I’ve recently been in Salzburg Austria reporting for the PokerNews Cup Main Event.  The home of Mozart and The Sound of Music, Salzburg is a lovely place, with historic buildings surrounded by snow covered alps, but for the most part we’ve been stuck in the confines of a smoke-filled poker room.

The event itself hasn’t reached any great heights with local Erich Kollman taking down the title.  He deserved the win, having a large stack for a lot of the tournament and clearly one of the better players in the field.

The highlight was the PokerNews girls pretending to provide a massage service for the players…

The only poker I’ve played here was a few S&Gs against some of the other PokerNews guys from the Dutch, Portugal and Slovenian sites.  Hux put 500 Euros on the first event and after getting my money in as a nice underdog with A2 versus AT, I skillfully sucked out on the turn to spike a deuce, only to waste it when a 4th heart hit the river to complete the villian’s but flush.  The second S&G was a 30 Euro buy-in.  Plenty of drinks were being consumed and a rule was introduced that if you didn’t act within 10 seconds then everyone got to vote on what you should do.  What a great rule and one that I exploited beautifully with AA.  I brilliantly limped UTG, the SB completed and Hux masterfully min-raised from the BB.  Amongst our drunken laughter at Hux’s unique play I had taken more than 10 seconds to act!  Oops!  Of course everyone punished my stupidity by making me go all-in.  Damn.  The small blind called with J7, Hux folded his 4 high and I double up!  I lost most of it back with an open-ender vs a flush draw, before a sick one-outer ended my evening.  Once again I got my money in real good with TT against both AK and KK, and I was off my chair in delight at seeing a third ten in the window of the flop, only for it to be followed by the case king.  Game over.  So sick.  Rigged.  Fortunately I had 10% swaps with both winners (Stevedude from Holland who has mastered the play of 82o, and Logan “Sleepy” Leatham, the only American in Austria), and we had plenty of free drinks so it was a fun night all round for the PokerNews team.  Rematch in Vegas.

Tags: austria, pokernews cup

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 27th, 2008 at 7:02 am and is filed under Poker, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.