Could have saved me 5K Euros by not getting sick but instead I had to play the EPT. It was a pretty short day, I doubled up with AKo 4-flushing AKs in a very skillful hand. Then I called a 4xBB shove with K7o and beat his A9o. Now at 36K blinds 600/1200 a100 I get moved to Schaefer's table. He raises UTG 7-handed to 3200, I call with JJ on the button and the BB makes it 11.2K. Schaefer folds, I'm not thrilled about it but shove and BB has QQ. I'd probably fold TT but I think JJ is just good enough I shouldn't be folding. Anyways the 2K Euro event is tomorrow so I'll get in that now I guess.

I haven't talked about San Remo at all, basically the whole area is gorgeous. When I flew into Nice the runway is right next to the sea so it's a pretty sick view of the Mediterranean as you land. The water is that beautiful bright blue rippling calmly. From Nice timex and I got a cab to San Remo, and the entire trip is winding through hills by the coast. There are houses built on the sides of all these hills by the sea that timex claims would just slide down into the sea if he were to give them a little push. The weather has been very nice like 15-20C every day so we've been chilling by the pool a lot. The casino here is kind of small but it's fairly nice and the hotel we're staying at is pretty nice as well. It looked really small from outside but the rooms are actually fairly spacious. We've been going to some good Italian restaurants, lots of pizza and pasta obviously. Speaking of food it's dinner time. Later,

Mike

I was a last minute entry into EPT San Remo today when Shaun effing Deeb had to withdraw because he was really sick. I was able to buy-in and take his spot which was pretty awesome, though obviously I feel bad for Shaun and hope he's feeling better soon. I did my best to make the most of the opportunity though. I didn't run especially good today and it was an up and down session. I probably made some small mistakes but all-in-all I'm happy enough with how I played. I was pretty exhasusted all day because I woke up really early this morning and didn't bother trying to get back to sleep since I wasn't supposed to have to do anything today. I ended the day with 17K which is a bit short with blinds starting at 500/1000 tomorrow but it'll do. I was going to write a quick summary of key hands but I'm really just too tired. My stack basically went 10K ---->15K ----> 3K ----> 14K -----> 6K ----->17K throughout the day is the short version. Hopefully I can catch some cards tomorrow and make a little run. Bed time,

Mike

...and it was so much fun I went ahead and won another one. With no $100K sponsorship package and still a little pissed about the whole ordeal it was clear I had to take matters into my own hands and go get paid. Of course seeing as it was Sunday that meant trying to luckbox some donkaments. Unfortunately all the US-based sites tournaments start super late here and I have a flight at 8am so I didn't really want to bother playing all the late ones and risk having to miss my flight if I was at a final table or something (unless it was a really big final table). Fortunately there are a lot of Euro-donkaments that start at more Euro-friendly times so I just played everything that started from 12pm EST to 5pm EST (6pm-11pm here). Timex told me about a $550 tournament on Betfair that had a $100K guarantee so I made an account there and gave that a shot as well. Lucky he did, because that was where I finally broke my ~9 month slump. It only had 156 players so there was a nice overlay and after a roller coaster final table I finally ran (really) good at the end for once and took it down for $30K.

I guess when it rains it pours though. One tournament I've finished 2nd in at least twice without winning (possibly 3 times not sure) is the Full Tilt $163 tournament. I usually only play the evening one but they now have the usual 3pm one on Sundays as well and it gets a big field. 699 players meant first paid just over $25K and I ran insanely good in this one as well (the first 3 times I got all-in preflop in this tournament in the early-mid stages I was dominated but got there). I cardracked pretty hard at the final table again and shipped this one too. No luck in the other donkaments but +$50k is definitely one of my best days ever and easily my best ever Sunday. Not bad considering I stopped registering 4 hours earlier than usual. Anyways my flight leaves pretty soon so I better go. Peace,

