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Rollin' with the Troll[ return to main articles page ]

By: Adam
Published on Mar 17th, 2005
One thing is for sure--I am living a dream life. While most of my friends are working grueling 40-60 hour weeks at entry level jobs in various fields or attending graduate school (as I was just one year ago), I am traveling to poker tournaments around the world. Even when I'm at home, I still have it easy compared to most, but on the road, I am truly living the dream.

So John (Texas Troll) won EPT seats in Copenhagen, Vienna, and Monte Carlo this year. For everyone who doesn't know, the EPT is a new tour this year throughout Europe, and one of their main sponsors is PokerStars, which is also the site running most of the satellites for these events. He went to Copenhagen in February, and had the idea for me to come along to the next two and report on the events. I didn't have the money to play the events (12k euros was the total buy in between the two), but I didn't mind just hanging out, and I thought it was a great opportunity to meet some new people and get the word out about our website.

The poker has been fairly dull for me, personally, and I've spent more time playing online here than I have live. They have a number of second chance tournaments running here, so I still have a chance to get a little action in before I come back to the states, but it just isn't my top priority. I've been focusing on learning, as I always do when I play or observe large events, and particularly on learning more about some of the top online players that we talk so much about on this site.

I was able to sit down with Noah "Exclusive" Boeken today and talk about some things, and among other things, I was interested to learn that he lives in a large house with Marcel Luske (and I assume others) in Amsterdam. I guess this place is sort of a poker "think tank," and like most think tanks, it is filled with great minds that are interested in learning from each other. I have a nice picture I will post soon of Noah with Caroline Flack, who is to the EPT what Shana Hiatt is to the WPT. Nice looking girl, in other words.

Noah made it through to the second day of the tournament, but unfortunately didn't see anything better than AQ all day, and that ended up being the hand he was holding when he was more or less forced to push in his short stack and hope for the best. One of our horses is still in as of the end of day 2, which was just now actually. Rob "Who's Bad" Mizrachi is sitting pretty with 117,500 chips, which is certainly near the chip lead with 38 players remaining. The average stack is somewhere between 50 and 60k right now, and the blinds are going to be something like 1000-2000 when day 3 begins, so Rob is in very good shape, and is the last hope for PocketFives.com ranked players. Good luck to him!

Really though, regardless of the results, this has been a fantastic time for me, and I'm glad it's not over yet. I wish I could report that John made the final table of one of the main events, and I wish I could say you'll be seeing him on TV soon, but the truth is he went out on the first day of both. The real story to be told here is just of the experience, of getting to go to new places and see new people and be a part of something innovative and exciting. When I took my first poker-related trip, which was the trip to Aruba last September, I realized what great times were to be had while living this lifestyle and really just yearned for more.

Now I'm really there--the whole sunday with cherries on top. I hope everyone reading this gets the opportunity to travel to some bigger tournaments, or if not, just to get to live out a dream of your own. It's been a fairy tail for me so far, and I know this is only the beginning.
 

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