I finished three or four spots out of the money in the 5K 6-max event that I last wrote about. Actually one of the more heartbreaking bubbles I've experienced, not sure exactly why though.
According to the prevailing rumors, this will be the last time the EPT Grand Final is held at this venue, so quite possibly also the last time I will ever be here in Monte Carlo. Glad I got to spend time here in 2007 and 2010. Au revoir.
The Monte Carlo trip is nearing an end. I am planning to leave town tomorrow, get a train from Nice, France and head for my next destination, Paris, but first I have to try and win the €5K six-handed freezout that started yesterday with 101 players and will end when one player has all the chips.
I've had a very swingy day at the table, starting with 90K and dropping as low as 30K and rising again as high as 120K chips--all in the five levels before dinner break, which is taking place as I write. I will return to the table with about 40K chips and blinds of 1k/2k. There are 16 players left, 12 paid, payouts from €9500 to €170K.
During the two days between tournaments, I shacked up at a tourist destination in the hills above Monaco called Eze. I stayed at a place called Eza Vista, which I would recommend to travelers on a budget (rooms were 75 and 100 Euro per night) who wants a convenient vantage point from which to explore the rest of the French Riviera.
Disappointingly, the second day was drab and rainy (I still tramped up to the Jardin botanique d'Èze at the top of the city), but overall the town provided a serene and very necessary break after San Remo, which was not fun at all for several reasons, including a crashed scooter and the €1K it cost to fix. A story for another time.
In response to a comment from reader Jennifer about my favorite poker destinations, this is it. Monte Carlo.
San Remo, Italy, where the penultimate event of EPT sixth season took place last week, was far more cramped (both the hotel room and the tournament area of the casino), more disorganized and consequently more stressful than I imagined any poker tournament ever could be. The Casino di Sanremo was easily the least customer-friendly, most cacophonous venue I have ever attended. The security staff, particularly the goon assigned to protect the front door, was adversarial to the point that it felt like they were mocking us just because they could.
But that's the past, and here, in Monte Carlo, everything is just...nice. Nicer than I would ever be able to experience if I wasn't a staked poker tournament player (albeit one who grinds a shitload of satellites). The Monte Carlo Bay Hotel and Resort is thoroughly magnificent, easily the nicest hotel I've ever stayed at, and being here is literally and figuratively a breath of fresh air. I feel light and relaxed and completely psyched to play one of the biggest tournaments of the year, the €10K EPT Grand Final, which begins tomorrow.
The new album Ugly Side of Love by the British group Malachai, where you can find the above embedded track "Fading World" [apologies to my American audience, who reportedly can't see the video], has been really good to my earhole. In fact I really can't remember the last time I was thrilled to this degree by a new album (the new Goldfrapp album Head First is sounding pretty good, too). Thanks due to WFMU's Trent for turning me onto these records on his Sound and Safe show.
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I am on the road for the next couple months (more like three and a half months when you count the World Sseries of Poker in June) to play poker tournaments, and I'm basically at the beginning of the journey, writing from a room in a mediocre hotel around the corner from the train terminal in Rome.
In a few hours, I will be on a train bound for San Remo, where I'll play the penultimate event of this season's European Poker Tour. After that, the EPT Grand Final in Monte Carlo. After that, around May Day, I will set up shop in an apartment in Paris from where I'll play PokerStars' Spring Championship of Online Poker (SCOOP) and two more live events, WPT Paris and WPT Barcelona. Then back to the States, off to Vegas, full throttle towards the finish line.
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More importantly, it looks like this method of fasting before flying in order to avoid jet lag, which Alex Bolotin showed me during my last trip to Europe, might actually work: I stopped eating about four hours before my flight and drank a lot of water as suggested by the findings. I fought the hunger until I landed in Rome, where I ate a croissant that I had picked up during my layover in Dublin and a totally decent espresso produced by a vending machine at Fiumicino Airport.
The general idea is to trick your body into thinking you're on a local schedule based on eating patterns, and it seems to have worked so far--I got a solid six hours of sleep starting around 2AM local time after some sightseeing and a nice bowl of "cacio e pepe." By the time I sit down to play poker on Friday, I expect to be nicely synced with the local time.
I was thrilled to see the back cover of the New Yorker advertising the upcoming HBO show Treme but quickly sobered by the news that David Mills died yesterday.
Treme is David Simon's followup to The Wire and David Mills was a longtime writing collaborator with Simon and a prolific blogger on music, culture and politics. It will take years still for me to catch up on all the information in his Undercover Black Man blogspot, where he devoted a lot of space to streaming rare and interesting music.
I probably first heard David Mills' name on a Wire audio commentary track, but I eventually had the privilege of exchanging a few emails with him about our shared interests in writing, poker and Funkadelic. In one correspondence he told me about a journey to Eddie Hazel's funeral, where he broke down sobbing in reaction to Hazel's mother "wailing 'that's my baby's music'" when they played the original "Maggot Brain" during the service. In another email, David mentioned that one of the first things he did with his "Hollywood money" was buy some original artwork from Pedro Bell.
