Deauville Denouement

Thanks for everyone who shot me a good luck message; my run came to an end with three hands left to go on the third day of play and 26 players remaining in the event. Mike McDonald and Peter Eastgate both had a pair of kings and my A8 failed to snap them off to triple up to a 1M-chip stack. Both of those guys are going into the penultimate day with strong stacks, and I won't be surprised if they both make the final table.

About 30 minutes after they chopped up my stack, the three of us sat down for a nice, late dinner at a local bistro. That's poker!

I guess this was just about my deepest run in a live tournament in over two years, which is simultaneously lame while also being slightly encouraging and also somewhat standard when considering the scope of variance. The money I cashed for, €16,500, is not enough to clear my makeup, not even close, and there really is not a huge moral victory in taking 25th per se, but I did manage to get a couple things right during the tournament, mostly in the realm of staying focused and also overcoming the jet lag in order to play halfway decent tournament poker for three days.

More importantly I guess, I liked the atmosphere here and had unanimously positive experiences with the individuals I encountered, players from all over the world--from Mexico to Lebanon, Scotland to Spain, Ukraine to Canada and everywhere in between. And especially the French locals, who made the experience very easygoing and pleasant at every step.

It's something that doesn't get discussed much, but the poker revolution of the 21st century has allowed an amazing diversity of people and cultures to literally come to the table and interact in a way that has probably never existed before.

Meet Me in the Morning

It's 7AM in Deauville, France and still pitch dark. A steady rain is falling outside in the courtyard of the sprawling Normandy Barrière Hotel as I sit up in the bed of my spacious room, unable to sleep. The room is upholstered from the walls to the chairs with a beige-heavy mural featuring images of hunters and gatherers (mostly gatherers it seems), but it's basically a very nice room. Picture a less ominous version of The Shining in an overcast In Bruges, and you'll have a decent idea of the setting.

One significant challenge related to playing EPT events is fading the jet lag and aligning my circadian rhythm with the local time, so hopefully I will be sharp when I sit down tomorrow to play this €5,000 buyin poker tournament. It's possible that I have been unduly obsessing on this issue, but after ignoring it during the EPT-London event of 2009 and being noticeably dysfunctional on day one and busting early, I will at least attempt to coordinate my sleep schedule this time.

To me, one of the great, random pleasures of traveling is arriving burnt out in a foreign hotel room and falling asleep in the bed for an indeterminate amount of time, waking up and momentarily having no idea where I am. The sensation lasts for a matter of seconds, but it's a glorious moment.

I had to forgo that delight for this trip as part of my plan to adjust to local time as quickly as possible, and anyway, the journey to get to Deauville involved a couple extra steps beyond the norm. I took a direct flight from LAX to CDG that departed at 7PM PST and arrived in Paris around 2:30PM local time. The flight was relatively painless, and after a few hours of sleep, a couple of attempts to use Air France's totally crappy entertainment system, listening to a podcast or two, and reading a portion of Julie Holland's excellent memoir, Weekends at Bellevue, we were pretty much there.

And then there was the trains, a straightforward but still somewhat exhausting process. Getting from the terminal at CDG to Gard du Nord was simple enough, but while waiting on the line for a taxi to take me to Gare St Lazare, I was struck by the bone-chilling cold that is a trademark of urban winters.

By the time I got to St Lazare I had to go to the bathroom, but first I wanted to purchase my tickets for the train to Deauville. The "billet" machine made it easy enough to purchase the ticket until it refused to read the magnetic strip on two credit cards on both machines, so I was forced to wait on line. It was around 5PM when I got the ticket finally, and the train was scheduled to leave at 5:45, so I had time to use the public bathroom, for €.50, and smoke a cigarette.

Back home in Santa Monica, I almost never smoke anymore, but a developing habit on the road has been to buy that blue pack of Camel Lights, which I carry around with me as a sort of portable, smokeable comfort blanket. It's not a great pattern, since it threatens to erode my ability to remain abstinent when I am home and perhaps find me venturing back into Serious Scumbag Smoker territory. But that's where I'm at right now in my relationship with cigarettes.

As the train left the station at 5:45 I drifted off to sleep, occasionally startled awake by the thump of a train passing in the other direction. Is it just me, or did they build the railroad tracks in Europe rather close to each other? In any case, it's a similar sensation to that jolt of turbulence that wakes me up in the middle of a plane nap and momentarily puts the fear of death in me.