Mike

Well I'm out of the Everest contest. I don't imagine I ever actually had a chance. The day went pretty well, we played a few sit n gos and I finished 4th and 2nd which is reasonably solid. The interview was two questions, one about Everest and one about poker in general. You get 5 minutes to prepare your thoughts then go in and do a 5 min interview. I got a couple tricky questions but I think I actually handled them pretty well. Anyways then they narrow it down to 20 people at the end of the day. I wasn't selected, but I kind of wasn't surprised. It seemed pretty obvious that their objective point system they claimed would be used was complete bs. Choose one/all of these reasons: I'm Canadian and they're concentrating on the European market. I only recently joined the site mainly for this contest and they wanted to reward their regulars more. They wanted people who were legitimate amateurs to give a shot to "Live the Dream" like the contest name, not someone who was kind of already doing that. Whatever the case, I don't think anything I said could have given me much of a chance as it turns out. I guess I still got paid to hang out in Vienna for a few days which is alright. Vienna seems like a really nice city, but I'm still probably not going to get to seeing much of it with tomorrow being the last Sunday of the quarter hence $1K buy-in Sunday million. I'm pretty much planning to watch March Madness all night, sleep forever because I'm tired and jetlagged as hell, then get up and play Sundays all night. Next up is EPT San Remo which I head to on Monday, I really wish I was playing but it's sold out. Despite the disappointment I somehow still feel really good about this trip, for whatever the hell that's worth.

Mike

I didn't play at all this weekend hence the absence of blog updates. I spent Thursday-Sunday visiting family and friends in the area and enjoying that special holy weekend that comes but once a year: the first weekend of March Madness, when anything can and invariably does happen. Today I played a nice long session to make up for it a little bit though, and made two final tables. I finished 5th in Party Super Monday for ~$1700 and 2nd (siiiiiiiiiiiiiigh) in the iPoker (Titan) network $50 rebuy for ~$8K. So I finished up about $6K at tournaments but lost the same amount playing cash so the day was more or less a wash. I'm leaving for Europe on Thursday, with the first stop being Vienna for the Everest Poker live casting (March 28-31). I haven't really gone through what this involves on here yet so I'll take the time to do so now. The 200 players invited compete for 10 sponsorship packages. We are judged in 7 categories:

Blogging Skills: 10

This category was basically just graded on how many entries you write during the last 4 weeks. I wrote more than required so presumably I received 10/10 points.

Internet Voting: 10%

This is the part where all of you came in. We were divided into the groups of 10 players at the final tables we qualified from. I finished 2nd in my group (the winner had ~8500 hits, I got around 6000, and the next guy had under 3000) for 9 points. Thanks!

Online Poker Skill: 20%
Live Poker Skill: 20%

Presumably these are my strongest categories. Very few if any players in the competition will have the kind of poker resume I've built up in both live and online events over the last year or two. There will also be some tournaments played between us at the live casting which will have some weight on the live portion but I don't imagine that will weigh very heavily compared to results in major tournaments.

Personality: 15%

This is the part where you guys deliver your best one-liners. I'm certainly not the biggest personality out there but I'm fairly certain I'm not too big of a douchebag either.

Everest Poker Knowledge: 15%

I've been doing some studying. I'm not really sure how they will test this category or what types of things they expect me to know but I've been absorbing whatever information I can find.

Speaking Skills: 10%

Perhaps not my strongest category but the experience from being on TV for the World Cup of Poker and doing the interviews for that will help a lot as well as experience giving academic presentations and such. Again nothing I'm too concerned about.

So overall I definitely like my chances and I think it'll be a fun weekend in Austria.

After that it's off to EPT San Remo (April 1-5) which has unfortunately sold out. I hadn't bought in yet so I'll probably have to miss the main event, but there's a 2K Euro 2nd chance event and having to just hang out in Italy isn't a terrible fate. Then there's a week to travel around a bit before EPT Monte Carlo (April 11-18) which I've won a package for already. This is the big one. 10K Euro buy-in, last year first was over $2M USD/CAD and it's looking even bigger this year. Winning this would be a pretty good birthday present to myself. As always blog updates should be more frequent when I'm on the road so check back often starting this weekend.

Mike