Travel Report: EPT10 Barcelona, Main Event: Day 3 -- La Rambla-in’ Along

Another fast-moving day yesterday at the Casino Barcelona as players in the EPT Barcelona Main Event played down from 235 to 79, taking five 90-minute levels to do so. The Englishman Tom “hitthehole” Middleton ended the night leading all as the only player to bag up over 1 million chips.

I imagine today’s Day 4 will likely follow a similar schedule with at most five levels as the target (usually) for these next-to-next-to-last days of EPTs is to get down to the final 24. It’s possible they may press forward to 16 today, but in any case I don’t think we’ll be going too late into the night.

One oddity that stood out yesterday was the fact that the player who ended up bubbling the event in 184th -- Nuno Da Camara -- never showed at all for Day 3. They reached hand-for-hand which went on for a while, and in fact several players survived all-ins while Da Camara’s stack was being blinded and anted down to a last couple of hands. Finally Da Camara was the one to be eliminated, and his empty chair became one of the most photographed pieces of furniture in a decade’s worth of EPTs.

Was kind of a long day, anyhow, yesterday as after play was done we had the media tournament. Your humble scribbler didn’t fare too well there, I’m afraid, and I believe I may have ended my non-U.S. undefeated record in tournaments after having won the EPT Kyiv media event a few years back.

Never could really get anything going, bungling a couple of hands and then losing a race with A-Q-suited versus jacks to end my run relatively early. Was for the best, though, as Vera was there waiting for me and had I gone deep she would have been forced to hang around the casino much longer.

We were able to enjoy one more nice dinner earlier yesterday, punctuating another great day of sightseeing and shopping for her. This time she made it over to La Rambla, kind of a long pedestrian mall with lots of shops and places to eat, and picked up various items including a cool FCB jersey for our little nephew.

She left this morning after having had a great vacation here, and in the end I was very pleased that we were able to spend as much time together as we did. We’ve talked about taking such trips many times before, and in fact practically every time I go on one of these tourney journeys we usually spend a little time considering whether or not she can come along, too, then decide “we’ll try the next one.” So it was great finally getting it to work this time, and we ended up picking an excellent place for it to happen.

Again going to sign off quickly here so as to ready for the day. Go on over to the PokerStars blog to read what Stephen, Rick, and I have been writing about the tournament thus far as well as to see the PokerNews guys’ updates, and don’t forget the EPTLive webcast goes on all day every day, which should become even more interesting to follow now that the tournament is approaching the latter stages.