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.

Travel Report: EPT12 Grand Final, Day 10 -- Respite

Was on the High Roller beat at the EPT12 Grand Final today and thankfully the early shift, too, which meant I had a chance to take off a little earlier than usual and enjoy a nice dinner with my friend and colleague Stephen before getting to bed at a reasonable hour.

We sat a spell before dinner enjoying the view of the bay -- something we mostly have been confined to looking at from the upper story windows (one of them cracked) in the media room. (Above is another such view above of a sailboat with sails down, taking it easy.) Was cool and calm and in stark contrast with the loud and occasionally relentless-seeming atmosphere of the poker.

Among our many topics of conversation was how busy we both were, in particular when on trips such as these where the already complicated life gets fragmented further. Such is true of pretty much everyone who works these things, be it staff, media, the dealers, of whoever. Everyone has other jobs, too, and many also have families which can make the traveling and being away that much more challenging.

Worth adding as well -- a not insignificant percentage of the players are likewise being pulled in multiple directions while trying to focus on the one leading to success at the tables.

We moved down to the Miami Plage for dinner, a place where we happened to have enjoyed a meal last year. I had a delicious seafood pasta dish and a piece of cheesecake as we talked about family, politics, and JFK and Nixon (the latter two constant favorites of mine, and interests of Stephen, too).

Was a nice respite before tomorrow’s big finale, when both the High Roller and Main Event will be playing down to a champ. (Didja hear? One of them Spin & Go fellas -- who got into the Main for just €10 -- made the final six.) Take some time to relax yourself and check the PokerStars blog as always to see how those events go.