know.

Roy: Talking of big parlays, shall we talk about your most recent final table appearance at the Irish Open? I think you rocked up at the venue with very little money, and did good. I mean, what were the figures? I mean, you were down to a case, covered, 100 quid, yeah?

Andy: I had a lot of money for a long time, and then I had a few speed bumps in life a few years ago. So the divorces, house burning down, you name it. So at that particular moment, I walked into the venue with 200 quid. Now, I’ve nearly won the Irish Open about six or seven times, so no one’s got a record like me in terms of nearly winning it. But I walked in with 200 quid, played the first tournament, which was 200 quid, split that with a few people, got six grand out of it, got into the main event, one entry, only one entry. And I think there was 3,000… I don’t know how many people there were. 3,000, something around that. But I managed to make it to the final table and finished fifth, and I got 100,000. So I essentially turned 200 quid into 100,000 in a week. And what was interesting about it was, it’s a festival, so there’s all these different tournaments, yeah? You know, so I didn’t lose my chips. I bought into a tournament on the first day, then took a couple of days off, then bought in to the Irish Open, and went through four or five days of that. And then it was only, you know, on the last day, with five people left, I lost my chips. So I actually went through a whole festival without losing my chips until the last hour. It wasn’t just that I went through the tournament; I went through the whole festival, which is kind of funny, you know.

Roy: And I think… I want to point out that when you say, like, “my house burnt down”, that was fact. And your winnings restored your thatched roof, correct?

Andy: Yeah, and I was in it, you know, anyone who’s been in a divorce will know that they’re frequently not very pleasant, you know. And for me, as a poker player, I’ve had a couple of those in my life, and my game just falls to pieces, you know. I mean, especially when kids are involved, it’s very traumatic, you know. Everyone knows that, yeah. But for me, because I’m not a cold-hearted, scientific kind of bloke, unfortunately, when difficulties happen, even though I have lots of skills to work with them, my ability to focus to the degree I need to playing is reduced dramatically, you know. And money just disappears very fast, you know. So I’ve had a few phases of a few years like that in my life where that’s happened, you know. And I mean, fair play to the people who seem to be able to… I know people… The guy who’s the all-time leading money winner in tournament poker, Bryn Kenney, he’s got about 90 million in kind of earnings. And when he discusses this matter of difficult things happening outside poker, he just goes, “Yeah, they just never affect me. I just play just as well.” Yeah, because when I’m playing poker, I’m just playing poker. And I’m looking at a guy like that, and, oh, you know, that’s amazing, I’d love to be like that, you know. But I’m not. So yeah, it’s funny. And an interesting thing about poker, I mean, I think I still… because, you know, it’s only a few years ago, and I came the closest… That same year, I came the closest. A few months later, I went to the World Series, and I won $100,000 there as well. But I came third in a World Series event, which was the closest I’ve come. I’ve made a final table maybe seven or eight times in different things. And I was basically one card away from winning the whole thing, and I was winning, and I was ahead. What’s interesting is, in boxing, you hit a point where you can’t box any more, unless you’re George Foreman or something like that. But at a certain age, you can’t do it any more. As we get older, it gets more difficult. There’s only a handful of poker players over 60 who perform at a sort of world-class level. So it’s very easy to think you can still perform at a high level, but you can’t. And how do you know? It’s tricky, because things move on. And I think as you get older, to keep that level of intensity and focus and newness, and somehow let go of all of the beats and difficulties you’ve had in life and all the rest of it, for all of us becomes, you know, a more difficult thing. And I think one of the reasons why this isn’t talked about much is because we get older slowly, so we don’t notice it. So the next time you see someone old who’s kind of got a twitch and is dribbling or something like that, and you think, “Oh, fucking Jesus. That old guy,” or “that old girl.” Yeah, every day we’re moving one step closer to that. So Roy, me and you are quite a few steps closer to that, but we don’t realise it. We sort of don’t realise it, because it just happens very, very slowly, you know, and we don’t notice it. So poker is pretty unusual, because technically you can keep playing until you’re dead, you know. Physically, as long as you can see the cards and you can keep going, you can keep going, you know. So famously, I remember, one of the most famous gamblers ever, you know, Jimmy the Greek, he was playing at the highest stakes in the 60s and 70s. And then, very close to his death, he’s there playing in one of the smallest games in the casino. And this guy goes, “Hey, you know, you’re Nick the Greek,” or “Jimmy the Greek, you’re that guy. You’re one of the biggest gamblers ever. How can you play in this tiny game?” And this guy just goes, “It’s action, isn’t it?” So there’s an element of that. And I mean, I know you yourself now. I think you always had a bit of a hate-love relationship with poker. It didn’t inspire you so much; other things inspired you. But poker, even when you were younger, you know, you were inspired in spots. You might like a venue or a particular type of tournament, but, you know, you’re frequently battling with being inspired. I mean, I’m fortunate that I’ve maintained an inspiration. But am I youthful enough? Am I smart enough now? You know, you’re up against kids who are… they’re fucking good, you know. I mean, they might annoy you a bit, but what they’re doing is, they’re all in little groups, chatting to each other and spending time and getting better and better and looking at their faults and all the rest of it. Whereas me, I’m just sort of sitting there thinking about it. All my peers are not doing that. So I don’t know. Is it possible to beat these guys? It’s possible, but you have to actually be pretty honest with yourself.

