Sole Survivor

PokerStars has planned many of their European Poker Tour destinations to coincide with the smaller poker tours they run such as the Estrellas Poker Tour and the UKIPT.

The impact this had in Barcelona was that the smaller poker tours main event had a massive 1,036 runners making the prize pool reach over €1,000,000. Very tasty indeed.

Many of the floor staff and dealers I had seen before at the Irish Open and other venues and they performed their roles fantastically as usual. However the casino hosting the event did not anticipate this vast influx of players and did not have the staff to make things run smoothly in the opening week of the festival.

I could list a lot of things that went wrong or were badly handled because of the lack of staff, but it is nothing the casino shouldn’t fix next year by simply putting on more staff and refining how registration for the tournament occurs. One thing that I will write about however is that I paid my buy-in over the Internet and while the money left my account I’m not entirely certain my transaction reached their end. Let me explain.

I arrived to Barcelona early to see the amazing sights and generally get settled in and relaxed before my first EPT event. I decided to warm up and play in the €220 game and while I was at the cash desk double check that I was registered for both the EPT main event and the ESPT main event.

Eventually after the guy checked through several pieces of paper he came back and said to ask again tomorrow. I busted out of the €220 game and came back the next evening to enquire about my registration. They told me to come back in an hour and that they would have the lists sorted by then.

I felt a bit more relaxed and went out with my family for a meal and returned only to be told to come back again the next day. By now I’m very concerned about my buy-ins of €6,400. Especially considering that €400 of that goes to the house to cover admin fees I’m more than a little annoyed at this, which is the last thing I want before a major tournament.

I come back yet again and a rather flustered cashier who seems to have been dealing with similar problems all day tells me to come back on the morning of the tournament and that the lists “should” all be with them by then.

You remember that old cartoon Road Runner? Well it turns out steam can actually escape one’s ear canals and I now have deep empathy with Wile E. Coyote. I brought my laptop the morning of the €1,100 game with my receipts open in my e-mail inbox. I went through the same scenario of long slow queues before finally asking the cashier to confirm my registration. She went to the printed lists and started checking the name on my passport and the lists half a dozen times and sharing confused and worried looks with her supervisor. This is when I opened my receipts on my laptop.

She wandered over looking very anxious and looked at the receipt and whispered something to her supervisor. He shrugged, nodded his head and she printed off my ticket. I still have no idea if my name was on that list, but I’m fairly certain that it wasn’t. Moral of the story? Print your receipts.

Finally I sat down at the table. The cards hit the felt and all my past stresses melted away replaced by the new stress of the super-hyper-aggression that is common in the EPT nowadays. I absolutely loved it.

It certainly was an eye opener however, the players at an EPT event are extremely skilled for the most part, but they still retain the honourable and friendly manner that is so common among poker players nowadays. If you’d like to see detailed accounts of the tourneys I played you can check my blog over at CardPlayer.com.

I’ll summarise it here by saying that I cashed in the €1,100 event for €2,500 but exited the main event on a very tricky bust out hand that I might just write an article about in the future. The €5,300 main event attracted a huge field of 1,081 players for a massive first prize of €1,007,550 which went to Mikalai Pobal from Belarus. A massive congratulations to him for his efforts in besting the field in Spain’s biggest ever poker tournament. It’s my turn next time, right? ♠

Science teacher Ian Simpson came fourth in the Irish Open 2012 for €107,500 and, as the last paddypowerpoker.com online qualifier standing in the main event, won the Sole Survivor contest netting himself another €100,000 =- €50,000 in cash, €50,000 in tournament buy ins.