San Remo, Italy

Hello, Ciao, Bonjour, Hola.

It's been a while since I've updated, but I'm back in the states now and fresh off a 2 week adventure in Italy, France, and Spain.  Oh, and there was a little stop in Denmark along the way, but that's negligible.  I began writing this post about 2 weeks ago right when I got into Spain, but didn't finish it, and have been ridiculously busy and haven't gotten a chance to post it until now.  And by that I mean I've been lying in bed and have been too lazy to write.  So without much further adieu here we go...

*** 2 weeks ago***

I just got into Madrid a few hours ago, and decided to update the world on my adventures from the past week.  As I write this I'm waiting on a 33euro piece of beef tenderloin and a 9euro apple juice from room service, but hey, it looks like monopoly money so I'm going to treat it as such.  I don't like how the purple ones are so much bigger than the others.  The top quarter of the note sticks out of my wallet and everyone who gets a glimpse of it immediately starts weighing the downsides of robbing this poor boorish Americantard.

In the past 10 days I've been in 5 countries.  US, Spain, France, Italy, Copenhagen.  And I'm looking at buying a place in Canada, but that's another story entirely.  The first week over here I spent in San Remo, Italy, so the story will begin there.  Actually the story will begin in Atlanta, Ga because it's my story and that's how it's gonna be.

ATLANTA TO SAN REMO

I left for Europe on the 26th of April, and my flight path looked something like the following.  ATL --Richmond -- New York -- Nice.  I then had plans to meet up with some other poker players and take the hour cab ride from Nice to San Remo, Italy.  Unfortunately, my flight out of Atlanta was delayed enough that I was going to miss my Richmond -- NY flight, so everything was completely fucked.  I only had about 12 hours to spare before the tournament was going to start with my original flight plan, so I begged Delta to find me a way to Nice.

Luckily Delta came through in a big way and got me on the next flight directly to JFK in New York and then onto Nice through a connecting flight in Madrid.  Also, I was upgraded to business elite on the way to Madrid, which was something like a $4k plane ticket purchased alone.  The only problem was I only had about an hour to get off the plane in NY and onto the Madrid flight.  Naturally the flight was delayed 30 minutes in Atlanta.  We finally boarded and after a half hour the pilot came on the intercom and announced there was a mechanical failure and we had to switch planes.  Our new plane was at the other end of the terminal and wouldn't take off for an hour.

But now for a musical interlude...





Ok I'm back.  I got into NY about 10 minutes before my Madrid flight was scheduled to take off.  Naturally I was in the back of the plane.  Somehow I managed to push through and get off the plane along with the 1st classers.  I told the agent inside of my troubles and they took me over to the other terminal on a shuttle.  Luckily the Madrid flight was delayed 30 minutes, and I boarded just as they were closing the door.  The other business elite people looked at me like a complete bum, which wasn't far from the truth as I was wearing pajamas and probably smelt horrible.  Oh well, nothing new there.  Business elite was awesome, the seat reclined 180 degrees into a bed, so I slept the entire 7 hours of my first overseas flight.

Madrid to Nice was uneventful, however after waiting 30 minutes at baggage claim it became apparent my luggage had been lost in limbo somewhere.  After haggling with the lost baggage department for a while (keep in mind he speaks little English and I speak 0 French) they determine my bag is still in NY.  I also have no idea how to get to San Remo and don't have enough money to cab it alone.  The lost luggage guy tells me they'll deliver my bag to San Remo when it gets there in the morning but I have my doubts.

I call Dmitri (Blaabar) as he had arrived in Nice earlier in the day and took a couple of  trains to get to San Remo.  I finally figure out which trains I need to take and an hour later I end up at a train station in Ventimiglia, Italy.  It's 10:30pm local time and I find out the last train to San Remo leaves at 9:00.  Sweet!  I ask a local policeman where a hotel is and he speak 0 English.  Luckily Italian is close enough to Spanish and I make out "2 streets, red, left, bus, wait."  This seems fun.  The cop is apparently telling me to go a couple streets out into the city, take a left, and wait for a bus.  In a foreign country where I don't speak the language and am clearly lost.

I wasn't too thrilled.  On my way to the bus stop I managed to hail a taxi and after some awkward hand gestures and me yelling "San Remo" 4 or 5 times, I think he had the idea.  Honestly he could have charged me  300 euros for the cab ride and I would have taken it but I managed to get to the hotel for 50.  I tipped 10 euros and the driver was suddenly much nicer and carried my bags in and such.  This is about par for the trip so far, I guess tipping is ridiculously uncommon over here.

EPT San Remo and The Royal Hotel


Now, if you've read any of my previous posts (which I certainly hope you have because they are quite amazing) you'll know that I'm a Supernova Elite on PokerStars and we get a lot of "perks" for playing so much.  A lot of this comes in the form of cash bonuses, but we also get to travel to a couple of tournaments per year and play for free.  In addition, PokerStars puts us up in a 5 star hotel and we are treated like kings for a week.  Unshaven, drunken kings without the class of most of the other people that stay in these ridiculous places, but kings nonetheless.

