EPT London: Change of plans for Drake as qualifier builds into Day 2
It’s sometimes good policy to enter a poker tournament with low expectations. Even the game’s biggest superstars know that this is a volatile world where roughly 85 percent of any tournament field is going home empty handed, regardless of how perfect your decision making.
Even so, Ian Drake set himself a very low bar at EPT London. He planned to play Day 1A of the Main Event and had his flight back to the Isle of Man booked for today, Day 2. In short, he’d not even expected to make it through the opening 10 levels of play.
Raising the bar
But at the mid-point of Saturday’s action, Drake realised he may have been underselling himself.
“I was chip-leader for a while,” he said this morning. “I saw my name on Poker News for the first time.”
By the end of Day 1A, Drake had bagged 170,500 chips and sat 13th overall. “It was a good day,” he confirmed, adding that he quickly needed to change his flight.
Not only that, he booked two more plane seats, bringing his fiancé Katie and their 6-year-old son Jasper to London to be with him to enjoy the ride as well. It’s school half term, so a lot of things fell into place.
Ian Drake found a much better way to spend Monday than flying home
How it all started
Drake’s ride actually began on PokerStars, where he fired up a few satellite tournaments with a trip to London very much in mind. He won a package to both the UKIPT Main Event and the EPT Main Event, and so packed his bags for the big smoke.
Drake, who is 35, has been a poker player for a long time, and says he used to play far more before a successful business — he is a car dealer — and a young family intervened.
The businesses can now “look after themselves” for a few days, Drake said, and Jasper is getting to the age where childcare is not quite so labour-intensive. So Drake is beginning to play more again — and he has picked up two cashes already this week, in the £500 Mystery Bounty and the £2,000 UKIPT High Roller.
All the encouragement you need
The Isle of Man is a good place to be interested in poker: it’s the global HQ of PokerStars, among other gaming companies, and so its population of around 85,000 is uniquely concentrated with card players. There was a successful UKIPT event there in 2013, which Drake played, and Drake says he has friends who are both current and former PokerStars employees.
No doubt a deep run in this event will be just the encouragement he needs to continue his return to poker, and enhance his standing among those keen poker watchers from home.
Either way, he can probably cover the fees to change his flight now.
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