I spent the last week in Italy playing the 1000+100€ European Masters of Poker. Here's how it went day by day:


Wednesday: I went to the casino in Helsinki at midnight, grinding until 4AM. Then I took a cab to the airport with a couple of friends without sleeping for a second. I hustled one of them big time in Sega Rally II at the airport before boarding the plane. We had a stopover in Frankfurt, resulting in a total of 6 hours of Chinese poker. I won a little during the flight. When we got to Milan, we took a cab to Campione where the tournament was being held, which cost us 220 euros. In Campione we noticed that there was absolutely nothing to do in the town. There were just a couple of restaurants, a hotel and the casino where the tournament would take place. We chose to stay at the hotel and play some more Chinese poker before going to dinner.

At dinner we ran into a couple of fellow poker players, and we decided to take a taxi across the Swiss-Italian border to Lugano and go check out the nightlife. Now here's a warning to anyone contemplating going to Lugano: It is *fucking* expensive. As in 20 euros for a beer expensive. I think we spent over 1k€ on booze that night. We stayed out until 5AM, when my friend Eero got kicked out of the night club. He was so wasted that he decided to go sleep under the table, but the security guys didn't think that was such a good idea and escorted us out. We got back to the hotel at 6am and drank every small bottle we could find in our mini bar. Then we played some more chinese poker. I think we finally passed out at about 11am.

 

Thursday: I woke up really hungover after 5 hours of uneasy sleep when my friends came back from the 330€ side event at 4PM. It had started at 3PM and they were the first two guys out. That wasn't at all surprising given how wasted they still were. They wanted to play some more chinese poker and didn't even let me take a shower; they forced me to start playing instantly. We played until 8AM the next morning non-stop. The only break we had was when we went to eat dinner, but even then we played chinese with one hand and ate pasta with the other for the whole time. By 8AM I was down about 600€.

 

Friday: Again I only got a few hours of sleep, and was feeling pretty tired when the main event started at 3PM. It didn't start off too bad though, as in my first hand I nearly doubled up:

20k stacks, 25/50 level. Villain is a young italian guy who's wearing a lot of bling bling and looks like the kind of a guy who likes to bluff a lot because it's cool. I saw him speak to a well-known high stakes cash game player before the start of the tournament so he might be a cash gamer / highroller too.

I (young scandinavian internet guy) raise to 150 from the hijack with 9d 9h, BTN (random swedish internet guy) calls, SB folds, Villain snap raises to 550 from the BB in a fashion that doesn't seem strong to me, we both call. I felt there was a weird "don't mess with my big blind" dynamic going on, as if he wanted to show us scandis not to raise his big blind, ever. Italian poker players do that a lot so it was a reasonable read to make.

Flop (1700) Ks 9s 2d

He snap bets 1200 again seeming kind of weak (as in trying to look really strong), I call, BTN folds

Turn (3900) 8h

He snap bets 3200 and I do my best to look as awkward as possible and then call.

River (10300) 8s

He snap bets something like 2500, I raise to 7700. He calls pretty quickly.

Basically I felt all the way that he was really weak, and therefore decided to just call down until the river. Against someone else raising the flop would be superior, but against a random italian guy it's usually better to let him bluff. However, it turned out my initial read was wrong and he actually had a pretty good hand, QQ. How he managed to call my river raise with it when he only beats a double float-reraise river stone cold bluff is a mystery to me, but I think it's safe to say I still managed to get maximum value despite being wrong about the strength of his hand.

I grinded up my stack slowly, as my table was full of horrific players and I kept busting people left, right and center. I knocked out one guy when I called his reraise shove on the turn with 3rd pair and he showed me ace high (standard italian play), and all in all played pretty well. With only two hours left of the day 1 I had 130k chips when the average was 35k, and I seriously contemplated going to the hotel two hours early, leaving myself approximately 110k for day two. I was feeling really tired and figured I wasn't playing my best anymore.

I ended up staying, which turned out to be a bad decision. I managed to go from 4xavg to 0 in less than two hours. First I lost a 55k pot KK<33 pre-flop all-in. Then I made a bad triple barrel bluff, which was probably fine for the first two streets but I really should've just check-folded on the river. That cost me about 25k. I kept leaking chips left and right, not managing to hit a single board, and value cutting myself a lot as people always had a better kicker against my 65o turned middle pair hands. In the last hand of the night I opened BTN for 3,5k (800/1600 blinds) holding pocket tens. BB called, and the flop came 986. He checked, I c-bet 3,5k and he insta-fist pump snap shoved for 50k. I insta-fish pump snap called with my overpair+gutshot, and he showed me 97o. To continue my great live run he hit a 9 on the river sending me to the rail.

After this it was 3AM, but I naturally didn't want to go to sleep. Instead we played chinese poker until 11AM, then checked out from the hotel and drove across the border again to a Swiss hotel in Lugano.

 

Saturday: I slept about 5 hours again, then headed to the players party. I don't remember much about the night so I don't have a whole lot to write about. I made a weird WSOP side bet with two different friends about who'd first get a 6-figures score in this year's WSOP; Durrrrr or Greg Raymer, me picking Greg Raymer. Go Greg! We also made a soccer world cup bet where I chose Netherlands and my friend chose Spain. I think I'm a heavy favourite in this one.

 

Sunday: I woke up at 6:55PM, just in time for the sunday tournaments. I ran so bad it's hilarious, ended up dropping 2,4k worth of buy-ins without a single cash or a single won coinflip. Then I finished 3rd in my last tournament, the Ongame $54 deepstack 6max for 2,5k, resulting in a net profit of $100 for a 10-hour grind. Talk about hourly rates!

 

Monday: More chinese poker and a flight back home. Now it's time to get some sleep.

 

 

I also noticed it's June already, so it's time to wrap up my May score. I won a total of $10500 online, which is about 50% less than I did in April, but on the flip side in also only paid 12 days so that's basically a two week's score so I guess that's not too bad.