Petrovice Part 1

Day 1
13:00 - 1 hour to departure. Pack all the last minute things.
Toothbrush; check,
Clothes; check,
Laptop; check,
Money; check,
Passport; still gotta pack that. Walk down to the cabinet where I keep it. Open it up. No passport. OK. Check the desk. No passport. Head upstairs and take a look around. No passport. "You gotta be fucking kidding me." Search the whole apartment. Still no passport. Please someone, say this is a joke! It's already 14:00 and I'm supposed to head out the door! What am I supposed to do now? My body is now drenched in sweat. "This can't be happening," I think to myself. Cancelling the trip is not an option. Sutti offers me his passport. We do not look alike at all, but it's my only choice right now. I go pick up Olli and Rainer and off we go. This better work. We contemplate putting me in the trunk and trying to drive through, but decide that the risk/reward ratio is simply not good enough, because if I get caught back there, we'll all get busted for smuggling.

Fast forward to 18:30, Germany - Czech Republic border control. I'm sitting in the back, pretending to sleep, with my head turned down and a baseball cap covering a good portion of my head. Olli hands them our three passports. They glance over them and wave us through! What a relief! My first bluff of the day is successful! We had originally booked a hotel in Germany, but crossing the border every day is not an option for me. I'm in Czech Republic and I'm staying until Sunday for sure. Luckily someone found us a pretty nice little house just two minutes away from the casino, it's pretty sweet! We met Sunshine and selecti, two very nice people and quite talented poker players!

19:30 - They begin the qualification tournaments for the final on Sunday. The qualifications have a buy-in of €50, with rebuys and an addon as well. There are 9 players per table and the top 3 qualify for the final. I definitely like that, because it basically turns it into a SNG, which I consider to be one of my strengths. The other players at the table were not particularly strong, and after a few hands I had a pretty good idea of where I stood. I quickly doubled my 1500 starting stack, when I turned my flush against mid-pair and an open ended straight draw. Then I acquired another 2k+ when my AA ran into Olli's 66. I was in really good shape when it came time to addon. I purchased the addon for €50 and had a stack of around 8k.

When action resumed, they started dropping like flies. We were down to 4 in no time and the bubble play began. 3 spots were being contended for by 4 players: Olli, myself, Mr. Know-it-all, and Old Chiller guy. The action got really tense and it really became a battle. After well over 30 minutes of play, the blinds were out of control at 800/1600. I only had around 6k, Olli had 4k+, Old Chiller had 4k, and Mr. Know-it-all had 10k+. Then it finally happened. Old Chiller shoved all in UTG with KQo and Olli called in the SB with AJo. An ace flopped, the hand held up and it was over! Olli and I both qualified in our very first try, it couldn't have gone much better. Sunshine and Rainer also qualified on other tables (selecti unfortunately bubbled).

23:00 - A €1/2 PL Hold'em table fills up. I buy-in for the max (€200) and am ready to see some action. I ended up playing until 03:30. In those 4 and a half hours, I was pretty card dead. Not one time did I have AA, KK, QQ, JJ, or TT. My best hand was 99, with which I took down a small pot. I took down a pretty decent pot with AQ as well, but that was it as far as decent cards go. I tried a few limps and raises with marginal cards like one-gap suited connectors, but I didn't get too much going with those. The good news is, I wasn't bleeding chips either. I was not playing any two suited cards (the same can not be said for the other players though) just out of boredom, so I was able to hang on to my winnings. At the end of the night I cashed out €299, I can live with that.