Halfway

Day 4

            At night, I showed up to this “random” person’s single apartment and stayed over. He’s fine with me staying for however long and I plan on staying for the duration of the Magic Paris Weekend, which is until Sunday. It’s really nice of him because he basically has no idea who and I am and he’s nice enough to share his place with me.

Day 5

            I spend the day playing around with the deck that I’m planning for play for the tournament. I put in about a 100 or so games and I’m relatively okay with it. I go to the site and register and call it a day.

Day 6

            I wake up early in the morning so I get there for Day 1 of the Pro Tour. In the end, I miss making the cut to Day 2. It sucks, but I’m not too disappointed about it. On a lighter note though, surprisingly, the hottest chick I’ve seen so far in Paris is the artist that is visiting and signing cards. She’s a French chick, light skin, strawberry blonde hair, thin. No creeper (the new “no homo), but I was stalking the booth all day.

            Spending about 10 hours there is a bit rough though. Usually at tournaments, I know people. Only about 2/3s of the time is sitting down playing. The rest is just down time. It can get really boring just durdling around by yourself. One of the best things about tournaments is having friends there, sharing stories, commiserating losses, and congratulating wins.

            I get back at night and Freemurge, guy letting me stay, says that there’s a party tomorrow and if I want to go out. I plan on playing a really large tournament on Saturday, so I can’t go out drinking on Friday and say Thanks, but no Thanks.

Day 7, Friday, February 11, 2011

            I wake up and go to the center to watch some playing and play to get 3 Byes for the large tournament the next day. I unfortunately quickly scrub out of two of them and I give up. I instead spend the day trying to watch matches, but unfortunately, the center is really poorly set up so that you can’t really get close to watch closely on how the Pros playing and make their decisions, which is by far the most useful thing to could do if you want to get better. I couldn’t imagine how much a poker pro would charge for you to sit over his shoulder and be able to see his cards while he plays. Hell, I bet you couldn’t even pay them enough for that.

            This day is a lot rougher because I barely play and I’m just tired of standing and walking around myself all day. Despite having one bye for Saturday because of my rating, I really don’t want to go to tomorrow. It’s going to be a recording setting 2800 people. It’s going to be over 12 hours of playing. Without three byes, it’s the worst crap shoot ever. Hell, even with three byes it’s a horrible crap shoot. Because, if you do well, you only Day 2 and there’s another 8 or so rounds to play. Also, the pay-out doesn’t scale depending on attendance. So no matter how many people there are, the best one could hope for is a few thousand out of that big of a player base, since it’s open to everyone to play. That’s much different from the invite only Pro Tour that had less than 500 people and the pay-out was $40,000 for first place and all the way down to Top 65.

            I get back to the apartment before 8:00 hoping that I could catch Freemurge getting back from work so I could tag along for the party that I initially turned down, but I guess he’s already went or maybe hasn’t come back yet because it’s almost 10:00 by now. I’m not really in the mood to go shlep out myself to the nightlife. I guess I’ll take it easy today because it’s been physically and mentally quite exhausting the past few days.

            As for the plans, I should book a hostel for Monday and on until I fly out next Sunday. Then, I’ll be able to see sights, hopefully go out, meet some bitches, and get drunk (and boy do I need a drink).