By Pauly
Barcelona
Sander Lyllof at the final table
A former chess wizard and world class backgammon player named Sander Lyllof from Denmark won the EPT Barcelona. He beat Mark Teltscher (UK) heads up for the title and prevented Teltscher from becoming the first player to win two EPT events. I don't know if there was anything shady going on or if the top two cut a deal... but they were very open about the fact they were roommates in Barcelona.
They both outlasted a final table that feature two Americans under 21-years of age... Adam Junglen and Greg Dyer. Junglen is a frequent poster on 2+2 and he played great all week. Dyer is a Harvard student who took third. I had both of them in the media pool against Howard Swains from PokerStars Blog.
I picked up a couple of random prop bets during the final table. Schecky bet me that I couldn't integrate a title of a Led Zeppelin song D'yer Maker into a title, which of course I was able to do so.
When TD Thomas Kresmer announced the winner, he said, "Congrats to our winner Sander Lyllof from Copenhagen, Norway."
To which I jokingly shouted out, "Wait, I thought that Copenhagen was in Sweden?"
The Swedish media reps thought that was hilarious and couldn't stop laughing. As soon as the press conference in the media room/disco was complete, we hauled ass out of the casino.
A quick note about the atrocious rail. It seems that my complaints to the powers to be (and an honest post from Change100 on her blog) helped to improve the hectic and combative situation on Saturday. Mad Harper is a goddess and helped us out once again. If the casino got an F grade for their ability to police the area in previous days, they got a B for their work on the final day. There was a noticeable difference in helping give the media a proper space to do their jobs. Of course that was four days too late.
There were still a few incidents when several asshats managed to infiltrate the media section. Schecky got into it with one guy who refused to clear out of the roped off media area. He pulled the "I don't speak English" routine and Schecky busted out some Spanish and called his bluff. They had a heated exchange. When the fucktard refused to budge, Schecky went to get security. I didn't bother to wait. I shoved the guy aside and got into position to get a better view of the table since I was given authorization to use physical force if necessary. Bullies don't like to be bullied and he backed off. When I was pushed or elbowed, I pushed back three times as hard. It felt like I was playing in a Knicks-Heat playoff series from the 1990s.
In another unfortunate incident, one guy had the audacity to grope Change100 after she politely asked him to move out of the way so she could do her job. He cursed at her then grabbed her ass. She bitch-slapped him! I found out about this after the final table ended. She was afraid I would have pummeled him to death if I discovered what happened. I'm willing to accept the fact that sometimes we have to work in a hostile environment, but no one should have to put up with that sort of abuse. Completely unacceptable.
Shronk and Schecky had to deal with a lot of nimrods while taping interviews for Poker News. During the Daniel Negreanu bit on Day 1b, I stood behind Shronk (the camera dude) and acted as a bouncer. I grabbed people from blatantly walking in the way of the shot even though we were in a roped off area. The funniest moment was when Schecky physically kicked someone out of the way to prevent them from ruining an interview. It's funny now after the fact and we can joke around about it, but during the tournament it was extremely frustrating dealing with the rudeness of the spectators and the lack of cooperation of the casino staff.
Oh, and yes, the other day I punched a guy in the arm for cutting the line and pushing Change100 as we tried to queue up to head into the casino. The same guy must be a degenerate gambler because he was rushing to get inside as soon as the doors opened at 3pm on Saturday. He tried to cut the line again and when I felt someone pushing me I whirled around and shouted, "Stop!"
The old guy recognized me from the day before and threw his arms in the air like, "Please don't hit me again!" He said that he was getting pushed from behind and sure enough a dozen other folks were rushing the line. I'm glad that I don't have to deal with that crap anymore.
Moving on...
The final table ended shortly after Midnight and we immediately hit the bar around the corner from our apartment in El Born. We were pretty shitty when we stumbled out of the bar and immediately bought cans of Estrella from a guy with a backpack who sold them in front of the Santa Maria del Mar church. Late night I lost a few throwing things prop bets. There's narrow alley that separates our apartment building that Change100 rented and the building across the way. Small balconies pepper the old buildings and the bet was to see if I could toss little pieces of a baguette and make it stay on various balconies without falling below to the street. I managed to miss the easy ones and nailed the one balcony with the highest degree of difficulty.
That's when I was offered free money to piss off the balcony. I needed to get unstuck. I whipped it out and let loose. After consuming a fair amount of beer, my tank was loaded and ready to go. I managed to water the spider plant belonging to the woman next door and almost urinated on a couple of people as they walked down the alley below. One of my favorite past times is public pissing and it was a sheer pleasure to get paid to do something I'm passionate about.
I woke up early on Sunday and played online poker on our balcony as the church bells rang and the street cleaners hosed down El Born. I had been on a nice run ever since I arrived in Europe hitting and running at 30/60, 15/30, and 10/20. I also had good results at the 1/2 PLO tables before I lost a monster pot at FT playing 8/16 LHE. The betting was capped on every street. There were six of us in until the flop and five of us went to the river. The board was A-9-5-4-Q with two clubs. Two of us had A-K (including me), one guy held A-Q, one guy missed his flush draw, and the clownfish with 3-2o dragged the monsterpotten. Ouch.
In other random betting news, I went 9-1 in my college football picks on Saturday missing Notre Dame. Why oh why do I constantly pick the Fighting Irish? I can't wait for the NFL season to start.
Checkout my Barcelona photo gallery over at Flickr featuring 72 photos that I took over the past week. If you dig Flickr slideshows, Click here for the Barcelona slideshow.
Anyway, my time in Barcelona is coming to a close. Next stop... London for the WSOP-Europe.
Original content written and provided by Pauly from Tao of Poker at www.taopoker.com. All rights reserved. RSS feeds are for non-commercial use only.
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