The good thing about the dead days at the end of a european event is that I rest in a way I just don’t at home. But it’s difficult to sincerely spin the vacation into a positive when the cold hard fact remains I’m effectively vacationing in Berlin. I’m struggling to remember ever visiting a more dreary place. It’s also ice-cold.

Flop 9d 3h 2h.

Interesting. There are a lot of sexy turns here. We check to Florian, he bets 3k, I call, bb folds.

Turn 4h.

I was going to lead fairly big on a heart, but I can’t lead this one big cos I get too many ace heart combos shoved down my throat. Still this is fine, small bet here and take it on a blank river. Not to mention I can still bink a King or Queen. I bet 5k, Florian flats as expected. River is a 6s.

I bet 15k, he tanks and calls with A9o no heart.

I’ve just been a little out of step all tournament. Trying this on a stars pro (who tend to be stationy) isn’t the smartest way to handle business.

I’m at my best in NL when inducing weak bets and bluffs, then snapping them off. Getting into pissing contests with other players is where I’m often wekaest. I have the gear but other people play this game better than I do.

Strategically I should probably stay snug all through day 1 and then open up day 2. But /shrug. Sometime when I start pushing it I’ll gather up a huge stack and be among the chip leaders. Having a stack on the bubble here has to equal tons of free chips.

Chipped up to 30k over next 90 minutes but failed to get any action on AA and AK. Slipped back to 20k and had been active, min raised 66 with 20k at 400/800 75, button who had 3b me a lot made it 4500, I shoved, he snapped with AA and I bricked. Fail

 There’s only one player on my right who I’m confident will fold to my 3bets, so when he makes it 1100, i quickly 3 bet to 2900 with K6o (and he flats oop.  Goddamit.  I drop another 4k to see his J9s had flopped top pair.  This is going wellllll.

Down to 25k I open 22 and see a Q82 flop with 2 spades.  Same players from the K7 hand but this time the youngster has the button.  With my image, if I cant get this all-in I may as well quit life now.  I lead for 1500, he makes it 4200 and after a pause I make it 10k.  He shoves and his AQ doesnt catch me.  Up to 55k.

This guy had been raisining to 900 in ep a lot and suddenly he limps utg.  It folds to me in the small blind with AK.  This is awkward.  Winning tournaments requires getting max-value from your AKs.  But stacking off here would feel horrible.  I complete, knowing theres a high chance of Thorsen raising from the BB.  He obliges and makes it 1600, the youngster now makes it 5600.  I was obviously coming back over the top of Thorsen if the youngster had been messing around, but now I just let it go and feel pretty good about it. 

Table break.  New table is very aggressive.  I 3 bet JJ from the SB vs co with 40bb effective and bet-fold an AQx flop to the german stars team pro who I don’t recognize.

I leave a couple of minutes early to miss the crush and maximise the rest I need from the dinner break.  My chip position isn’t as good as it could be, but it’s fine and I just need to regain my rhythm.

That said the only double up for me I can see coming from my mostly young table is encouraging a similar spazz-off. My frequent “min-raise +25″ opens seem to be irritating people and getting attacked pretty hard so there is definite potential for something awesome to happen.

Antes kick in when I return from break.

(Aside for brief story from EPT Dortmund a couple of years ago. At the time I spoke passable German. Tho I hadn’t reached fluent neither was it halting or broken. The dealer at my first table started talking to me and as I replied in German he caught my accent, immediately cut me off and turned around to talk to someone else. Classy. I let my german lapse into complete disuse after that because, seriously? what would be the point?)

Dortmund had many other issues that made it a venue I would never return to, from a hotel that was a 2 mile walk to the city, to the casino that was a long bus ride from *anywhere*. This same casino charged us in advance an exoribitant fee for free food/drink every day of the tournament but for the vast majority eliminated on Day 1 this money was wasted as returning all the way out there to recover 40 euros or so cost would have been ludicrous.

Berlin has immediate advantages over Dortmund and we’ve only taken a brief stroll around the platz so far, but Germany is not endearing itself to me. Part of this is not it’s fault, but simply a result of the homogenisation of the world’s cities which always leaves me slightly irritated at visiting a “new” place and finding it’s exactly like everywhere else. The largest part of it tho is the general stand-offish, excessively formal and ingrained rudeness of the people in the service industry that we’ve encountered so far.

Worse when I finally got my seat draw it was Table 45, Seat 10. Seats 1 and 10 have significant equity loss over the middle seats. I start in a few minutes, I’ve heard the structure is good and will check it now so I don’t make a strategic error as I did with a big stack pre-ante in Manchester. I’ll probably just grind out small pots, wait for my table to break and get a better seat position. That said if seats 7-9 are god-awful I’ll have to get involved straight away.

(Why, with Snowfest and San Remo just around the corner, am I attending EPT Berlin? I’m doing something very very wrong.)

$1275 cash.