On the Road: Barcelona
After following the tournament circuit over the past three years, the novelty of living in hotels had worn off and having maids bust into the room while I’m asleep no longer appealed to me. Nicky had found us an alternative to staying in a super-expensive hotel near the casino. The only bad things about it were that the bathroom was built for hobbits and the walls in the apartment were pink. When we picked up the keys, the lovely female rental agent suggested that the soothing colors might inspire me to write better.
Two years earlier, in September of 2005, I showed up in Barcelona with a camera (that my friend Flipchip gave me), a laptop, and a small backpack. I was alone in a foreign country and working on spec. I paid my own way to Spain. After a long summer in Las Vegas covering the WSOP, I needed to get out of Nevada. And out of the country. Fast. When I heard about the EPT from my friend Otis who wrote for the PokerStars Blog, I bought the cheapest ticket to Spain I could find.
The day after Joe Hachem won the 2005 WSOP in Benny’s Bullpen at the Horseshoe, I emailed the creator of the EPT, John Duthie, and asked him about acquiring a press badge for the Barcelona event. He was thrilled that an American writer would be interested in covering his tournament. At the time, there were no press procedures for Season Two of the EPT. He told me to show up at the casino and that I’d be allowed to take photos and live blog the event live on my site, Tao of Poker. At the time, about six media reps were there, including Rolf Slotbloom (Poker Pages), Tom Murphy and Mike Lacey (the Irish guys from Antes Up), David Lloyd (Gutshot), and Howard Swains (Poker Stars Blog). We were huddled around a table underneath the stairs and drank pints of Estrella. In contrast, at the EPT Barcelona in 2007, there were over 100 media reps from all over the world. The EPT and poker had come a long way in just 24 months.
Not only did I have a blast in 2005 covering my first event outside the States, I had also been asked by John Duthie to announce the feature TV table on Day 1 and then the final table. I might have been the first American poker writer to come across a good-looking skinny kid from Finland named Patrik Antonius. He made the final table along with Gus Hansen. I couldn’t believe what had happened to me, as I was overcome by one of those existentialist moments like... how the hell did I get here? Just six months earlier I was unemployed, broke, and homeless. Then all of a sudden, I had a microphone in my hand and was doing my best Johnny Grooms imitation for the crowd.
The Barcelona Casino always had a special niche in my heart and was a monumental place on my journey through poker. I was given a rare opportunity to visit a new location, make new friends, and have an original mind-blowing experience. Even though I made some mistakes along the way over the last two years, I look back at Barcelona in 2005 as a major turning point in my life and my development as a writer. When John Caldwell at Poker News offered me an assignment to cover the 2007 EPT Barcelona, I immediately said yes. How could I pass up free travel to Spain with my girlfriend and have a chance to reunite with a lot of friends I’d made along the way?
The casinos in Europe are not like the ones you experience in America. Most of them are not 24-hour operations. The Barcelona Casino opens up at 3pm and closes at 4am. It didn’t feature a massive gambling floor with thousands of geriatrics pissing away their social security checks in slot machines. Although the Barcelona Casino was made up of two floors, all of the action took place downstairs where the pits and the poker room are located.
On the first day of the 2007 tournament, we arrived early and had to wait outside for the doors to open. I bumped into Jimmy “Gobboboy” Fricke. Gobboboy was excited (much like many online American pros who are under 21) to play in his first EPT event. He doesn’t have the opportunity to play many live events and has to travel overseas to do so. I first met him at the beginning of the year during the Aussie Millions in Melbourne, Australia. Gobboboy is a good kid who brims with confidence about his poker ability. He got a lot of crap for being a luckbox at the 2007 Aussie Millions when he lost to Gus Hansen heads up and finished in second place. For several days he dominated that event and at one point at the final table, seasoned pros like Gus Hansen and Andy Black had no idea how to handle Gobboboy.
Once the doors to the Barcelona Casino opened, I rushed inside to the front desk, where I showed my passport. Normally, you pay a fee to enter the casino, which often keeps the miscreants away. Imagine if you had to pay to walk into the Bellagio!
They scanned my passport and had me on file from my visit in 2005. As a member of the media, I got free admission for one week. They handed me a ticket with a barcode, which a security guard scanned before I stepped onto the gaming floor. My picture popped up on a computer screen to verify my identity. It was something freakish out of a Philip K. Dick short story and right off the pages of George Orwell’s 1984.
The press room was located inside the disco with random tables set up on the dance floor. Several media reps sat in plush booths that were usually reserved for the VIPs with bottle service. The press room/disco came with its own bar and two bartenders. The internet connection was spotty at best, but at least we had full bar service.
Media reps from other outlets set up at nearby tables and the air quickly filled up with other languages: French, Spanish, Italian Swedish, Dutch, German, Portuguese, Danish, and, of course, English. Their conversations were interrupted by English poker terminology like “flush” or “set” and occasionally “donkey.”
The buy-in for the 2007 EPT Barcelona
Open was 8,000 or roughly $10,600. Players
got a starting stack of 10,000 in chips. I recognized
only a few Americans, such as Brandon
Schaefer, Gobboboy, David Williams,
John “Pearljammer” Turner, Phil Gordon, and
Paul Wasicka. Some of the biggest names in
Europe were playing, like Katja Thater, ElkY,
Ram Vaswani, Annette_15, William Thorson,
Johnny Lodden, Noah Boeken, Roland De
Wolfe, and Rob Hollink. My roommate from
Amsterdam, Johnny Mushrooms, was among the chip leaders for a while and even busted
a player with quads. But he didn’t make it
past Day 2, when his aces were cracked by
Fabrice Souiler.
