Recently a family legacy was born after Irish poker player Eoghan O’Dea won the World Series of Poker (WSOP) Gold Bracelet, 22 years after his father won the same title. The 36-year-old Dublin native, who has been playing poker professionally for nearly two decades, is the son of renowned poker pro, Donnacha “The Don” O’Dea.
From Olympian to poker star
Yet Eoghan’s father is more than a fellow member of the WSOP’s elite gold bracelet club. The son of actors Denis O’Dea and Siobhán McKenna, The Don previously represented Ireland in the 1968 Olympics, and was the first-ever Irish swimmer to swim 100 meters in under a minute.
To his mother’s dismay, however, poker was his first love. Donnacha learned poker from his father, Denis, who reportedly played the game with Clark Gable and Grace Kelly on the set of Mugambo. By 1982, The Don was in Las Vegas for the WSOP tournament, and in 1998, he won his gold bracelet.
A chip off the old block
Like his grandfather and father before him, Eoghan grew up with poker, playing online under the username “intruder123.” At an interview with historian Turtle Bunbury, Donnacha revealed that Eoghan is largely self-taught because the elderly O’Dea initially didn’t want his son to become a professional player.
Despite this, Eoghan began playing poker in his 20s, working his way up to bigger tournaments. Finally, he started playing at WSOP tournaments towards the end of the early 2000s.
The reward for persistence
Eoghan’s journey to his first gold bracelet win was anything but easy. He started out strong, making headlines in 2008 for winning over half a million dollars in two separate tournaments over the course of two weeks. And in 2011, he made it to the WSOP’s November Nine, or the top 9 contestants in the tournament for that particular year.
In both 2017 and 2019, however, he was eliminated from the WSOP after making it to 6th place. But like many pros that came before him, the younger O’Dea knew the secret of how to win at poker: learning to accept defeat.
Mental toughness is important in the sport not just in dealing with high stakes and pressure, but also in picking yourself up after a bad beat.
The reality is that nobody gets to win every single time, and players like Eoghan have learned to be relentless, coming back to the poker table time and time again to earn the win they aspire to get. And in 2020, he finally got his first taste of gold.
Making a name for himself
Donnacha was the first person Eoghan contacted after his win. The tournament, which was held online due to the pandemic, had ended at around 5:30 in the morning, so Eoghan woke his father up with the startling news that he had both entered and won that year’s WSOP.
And while he’s succeeded in solidifying a legacy that began two generations earlier, Eoghan is determined to carve a name for himself in the world of poker in and out of Ireland.
“My aim now is to go one better than [my father] and win another,” he disclosed. “That would be unreal.”