Travel Report: EPT12 Grand Final, Day 11 -- Bird or Fish?

It’s over, at least for me. As I have a shuttle picking me up at 4:30 tomorrow morning (a bad draw, one could say), the fellas released me a bit early tonight (a good result) once both the €10K High Roller and Main Event at the EPT12 Grand Final reached heads-up.

So after getting a few last bits of business in order I’ve been packing while watching EPT Live, and occasionally checking in on my colleagues blogging the High Roller finale which seems to have gotten short-circuited by endless double-ups of the short stack.

I know my buddy Remko Rinkema (covering the HR for PokerNews) is hurting as the heads-up match continues, carrying him further and further from the jovial mood he was in at the start of this final day of play. At one point I was watching one of the final two tables, and he appeared at my side, whispering a question.

“Which would you rather be, a bird or a fish?”

Remko loves such hypotheticals, appreciating the thought experiments they sometimes can engender. I was thinking too much about a hand I was watching, though, and so answered “bird” without thinking too deeply about why I’d made my choice.

“Yeah, bird for me, too,” answered Remko, who after pausing a beat had more to say about it.

“It would be hard to watch sports if you were a fish,” he said, and I nodded with a grin while looking out of the corner of my eye. The wheels were spinning in my Dutch friend’s head.

“If you were a bird, you could get into games for free,” he said. “You could even get snacks... peanuts on the ground....”

I tweeted Remko’s wisdom, and got a good response from someone: “He's not wrong.”

That pic above came from the two of us goofing around just before I’d left the night before. Remko had taken a picture of some chip counts off of one of our colleagues’ phones, I decided to take a picture of his, and, well, things got a little out of hand after that.

Home tomorrow, after having spent 11 days taking picture after picture after picture (mostly of the verbal variety) of what I’ve seen. Will be nice to get back and stop keeping track of everything so closely, if only for a while.

See the PokerStars blog to find out how these heads-up matches end up, which I assume will happen. Now that the bird-vs.-fish one has been settled.