On the train, I woke up and looked at my watch. It was 6:45 exactly, but I thought it was 5:45 and that we hadn't left the station. Once I realized that, I tried to communicate my confusion to the woman sitting across from me, working on her laptop, but the language barrier made it more goofy than interesting. In any case, I guess that incident will have to suffice for my "waking up having no idea where I am" moment for the trip.

***

I know it's basically impractical and a bit nutty to travel across the world to play one poker tournament, and my friend Paul Smith (the poker player not the fashion designer) ribbed me for embarking on such a strenuous trip.

I explained to him that I feel genuinely lucky to have the opportunity to do things like this, even if the sunk costs of the tournament prize package I won on PokerStars (a €1600 hotel allotment is built into the total value of the satellite win) and the physical drain of the undertaking does not seem like a sensible option when compared to staying at home.

But it's not a false sense of gratitude I was trying to express--I think it's absolutely amazing to get on a flight in Los Angeles and find yourself wandering half-asleep in a strange country, through a new cultural dimension, the following day. How accessible the entire journey is, how connected the world is. Not to mention playing high stakes tournaments in faraway locations, an experience that was literally unheard of 10 years ago, around the time I had the chance to take a couple of road trips back and forth across the beautiful USA.

Recently I was talking with my friend David about one specific road trip we took in 1998, starting in New York, with a plan to pick up an acquaintance in Washington, then scoop down through New Orleans for Jazz Fest and eventually arrive in Oregon. We had no cellphones, no internet access and, yet, when it came time to pick up our companion in DC, we made it happen. "That's just the way it was then," David remarked a bit wistfully, "you had a plan to pick up a guy at a park in Washington at 2AM, and there he was--at a park, in DC, at 2AM."

***

It's now almost 8:30AM, and I'm just beginning to see the first hints of dawn while the rain continues at its consistent rate. The darkest hour.

I'll attempt to spend the day awake, relaxing, checking out the hotel pool (or the bathtub in my room), reading about Bellevue in Deauville; perhaps I'll try to do a little exercise. Hopefully tonight I will get a solid 6-8 hours of sleep and wake up sharp and prepared to win a poker tournament.

WBOC

I have registered to play in the PokerStars World Blogger Championship of Online Poker! The WBCOOP is a free online Poker tournament open to all Bloggers, so register on WBCOOP to play.

Registration code: 514588

Quickie PCA Update

I played day 1B of the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure and had a rather tough table, so I'm happy to have made it through with a 129K stack (30K was starting stack). Blinds will be 500/1000 to start day two tomorrow. The tournament got an enormous 1500+ player turnout, and I've managed to get a decent amount of rest and a bit of exercise since getting here, so I can't ask for much more.

2010, An Earth Odyssey

I'm still alive and grinding. I ended 2009 with fairly strong poker results in December--a few healthy cashes on PokerStars and a couple of satellite wins--but not strong enough to pull out of what is basically a two-year downswing/rut.

I keep referring back to a baseball analogy, in which I had some decent base hits, singles and double mostly, maybe a triple or two, but no home runs and certainly no grand slams. Some balls that seemed to be headed out of the park but bounced off the pole and went foul at the last minute and so on.

But I'll keep my eye on the ball and try to continue making good contact with it and do whatever it takes to avoid a slump in 2010. Despite how absurd and trying the profession of poker feels sometimes, I'm ready for another year of it, looking forward to a few live tournaments that whet my appetite for the possibility of a big score and ready to work hard until I can officially declare this "rut" over. With the advent of synchronized breaks in 2009, I'm also prepared for plenty of online poker in 2010.

The mammoth PokerStars Caribbean Adventure starts early next week in Paradise Island, Bahamas, and, later in the month, I'll be going to another EPT event, in Deauville, France. Then back home for several LA Poker Classic events and the sanctuary of Santa Monica living.

***

I saw a bunch of movies during my holiday visit to NYC last month, a couple of which I liked a lot--Up in the Air and Everybody's Fine both surprised me by presenting touching examinations of modern day existential confusion. But the best movie of the year still must be The Hurt Locker, whose DVD I can't wait to buy, if for no other reason than to watch the ending sequence about 400 more times.

Director Kathryn Bigelow's ex-husband, James Cameron, also came out with a new movie (you may have seen the trailer) called Avatar. I saw it the other night at the Arclight (4.5 years in Los Angeles and my first attendance at the Cinerama Dome), and, despite its flaws (I do hope the next installment is a prequel not a sequel), the movie was nothing short of amazing, an exquisitely beautiful, psychedelic vision of humanity created from scratch and translated onto the big screen in a way that was almost literally incredible.

***

Good luck to everyone in 2010.