Roy: You’ve planted a fair few seeds of doubt in yourself there, I believe. But, you know, where are we going to be in five years’ time? Or sorry, where are you going to be in five years’ time? Do you believe that… I mean, your passion is still there. You love playing poker, I know that much. You can have ambition, obviously. But realistically, with those seeds of doubt you’ve planted in yourself, do you think there’s a… it’s not, say, a big title? Well, actually, because I think you play more for the glory than the money. Correct me if I’m wrong. But do you think in the next five years you are going to get a big result of some semblance?

Andy: The basis on which I will get a big result, and I suppose this is where, you know, bizarrely, the first question you asked me was, you know, one of the first bits we were talking about was Buddhism and poker: how do you put them together? So I do have some advantages. And at the moment, I would do five and a half hours’ preparation every morning, which is involving various meditations, various reflections, a bit of poker study, swimming in the sea. I do about a half hour every day of swimming in the sea. Walking. So it’s my own sort of training routine. And what that provides is it provides a sort of space. So it’s a bit like… my way of winning will be a bit like The Karate Kid, you know? Anyone remembers The Karate Kid? So these guys might have a hundred moves, but if I do my five or six moves really well, well then, you know, I think I should be able to beat them. And there are advantages. So, to the point of what’s changed in poker, if you watch the highest level of poker on television, which is Triton, if anyone’s watching that on television, they’re the best poker players in the world. The buy-ins are ranging from, you know, 15,000 to a million. The average buy-in in those tournaments is like 50,000 or 60,000. So you see all the best poker players. Very few of them even try to read people. It’s almost shocking. So technically, they’re making all sorts of brilliant decisions mathematically. But literally, you’ll have a situation where the money goes in from the other player, and you’re sitting there, all the cards are out, and you have to try and figure out: are they bluffing or not? So this has happened throughout time in poker. If you look back at coverage of older poker tournaments, the one thing everybody did was they looked at the other person, trying to figure out whether they were bluffing or not. Now, some people were not very good at it and some people were very good at it. But what’s happened is, you’ll find in the highest buy-ins, you would not believe the amount of pots there are which are key pots, but the guy is not even looking at the other guy. And I’m spotting stuff and I’m watching it, in terms of, you know, how people are moving, et cetera, et cetera, which is a different level than most of the top players in the world. So if I combine a really still mind, being at ease, being really focused, with some reading abilities, and then I have to have a certain amount of understanding of the modern game, which requires quite a lot of technical study, but I do it with my own style… well then, you know, maybe so, maybe so. Because it’s hard to say, you know.

Roy: Make sense of this for me. Most people want to play poker to win money. You’ve said that Triton is the top echelon of the game. If it has 50 of the world’s best poker players all there competing amongst themselves, then there can be no value in that. There can be…

Andy: No, but the value becomes because a certain amount of… So these are the best of the best in terms of poker, yeah?

Roy: Are they, Andy, really?

