Betfair | Imper1um | Winter sports, prop bets and Warsaw trip report

Winter sports, prop bets and Warsaw trip report

A couple weeks after Copenhagen my friend Roland De Wolfe invited me out for a 1 week skiing trip with himself and his parents in Zermatt, Switzerland. I elected to go snowboarding instead of skiing as I remembered having a lot of difficulty skiing as a youngster and how snowboarding came really easy to me.

For the first 3 days at the resort, all we did was stay in the room and play Chinese poker and online poker, sometimes both at the same time. Finally we got out and hit the slopes. The mountains were higher up than I've ever seen before, so different than the kiddy hills I use to snowboard on back in high school. It took about 20-30 minutes by train to get up the mountain, so you can imagine how far up it was. At first, I struggled keeping my balance on the snowboard and would fall quite frequently, but eventually I got the hang of it and picked up where I left off 5-6 years ago. After only 1-2 minutes of boarding, my legs and feet were in excruciating pain and I was out of breath to the point of me wanting to stop and take the train back down. I'm not sure if I was out of breath because the air is thinner at higher altitudes, me being out of shape, or me underestimating how strenuous of an exercise boarding actually is but it was probably a combination of all three.I felt a little bit guilty about not wanting to continue, as it interrupted Roland's ski session and I knew that Roland, being the loyal friend that he is, would want to take the train down with me instead of continuing on without me and meeting me in the room. So we went down, played some more Chinese, went to the sauna and relaxed until dinner.

Every night Roland and I had dinner with his parents at this really nice restaurant in the "Alex", a hotel owned and operated by a family and THE best hotel I've ever stayed at by far. Roland and his family had been going to this hotel in Zermatt for the last 20 years and it's no wonder why. The whole village of Zermatt is like an undiscovered paradise, almost like a world within the world. I highly recommend it to anyone wanting to go skiing or boarding. We tried boarding / skiing again the following day and I had the exact same problem after a few minutes. This really got me disturbed. I guess punishing my body by eating junk food and not exercising for the last 2 years was finally catching up to me. Nevertheless, I shouldn't be out of breath from boarding at this young of an age.

I'm a firm believer that in order to make positive changes in your life, you need to get disturbed about your current situation. When I first started playing online poker, I got disturbed about not being a winning player and developed a keen and pulsating desire to become successful at online poker and more specifically multi table tournaments. I know for a fact that I can use this same strategy to get back in great shape and have exercise and balanced diet become a part of my regular lifestyle. Of course, It also helps if theres some financial reward for achieving my goal. So I asked Roland if he'd be interested in a prop bet where each of us are required to lose a certain amount of weight by the start of the WSOP (May 31st) he agreed and we discuss the terms the following day.

These are the rules/terms:

1) NO eating up to three hours before bed
2) Must workout 5 times per week for at least 1 hour
3) No Eating the following foods:
Fast food
Candy
Chocolate
Chips
Coffee
Anything Fried
Hot Dogs
Corn Dogs
Donuts
pizza
Soft Pretzel
Cookies
Some sugary cereal
Cake
Cupcakes
Ice cream cake
White bread
Pizza
Fries
Pies
Pop/Soda
Hamburgers
Fattening Dressings
Pastries
Processed foods
Red meat
Alcohol
potatoes
White Rice
Egg yolk

4) Alcohol only 1 day out of the week
5) 1 Cheat day per week (we can eat anything)
6) If one of us loses the required weight and the other doesnt, the person who didnt acheive their goal owes the other 25k. If both fail or both succeed its a total wash.
6) Roland has to lose 16 Kilos, Sorel has to lose 12 Kilos

Starting weights

Sorel 98.1 Kilos
Roland 102.5 Kilos

We get charged 1k per rule we violate to a cap of 3k in a single day. Obviously we're not going to be able to monitor each other efficiently, so we're just going by the honor system. I've already broken one rule. I ate a cookie knowing that it would cost me 1k... it seemed worth it at the time =(... good news is that Roland has already racked up 4k in violations and isn't showing any sign of slowing down so I'm liking my chances.

EPT Warsaw was a little bit uneventful. I got down to 1500 chips after 3 barreling some guy who called my QK UTG raise with 62 on the button and flopped trip 2's and called my bet on every street. I raised to 275 at 50/100 he called the button, I bet 550 on a board of 229 he called, turn was a J I fired 1400 he called , 3300 on the river of a 5 and again he called. I really didn't put 62o in his range :( Oh well, I don't feel too bad about the hand as I would have played AJ, KJ, QQ, KK, AA the same way for value.

I managed to get back up to 10k after a few lucky double ups QQ vs TT against Luca Pagano and then AA vs QK on a K high board against William Thorsson. After recoverring, I made the same mistake I've made in every single EPT tournament this year, overvaluing AQ when I have a very loose aggressive image. It's always the same thing, someone at the table makes a comment about how aggressive I am, and then I think that they think I have nothing and are reraising me light, and I 3 bet all in for all my chips. I really have to stop thinking so deep when I get reraised by older live players, they always have it! I've ran AQ into KK and AK 5/5 times this year in live tournaments when I could have avoided the situation, and only sucked out once (Irish open). AQ is the devil.

1 April 2008 / About Imper1um