The room at the Royal wasn't all that amazing.  Pretty simple 2 bed with and a cot we bought for the 3rd member of the crew, Isak.  However, the bathroom had a bidet which was pretty much the highlight of my trip.  I was scared to use it but I lost many hours simply staring at this modern wonder.  They gave us a continental breakfast every morning which was probably the best breakfast I'd ever eaten (and then ate again for 7 days straight).  And then there was a spa which was also very interesting, and I took an emotional shower where instead of water I was sprayed down by some perfume.  Very emotional.

Some pictures from San Remo...

Here's the pool area at the Royal Hotel

Some rocks and an ocean

Blaabar deep in thought about moustaches or something

Proof that it's actually San Remo, Italy

Definitely climbable in Assassin's Creed, see all the little holes?

Narrow backroads, perfect for black market transactions

Not just 5 star, 5 star L!

View from the back of the hotel with Blaabar and Isak

9L bottle of Moet, which we promised to buy if someone won something

Crazy euro chips and plaques used during cash games

Casino Sanremo

The poker part of the trip went pretty horribly.  I had a VERY good starting table for the 5,000 euro buy-in main event with 5 or 6 bad Italian players, 1 seemingly bad online player, 1 very good online player (but his online name is 'passiv' so I tried to bluff him lots) and 1 wealthy Russian dude who was not very good but had final tabled this event the previous year.  In level 2 I lost the majority of my chips, in a pretty interesting spot.  Here's how it went down... (enter boring poker talk, but I will try to make it user friendly)

I started the hand with about 24,000 in chips (30k starting stack), and the Russian had about 23,000.  He raised preflop first to act to 400 at 75/150 blinds.  He had been raising close to 30% of hands with no regard to position, and seemed to be in the mood to gamble it up to build a big stack early.  He had also called a few 3-bets before the flop and shown down A7o and QTo in those spots, so he was definitely defending very light.  It folded to me in the big blind and I looked down AKo.

Against almost any other player with this many chips still in play, I would usually just call here for 3 main reasons.  1) I disguise the strength of my hand and can likely get 2 or 3 bets on an A or K high flop,  2) I will win the pot often when both me and the other player miss the board, and 3) I will be put in a very difficult decision if I 3-bet and my opponent 4-bets.  Most good players will not get it in preflop this early with anything but KK or AA, thus getting in AK is a terrible proposition.  However, against this player, I felt that what I had seen of his play thus far outweighed the negatives of 3-betting, and thus I reraised to 1,300.

He very quickly make it 4,600.  This confused me a bit as it was the first time he had 4-bet preflop, so he definitely had some kind of hand.  At this point, I considered his range to be TT+, AQ, AK.  (for the non-poker junkies this means {TT, JJ, QQ, KK, AA, AQ, AK}).  However, due to his sizing, timing, and few other things about his bet, I heavily discounted KK, AA.  Thus, my AK was doing very well against his range and I was pretty happy to push all in.  Ideally I'd have liked a fold from TT-QQ, but the dead money in the middle made up for the slight disadvantage I'd be to those hands.  After a couple of minutes, he made the call with TT and I was pretty surprised.  The board came 9 high and I was knocked down to around 1,000 in chips.  I battled for a few hours and actually got back to around 6,000 chips, but eventually got it all in preflop with A2 vs. KK for a 15,000 chip pot and did not find any help.

So, my first EPT event was a pretty massive failure.  After talking about the big hand with a few other pros, we decided that it probably would have been better to not take the coinflip this early, given how good the table was.  But, it was too late for that, so I went out and drank a ton of Italian wine and ate great food for the rest of the week.  I ended up playing 2 more events and busted shorted of the money in both, and combined with a losing session at 10/20 euro cash (the smallest game they had), it was a pretty poor trip monetarily.  However, I still had a blast and can't wait to go back to Italy.

Blaabar also had a pretty poor trip, playing the same tournaments I did and failing to cash as well.  However, Isak played a 2,000 euro tournament and came in 9th for what I think was his biggest score ever.  Unfortunately, the final table was only 8 players, so he bubbled the final table and was pretty dissappointed.  At least one of us won some money on the trip.

*** Back to the present ***

I'm leaving for Vegas from Atlanta tomorrow and will be driving out again, so hopefully there will be some awesome new stories to write about.  For a blog on last year's journey, check out this post:  http://heynotilt.blogspot.com/2010/07/driving-to-vegas.html.

I still have a lot of stories from Nice and Madrid, but I'll probably be writing those up from Vegas, so expect them in the upcoming week.  I'm planning on playing close to 40 events this summer between the World Series and the Venetian Deepstack Series, so I'll be very busy but hopefully there's a bracelet out there somewhere with my name on it.

- Weinman