Poker News / Short-Stacked Shamus / 03 December 2010 / Leave a Comment

Like our friend YorkyPud, a.k.a. Matthew Pitt, one of my partners in crime here at Betfair Poker, I have also been doing a bit of traveling of late. While Matthew was in Barcelona, Spain, reporting on the recently-concluded European Poker Tour event won by Kent Lundmark of Sweden, I spent the last week a bit further south in northwest Africa helping cover the World Poker Tour event in Marrakech, Morocco presented by Chilipoker.

I greatly enjoyed reading Matthew's "A Pudding Abroad" posts in which he described his experiences at EPT Barcelona. If you haven't seen them, he began with a preview of his "European Pudding Tour," then gave reports along the way of Day 1, Day 2, and Days 3-4, plus another post describing his return to snowy Leeds.

While I have been on a few of these tourney reporting trips by now, I am by no means as seasoned a traveler as some of the other poker media from various countries who find themselves in airports and hotels more often than home in their own beds. Aside from spending my last few summers in Vegas covering the WSOP, I've only been on a handful of these trips, covering various EPT, LAPT, and NAPT events -- a few more than YorkyPud, but still few enough that each new trip still possesses that same "adventure"-like quality for me, especially when it involves going somewhere I've never been before.

Like Matthew, my journey also carried me through a similar sequence of experiences over the last week: transportation troubles and challenges, arriving and trying to settle in the temporary home-away-from-home, sampling the cuisine, figuring ways to explore the country while also working crazy-long hours, finding and maintaining internet connectivity, learning players' names and establishing routines when reporting, and -- as always seems to happen -- dealing with lack of sleep.

I chuckled when I first saw the title of Matthew's post for Days 3-4 of his trip, in which he reports having become a "zombie." I, too, was averaging about 2-3 hours a night for most of my trip. And with my trip bookended by 24 hours of travel on either side (carrying me through New York and Casablanca on the way, then Paris and Atlanta when returning), I, too, had devolved into a George Romero extra by the end.

I'm not going to rehearse all of the details of my trip here. I did write a daily journal of sorts over on my blog, Hard-Boiled Poker, which you can see by clicking here. I'll also forgo describing the final table of the tournament itself, which Matthew was able to do earlier this week upon his return to England. Click here for details of Sebastian Homann's dominating performance in which the German bested the field of 222 to take the title.

I will, however, share one observation here about my trip to Marrakech that kind of picks up on something Matthew brings up in his reports, namely, how these trips afford us the opportunity to collaborate with other poker media from all over the world -- and how that experience can be especially positive. In fact, when considering all of the different aspects of the job, getting to know and work with so many smart, funny, and mutually supportive people is probably my favorite part of the job.

Matthew mentions his "little work buddies" Lee and Dana, "great people" with whom he got on very well and who "made the trip more enjoyable" for him. Not at all surprised by YorkyPud's comments, as I could've predicted the trio would get along swimmingly. Indeed, I've worked (swam?) several times with "danafish," who besides being a top reporter has a great sense of humor that keeps one smiling even after 14 hours of running around counting chips and following flops, turns, and rivers.

In Marrakech I had the opportunity to work with Mickey and Elissa, both of whom I knew before from the WSOP. I had worked more closely in the past with Mickey, the champion chip counter, seat chart organizer, and field reporter, but already knew Elissa to be a solid colleague as well with whom I was looking forward to working.

I have to tell one quick story about Elissa. At this summer's WSOP, she wrote up a post in a preliminary event involving Edgar de la Torre in which he successfully ran a bluff and showed it, inspiring her to headline the post "De la Torture." The next day, friends and family of de la Torre showed up to support him wearing t-shirts with Elissa's headline printed on them! (See here.) Gave me a new goal as a poker reporter, natch -- to have someone wear my words!

Anyhow, as was the case for Matthew, I, too, greatly enjoyed working with my two talented partners over the past week. I should mention, also, how at these events we tend also to join forces with numerous others, including tournament officials, casino staff, dealers, and other media reporting for other sites. At Marrakech we had Matt Savage, the Executive Tournament Director for the WPT, constantly helping us out while managing the event itself. So, too, were the folks from Chilipoker and Casino de Marrakech constantly looking out and providing for the media when needed. And reporters from other sites -- including my new friends Vanda, Ivan, Joe, and many others -- similarly helped us do what we had to do, while we helped them, too.

Such support is vital, really, not only for getting the job of reporting done, but for helping one endure the trial of being so far away from home. Matthew mentioned in his preview post how he anticipated that the "hardest part [was] going to be the actual working away element of the trip," something which for me also always tends to be the most difficult aspect of the job. Like him, I, too, am having momentarily to leave family to go on these adventures, thus making it all the more meaningful to have that support system on site -- a temporary "family," even -- to help make it through.

Getting the chance to see the world like this -- to go places I likely would never have gone otherwise -- is great, for sure. But getting the chance to interact with and learn from others in the "poker world" is pretty cool, too.

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