Andy: Yes, yes, they are. So, but it doesn’t mean that they don’t have weaknesses. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t quite a few big recreational players, or top-class amateurs, or a lot of Asian players, who… some of them aren’t so good. So the buy-ins attract… Let’s say you have a tournament with 100 people. If you attract 25 people who have very little chance, well then, that’s what keeps the ship going, essentially. Or not much chance, yeah? But it doesn’t attract me, the idea of playing these. What attracts me was something I mentioned earlier, is playing main events. That was always my preferred way of living. I wouldn’t want to… I mean, I wouldn’t want to play in those tournaments, from a kind of lifestyle thing. It’s sort of a five-star experience, with lots of, you know, appreciation and love and respect. And hey, you know, I prefer something a bit messier. Now, I don’t like horrible environments, but I prefer something where you just have lots of ordinary people, you know, these main events. And I think I have a decent chance of posting good results in those, in those kinds of things: Irish Opens, the World Series main event. It’s the best-value tournament in the world, simply because more people play in it that shouldn’t be playing in it.

Roy: Yeah, I did, I did. I played it one year, and there’s a character at the table, lovely fella, had a wood-sawing business somewhere or other in Wyoming or wherever. But he opened, he said, “This is the first time I’ve actually played live poker in my life,” and there he is for $10,000 on the line. So yeah, I can’t disagree with that one. Andy, we’re going to wrap things up soon. Give me a bit of Nostradamus here. I mean, more people are playing online poker now than ever, which surprises me. Will that continue to grow, and where will poker be in five or ten years’ time, per se?

Andy: Yeah, I think it is. Well, I mean, the fact that poker went back on to ESPN, for the first time in quite a few years, is a sign that it’s growing. Also, I think the gambling and the poker are joined up a bit in quite a few of the companies. So the GG Poker, it’s a Chinese company, bought the World Series for half a billion. Now, obviously, as there always has been in poker, there’s a connection between poker and gambling. Now, the smart operators understand that if you can sort of let those two live together a bit, then they kind of publicise each other, you know, essentially. So the fact that these huge operators have come in, and they see that, yeah, these are marketing tools… It looks like it’s kind of moving forward, and they are making some efforts to make the commentating and things like that, and make the presentation of these events, more broad. You know, there are minds trying to understand what went well in the poker era. Now, the problem they have is the characters, in some ways, aren’t as open. The better poker players, they’re overall not so open. So yeah, but I think it feels like it’s on the up. How long that lasts, I don’t know. Hopefully long enough for me to win a couple of million.

Roy: That would be good. That’d be good. And I’ll take a share again, if I could. Listen, last question. Give us, if you’ve got an anecdote, great; if not, give us your recollections or memories of two or three guys or girls that you really enjoyed playing with and you found interesting characters for one reason or another.

Andy: I must say, it’s coming to mind, people who’ve died, you know. Yeah, because it’s sort of… Jimmy Langan, who was Ireland’s top table tennis player for many years, but he also won the Irish Open a couple of times, and he was one of the first Irish people to play in the World Championship. He had severe bipolar disorder, but he was a very, very interesting man. And he had a furniture shop down on Capel Street in Dublin. It’s a big shopping street. There’s a lot of furniture shops and stuff like that there, and so he was competing with other furniture shops. But he would employ old, broken-down poker players of various sorts. There was, you know, Johnny Suitcase, a guy that very few people remember. He had tattoos, English guy, moustache, tattoos all over his hands, you know. And he was very old at that point, and unemployable. Jimmy had him in there. There was another guy, I won’t mention his name, but he was very good at stealing, yeah? This guy was very particularly good at stealing, yeah? And he had him in there as well. But he reckoned that the best salesman he ever had in the place was… he put this exotic cockatoo bird in a cage up there, and everyone would remember the furniture shop because this exotic bird was in there that would speak and stuff. And he reckoned that bird… But he was one of my mentors. And I would go down, because in those days there was no internet, no learning, no tools, no solvers, no nothing. If you were lucky, you got to talk to some guy who’d done more than you, and the bits of wisdom you would get from him would kind of keep you going. And he unfortunately died pretty young. I know he had severe bipolar disorder, so I think he was always battling that. Noel Furlong is someone else who comes to mind, who was the only Irish guy to ever win the World Series. And again, a character like that. The guy was a mercenary. He was a safe cracker, right? He ran the biggest ever carpet business in Ireland. I remember him showing me his bank account, oddly, at one point, which had 65 million in it, yeah? He famously was a huge gambler. He trained horses. He was a huge, huge gambler. He’d take on the bookies. I’m not a horse guy, but he won a million off the bookies at one point. It was on the front page of the papers.

