Planning > Doing

Maybe it’s just me, but I think planning a trip is usually better than actually taking the trip itself.

When I am at home these days I spend a lot of my time planning out my next trip. And I always have a blast doing it. When I’m planning a trip, I can always imagine how great it will be, and how smoothly everything will go. In my head every trip is perfect and better than I could even hope for.

When you actually take the trip itself, it never lives up to your expectations. All the small problems that you never think about come into the fore and have to be dealt with. Maybe I’m just too set in my routines, but dealing with jet lag, delayed flights, noisy hotel neighbors, rude waiters, and the million other small things is just such a hassle sometimes.

Yet still, I love traveling. These days I never have to go anywhere I don’t want, and I get to pick and choose wherever I want to go in the world. In my mind, the best thing to come about because of the poker boom is the growth of poker worldwide. I look on Cardplayer.com and see there’s 36 poker tournament series happening in October alone! I love it. Anywhere and everywhere, there’s bound to be a poker tournament there eventually.

Not quite sure what I’m trying to say here, guess I’m just rambling. Been spending my morning trying to decide where to go next and finding, as always, how much fun it is.

Time to be a devil’s advocate, which I always enjoy. I’ve been hearing a lot recently about how great it is that the next WPT in Atlantic City will be $3500 buy-in event. Am I the only person who doesn’t think this is a good idea?

Now I realize that this will increase the field dramatically, and make it much more available to the recreational player. What I don’t understand is why people seem to love the huge field events so much. Beyond a bigger prize pool, I don’t see any real advantage to playing in a 2000 person tournament. In fact, I find them pretty annoying. I would much rather play in tournaments with 50-100 people rather than 2000+ people. When I enter a tournament I like to have a reasonable chance to win. Having a tournament with 100 players gives me that chance. Entering a tournament with thousands of players means you have such a small chance to win, that in your whole life you may never win a tournament that large.

Recently I’ve found that my favorite tournament series are the ones held at the Bellagio. The larger buy-ins and growth in the number of other series have made the field sizes shrink dramatically. They often have tournaments that don’t even reach 100 players. But having tournament fields of 50 or 100 players is not a drawback at all in my mind, it is actually a selling point. I often hear people there complaining about the tiny fields, but I’ve never agreed with them.

The other problem with a buy-in of $3500 for a WPT main event is that it makes the trip almost pointless. Why would I want to travel, often across the country, for a tournament of that size. The travel costs alone often make the tournament no longer make financial sense.

In this case they have decided to run a $3500 WPT event at the exact same time as the $5000 main event of the wcoop. Why would I choose to travel to Atlantic City for a tournament when there is a tournament with a larger buy-in and a larger prize pool happening online on the same day? I have thought about trying to play both, but the only way that would be possible is if I was to play day 1a of the WPT, and bust early. Then the next day I would play online. But if I was to survive day 1a of the WPT, then I would not be able to play the wcoop as it is a 2 day event, and the two day 2’s would conflict.

I was thinking about heading down to AC for this event, as I have never been there and this seemed like a good time. But as of now I’m leaning towards not going. The small buy-in and bad timing make it a tough sell.

I just got home from Cannes. I finally broke my Euro curse as I cashed in my first tournament outside of North America. I ended up in 18th in the 2nd event I played at the PPT, a 1500 euro no limit event.

Next up for me will likely be London for the WSOPE and EPT. After that I’m not too sure. Maybe back to Bellagio for the Festa al Lago, or maybe I’ll try somewhere new and visit Morocco for WPT Marrakech. Would be my first time to Africa, which makes it pretty tempting. We shall see.