EPT12 Barcelona, Day 5: My Mind Is On the Blink

“Six more hands,” came the announcement. It was the last level of the night, the tournament clock had been paused, and a card had just been drawn to see how many more hands each table would play. Three would be the minimum, with six or seven (I believe) the max.

René, the photographer who has been working me as we cover the Estrellas Barcelona Poker Tour Main Event, looked at me and rolled his eyes.

“That is appropriate,” he said, and I immediately understood his meaning. It had been a long day, and so it made sense to punctuate it with a longish final sequence.

All of which is to say I’m pretty much beyond exhausted this morning after a fifth straight day of work here at EPT Barcelona, this one carrying late into the wee hours. There was definitely a wall of some kind I ran up against earlier in the day, and by night’s end I was mentally leaning up against it trying my best to remain upright.

Was 2:15 a.m. leaving the casino after a long Day 2 of the Estrellas Barcelona Poker Tour Main Event that saw 984 players play all of the way down to just 98. There was more to do after that, too, making it even later before your correspondent was able at last to catch a few hours’ worth of Z’s.

That pic above, by the way, is one taken by René of the player Chris Da-Silva Oduntan during what became an especially long bubble period yesterday when the clock was repeatedly paused (thus resulting in the longer work day).

Jose Carlos Garcia, the young Polish player with a not very Polish-sounding name, is leading the tournament at present. This makes the third straight EPT I’ve covered in which Garcia has stood out, as he final tabled both the LAPT Bahamas event back in January and the EPT Grand Final Main Event in May. He’s also won a Sunday Million before (in March 2014), and I believe is only 22.

Along with Dzmitry Urbanovich and Dominik Panka, Garcia is helping to form what is fast becoming a kind of new wave of Polish phenoms in poker. I remember once speaking with Marcin Horecki, the Team PokerStars Pro from Warsaw, about Panka (who won the 2014 PCA Main Event), and he talked then about other young stars of the game from his country who were about to break out as well. (I had a chance to talk to Panka, too, back at this year’s PCA.)

I’m bracing for another long day today covering the Estrellas, as they’ll need to get all of the way down to an eight-handed final table for Monday.

Again, check the PokerStars blog for my ESPT reports while the others fill you in on the €50K Super High Roller. They had nearly 100 come out for that one yesterday (a record), with late reg still open until the start today. (Every event is breaking records, in fact.)

EPT12 Barcelona, Day 2: Buffeted About

The first full day of events at EPT Barcelona seem to blow by, the 14 hours or so I spent at Casino Barcelona swiftly slipping past.

That’s because with eight events going on -- all of which got at least some attention from your humble scribbler -- there was always something else to track down and try to chronicle. The turnouts for all of the events were healthy, including for the €1K Estrellas Main Event (our primary focus, coverage-wise), as usually is the case on the EPT.

With the Estrellas the 592 who showed up to play the first of three Day 1 flights might have seemed like a modest total at first glance. But they staged this exact same event a year ago and drew just 438 on Day 1a, then after three Day 1s they had 2,560 players total -- the biggest freezeout field ever for a PokerStars live event. Probably looking at something over a thousand coming out today, and who knows how many on Friday?

Along the way I enjoyed a brief chat with FPS Monaco winner Sebastian Supper, a friendly German who is really more student than poker player. I also greatly enjoyed a kind of incredible buffet for dinner (pictured above), done up much differently than was the case here a couple of years ago.

With all of the events going on, I felt like I was doing a lot of buffet-like sampling all day as I ran around taking away small portions here and there to serve up. Check out the PokerStars blog to see what I dish out today.

EPT12 Barcelona, Day 1: Barceloner

After heading over to the Casino Barcelona around dinner time yesterday, I ended up sticking around until late -- after two a.m., in fact -- in order to see through to completion the first trophy event of the EPT Barcelona series, the Neymar Jr Charity Home Game.

Steve O’Dwyer happened over just before registration closed for the tournament, was encouraged to play by Team PokerStars SportStar Fatima Moreira de Melo, and ended up taking down the sucker to win a seat into the EPT Main Event that starts this weekend. Halfway through the final table (where O’Dwyer knocked out all but one of the others), he estimated he’d knocked out about 15 players along the way -- not a bad clip for a 59-player event.

After several hours of sleep and a largish breakfast at the hotel, I’m back over at the casino readying for a more standard long day of work. Today things pick up in earnest for the 71-event series, with eight different tourneys going on including the start of the €1K Estrellas Main Event. Last year they had a ridiculous 2,560 entries for that one -- the first big buy-in event of the EPT season -- so we’ll see how many come out for the three starting days this time.

I’m kind of on my own, blogging-wise, here at the start of the series, with the rest of the PokerStars blog team arriving later in the week along with all the PokerNews guys and a bunch of others once the EPT Main and them high rollers roll around. I’m not really alone, though, as plenty of seats in the media room have already been filled. My buddy Carlos Monti, the LAPT photographer, is here already, too, and the two of us enjoyed each other’s company as we worked late into the night.

I guess despite all of the camaraderie during the long workdays on these trips, there’s a lot of time spent on my own, too, when traveling and the hours spent in the hotel room. That I already miss Vera and all of our four-legged friends on the farm doesn’t help too much with that, either. But I do pretty well with the alone time, all things considered.

One day is in the books, and another dozen are left to go. Check over at the PokerStars blog today for more from your soloist scribbler.