Roy: Yes. Destriero, at the…

Andy: He’d be flying in his helicopter to the Arc de Triomphe. What a life, what a life this guy had. I know for a fact that after he won the World Series in 1999, his celebration was going for a quiet dinner with Terry Rogers, who was Ireland’s famous bookmaker, you know, very eccentric guy, the guy who actually brought poker to Ireland. And that was it. And I know that the room he stayed in was a tiny little room at the bottom of Binion’s, with no light and no nothing and all the rest of it, and the guy was a multi-millionaire. And what he would do when he wasn’t playing poker is, there were five different Greyhound buses, yeah, that would go to different places around Las Vegas, and you’d see all of the, you know, away from the glitz and life, there’d be the shanty towns and the trailer parks and all the rest of it. And what he would do on days off, or, you know, if he’d a few hours, is he’d get on one of these buses and go round looking at these people. And many of the people always underestimated Furlong, because they didn’t get it. He wasn’t technically proficient. He was a kind of bully, a reader of people, he was brave, et cetera, et cetera. And, you know, he nearly won the World Series a few years before, but then he won it in ’99, and the Americans just thought he was some foolish oaf who got lucky. They didn’t understand that Furlong was… I mean, I’m pretty good at reading people in poker, I’d be up there, but he was a whole different level, yeah. And he would tell me how he would read people, and the main way he’d read people, he would look at how their hands moved. You know, so it’s almost a bit… you could feel from the life story I’ve given you there that he… And he was publicity-shy, but he was the most streetwise guy I’d ever met. You know, he was so streetwise. And he just read… he felt it as a game of kind of reading people. That was his thing. And then I’m thinking of Colette Doherty as well, for some reason. I have a story coming up. She died not so long ago, but she won the first Irish Open where the winner got a ticket to go and play in the World Championship. So she was actually the first Irish person, I think, to go over in that format, to go over and play. And there’s a silly story about her. The joke was that she never had any change. And then, to tip the dealer or whatever, she needed a euro or pound change chip, so she would just get change off you to tip the dealer, and never give you the money back unless you asked. And over the years she reckoned she’d made thousands from this particular thing. But it’s sort of stuff like that, you know. I mean, one other crowd was the entire Dublin Mafia, when I first played poker. So there I was, 21, and you’re going into this world. I’m a kind of green guy, yeah? You’re going into this world where it’s a totally mythical world. You used the word earlier. It’s a mythical world. It’s chips and green baize and smoke, and all of these people, you know. But there was a whole family, about five or six of them, and there’d only be 30 people playing, so you’d be just at a final table with three of these guys, and you, you know, and they all wouldn’t bet against each other. But they were little old ladies, you know, and old men. But just the whole image of this kind of thing, it’s very hard to recreate. So maybe, you know, I still can feel the chips back then, because they put more money into the chips. They weren’t all plastic or composite. They were kind of wooden chips, almost. They were…

Roy: Clay. It was like a sort of a clay compound, yeah.

Andy: Yeah, whatever. But I just remember that the chips all felt…

Roy: Weightier.

Andy: They all felt different, you know. Everything felt and looked different. It was a different kind of thing, you know. So the guy who was the number two to the main guy who was running the first poker place that I played in, he was a guy who actually escaped from H-Block dressed as a priest. Yeah, so H-Block is where they interred, sort of, IRA. So the number two guy was a lovely man, Frank McGuigan. But he… that’s one of the things that he did. He actually escaped from H-Block back in the day, you know. And as a young student, you know, who lived… even though I grew up in Belfast, quite a, you know, protected environment, because I was from a middle-class background, yeah, and you weren’t allowed to wander around, yeah, to meet people like that, at that age, was… I don’t know, I can’t even put it into words. It seems more and more important the older I get, you know. So…

Roy: Reminiscing. Right, Andy, we will decide where we’re going to be in five years’ time. In five years’ time, we’ll talk again, in the year 2031. But in all seriousness, it’s been delightful. Some great Irish poker history there, and your enthusiasm remains, so I’m going to wish you the best of luck in getting another life-changing result sometime in the not-too-distant. Thank you for joining the Odds-On podcast, brought to you by bestbettingsites.co.uk. Please gamble responsibly, please enjoy your gambling. And yeah, Andy, please be lucky. Thank you so much, it’s been a pleasure.

Andy: My pleasure. Pleasure, Roy.

Roy: Ciao, ciao. Talk to you soon.

Read full transcript