Phil Gordon and Roland De Wolfe were chatting it up after Gordon lost a pot.
“Hey Roland, how do you say ‘donkey’ in Italian?” Gordon groaned.
“Philo Gordino!” joked De Wolfe.
During one of the breaks, Gordon came over and discussed a horrible player at his table. Gordon insisted that the guy was easily the worst player he ever encountered. The guy didn’t know how to play the game and picked up his cards off the table to look at them instead of the usual bend and peek method. The donkey had no idea how to bet and Gordon had to show him what chips to put into the pot.
On another break, I wandered over to the bar. I sipped a beer and ate a bikini sandwich (grilled cheese with ham) while seated next to two hookers. They weren’t like the traditional Las Vegas working girls. Rather, the ladies of the night in posh places like Monte Carlo and Barcelona were a sophisticated bunch; $300 for a rub and a tug wasn’t going to cut it. They got paid with expensive jewelry, $1,500 Louis Vuitton purses, and trips to the French Riviera. The two angelic hustlers were in their early twenties. They hung on the arm of a gentleman in his sixties, while they slowly sipped champagne and massaged his arms and inner thighs.
Around midnight on the fi rst day, the casino erupted with a sudden buzz. Johnny Chan was in the building. It was amazing to see several of Europe’s top pros pay homage to Chan as most of them walked over one by one to pay their respects, like a scene out of The Godfather. One Swedish kid in capri pants and designer sunglasses actually bent down on his knee and kissed Chan’s ring. That’s respect.
On the second day, a weary Daniel Negreanu was in the field and spent most of his time at the tables getting a massage. He had flown from Manila to Barcelona and was jetlagged. Like most of the US-based pros, he enjoyed Barcelona immensely.
“I love Barcelona,” he said continuously. Have you seen all the beautiful women?”
David Williams and Kirk Morrison echoed his sentiments. They had fallen in love with
Barcelona. They all had the same joyous looks on their faces that I had two years earlier. When you visit Barcelona for the first time, you become enraptured with everything... the amazing architecture, the history, the food, the nightlife, the vibe, and the women. I always felt that Paris was overhyped and overrated, while Barcelona was vastly underrated as one of Europe’s top cities.
“I fuckin’ love Barcelona,” Morrison said as he sipped a glass of wine and asked me where my drink was.
Kirk Morrison showed up in Barcelona out of the blue. He had originally gone to the Bicycle Casino in LA and stood in line waiting to buy into the WPT Legends of Poker. A dozen or so horrible players asked him to buy them into the event. He kindly said no. That’s when it hit him. “What the hell am I doing here? I’m going to Barcelona to play instead!” he said. And just like that in true rock and roll fashion Morrison went directly to LAX and flew to Barcelona to play in the EPT Barcelona (which outdrew WPT’s Legends of Poker... 543 entrants to 485). Even though Morrison busted out early, he knew that he had made the right choice.
My time in Barcelona was outstanding, with one exception. I had never experienced a more horrendous day of work due to the severe lack of crowd control and unruly drunk spectators as I did on Day 3. Media was not allowed inside the ropes and we had to get updates from the rail, except that the rude spectators who were camped out would not let us get close to the action. If we stood on the rail, we were subject to physical abuse. I was punched, elbowed, knocked off a chair (three times), and had no fewer than five drinks spilled on me. The poker room was a zoo, with people standing eight and nine deep on the rail and many others hoisted up on chairs hoping to check out the action. When there was an all-in at a specifi c table, a mad rush of people surged, knocking down anything in their way. Poor Nicky got shoved off a chair when she stood up to get a better view of the action in order to do her job. The situation got so bad that I started pushing back. I had not thrown that many elbows since I played pick-up games of basketball on the playgrounds of the Bronx. It felt like I was embroiled in a Knicks-Heat playoff series from the 1990s. Luckily, Mad Harper from PokerStars came to the rescue and helped the media gain better access to the tables. She vastly improved the hectic and combative situation as the remaining players slowly got down to the final eight.
Two Americans under 21 years of age, Adam Junglen and Greg Dyer, advanced to the final table, but they couldn’t hold off a former chess wizard and world-class backgammon player named Sander Lyllof from Denmark. Lyllof beat Mark Teltscher heads up for the 2007 EPT Barcelona championship and prevented Teltscher from becoming the first player to win two EPT events. Lyllof won 1.1 million for a couple of days of work. Not too shabby.
When TD Thomas Kremser announced the winner, he said, “Congrats to our winner Sander Lyllof from Copenhagen, Norway.”
I jokingly shouted out, “I thought that Copenhagen was in Sweden?”
The entire Swedish media couldn’t stop laughing. As soon as the press conference in the media room/disco was complete, Nicky and I hauled ass out of the casino. We raced back to the apartment in El Born, dropped off our gear, and headed down to the local bar called The Rocks. One of the bartenders was a petite girl with a nose ring. The braless waif would ask me “Uno mas?” every time my Carlsberg got low.
We were Albert-Finney drunk when we stumbled out of the bar and immediately bought cans of Estrella from a guy with a backpack who was selling them in front of the Santa Maria del Mar church. Their sales increased substantially once the bars closed. Aside from being a pickpocket or purse snatcher, one of the popular local jobs was to sell cans of beer to people in public squares. Well, that or playing online poker.
Next stop... London for the WSOP Europe.
