EPT San Remo

Day 1 actually went pretty well for me. My starting table was fairly soft with the exception of my good friend Nasr being seated to my immediate left. I wanted to try and reduce spewing by playing as tight as possible before the antes came into play which seemed to work pretty well for me. My stack was around average until the last two levels when I defended my BB with 99 after an UTG raise and a call from MP. The flop was 9cJc2h and I got it in vs. KK, catapulting my stack to 50k.

During the last level I lost a 10k coinflip and ended the day with 42k chips. Day 2 didn't start off all that particularly well either. After raising JJ from MP, an Italian defended his BB and saw a flop of 6s9hTh. He donked, I raised, he jammed and I made the call only to be shown 78o. In retrospect I may have been able to get away from the hand after his flop 3bet due to his behavior in the hand. There were two crucial tells he gave off but I chose to ignore them and paid the price.

I still had around 20k left when I made a very questionable, if not outright terrible resteal A2 from my BB vs an unknown button raiser. I lost nearly my whole stack vs his AQ and had just around 6bb left. I did grind those up to around 10bb when I found 89o first in from the button and jammed. The BB made the call with KQ and I was busto. This was probably one of the only tournaments lately where I was really not satisfied with my play. That feeling sucks.

The rest of the time I've just been relaxing in San Remo. As always there has been tons of gambling going on. I'm down in sidebets so far but can break even if a certain someone wins San Remo today :) We've also been running 5-5nl home games almost every night at the hotel just for fun. Those games obv get pretty action crazy and so far I've been a huge donator, I think I'm down around 3k so far. Largest hand for me was getting it in for 1k preflop with 99 vs Ramin's 72o. He somehow managed to luckbox a straight, nh.

Other than that we've been trying to hit up some of the restaurants around San Remo but the options are not that plentiful. Tomorrow we all leave for Milan so I'm sure there are going to be tons of good options there. Actually I just checked and there's a Nobu in Milan, ship it. I'll try and take some pictures of the trip, so far I haven't taken my camera outside it's case at all. Time for breakfast now, cya!

Italia

Time is flying! Tomorrow I already leave for San Remo, which I am really looking forward to. The only downside is that the weather forecast says it's supposed to be raining there until Tuesday :( WTF, it's mid-spring in Italy, there's not supposed to be rain!

We'll stay in San Remo until next Friday and then a large group of us are going over to Milan for three days to hang out until EPT Monte Carlo begins. I think that all three legs of this trip are gonna be a total blast, it's gonna be kind of a pre-Vegas gettogether. The crazy thing is that Vegas is just over a month away as well!

Anyway I play Day 1b in San Remo, it's about time that I made my mark at one of these tournaments. Ciao!

German Highrollers

Now that my two episodes of German Highrollers have been broadcast I wanted to talk a little bit about the show and hands. I felt that I played pretty well with a few minor exceptions such as 3-barreling Ben Kang in a spot where a player like him is pretty much never folding. I obv didn't run that well as a whole, matter of fact, I was even the biggest loser for that day of shooting with -12.5k.

When I heard that Strassmann folded an overpair to me vs my 89s I was pretty shocked at first but since we haven't played much together I can certainly understand him taking the cautious route in that hand. He told me that he heard I was a very tight player so I guess that helped me considerably for that hand, though he began to loosen up quite a bit as the show progressed (and the alcohol kept flowing).

I thought Johannes Steindl played extremely well throughout the whole show and is certainly not undeservingly the biggest winner by a wide margin. Though a few things he did were pretty complex for the average Joe tv watcher and make him look crazy (OOP floats for example), he really had the whole table under control. He put himself in some very high variance spots, such as the A8o vs KJo all-in preflop, but it paid off.

I really would have loved to play with Hermann Pacha but unfortunately he was already gone when I arrived. Maybe next time I guess :) Also, if there is a next time, I'll need to make sure to have plenty of money with me. Because I got invited just one day before filming, I was "only" able to bring 20k with me, just two stacks. Once I was down a stack I had to make sure not to go too crazy because I would have busted out and had no chance to reload unless I borrowed money from someone and that's not something I like to do.

Anyway, I've been told that another one of these shows is in the pipeline, perhaps even just the "young guns" so I hope that all works out. In other news, maybe it's because of the weather, but I have lost all motivation to play online these past couple weeks. I don't go to San Remo until the 18th so I still have a little time to catch myself and get some hours in but I'm finding it increasingly difficult to keep my focus up while playing. I'm sure it's just a little funk that will go away soon enough.

Weight loss and TV

Vienna wasn't very successful for me, though I did have a lot of fun there. On my final night I watched Kansas get joked out of the NCAA tournament so now March Madness is half as interesting for me. My bracket is dead and I couldn't care less who wins, though I am thinking UConn is a good pick as overall winner.

Stefan Jedlicka, loser of three previous weight loss bets (including one against me), has agreed to do one final weight loss bet and I get to bet against him. The bet is in a different league than all my previous bets so I'm a little worried about it, but we'll see. I gave him odds, so it's his €10k vs my €15k and he needs to drop 11kg by early September. There are a few minor details that I don't feel like writing down because they are not that important, but all in all it should be a REALLY close bet.

In other news, my chair finally arrived in the right size and I am now finally sitting in perfect comfort. People have asked me for a review and all I can say is that if you spend a lot of time at your desk, getting a comfortable office chair is definitely an investment that is totally worth it. Everything on the Herman Miller chair is customizable and adjustable, so you can make the chair pretty much perfectly fit to your back. I don't have any back problems (yet) and this chair should certainly help keep it that way for quite some time.

Finally, I make my TV debut this Sunday on DSF at 13:30. The show "German Highrollers" has received pretty good reviews afaik from the poker community, mainly it's Hermann Pacha who has a ton of new fans due to his fearless play. Unfortunately he was already gone when I was there, so the action is not quite as fishy as you've seen so far. I made some tight folds that I'm not sure about, I'm curious to see how they come off on TV. We'll see on Sunday.