Nie Wieder

How can I put this. The EPT was, well, crap.

Germany is a lovely place. It's spectacularly clean, there are no chavs or scoundrels to be seen anywhere, and everybody is extremely polite and helpful - even to ignorant foreigners like me, who don't even know how to say 'sorry', or 'do you speak English?'.

Heck, even the graffiti in Germany is classy. On the train, I saw out of the window a quite arty tag that said 'Capitalizm is Organised Crime'. In Britain, we have no such political statements scrawled on our bus stops - the best we can do is 'Darren woz ere' and 'Donna takes it up the arse' (to be fair, with a name like Donna, she probably does - and good on her too). The translated German equivalent of that would probably be 'Donna is very popular with the gentlemen and likes to experiment with eroticism'.

Once in Germany I was supposed to be helping out with the PokerStars blog, but when I arrived at Heathrow airport to meet the other PokerStars staff, nobody knew who I was or why I was there. By the time we reached Dusseldorf airport (the quietest airport I have ever seen in my life), some of the people I was supposed to be working with still thought I was playing in the event.

As it turns out, I wasn't even going to be writing for the blog - that would be left to Simon Young, known as 'Suffolk Punch'. He was a nice guy, but he didn't need or want my help. I was basically relegated to being his lackey - looking out for interesting hands and collecting chip counts.

Tournament reporting is dull at the best of times, but when you can't even break up the monotony by writing, it's excruciating. You spend hours waiting around, watching the tables, not being able to see any of the hole cards (especially in the early stages when most pots end without a showdown). Then all of a sudden, somebody busts out of the tournament at the other end of the room and you have to go figure out what happened. It's painfully boring to do this for ten hours at a time.

Anyway, I ended up spending more time in the hotel than at the Casino Hosensyburg. I played online and had my worst Razz session ever, losing well over 30 big bets at $15/$30 Razz, but won it all back with interest playing No Limit Hold'em, using a new short stack strategy I've been working on for an Inside Poker article (read more about it in the May issue).

I managed to rack up a room service bill of about 120 Euro (the plural of Euro is Euro, by the way, not Euros), paying for the ludicrously-priced internet connection and a few German breakfasts, which consisted of coffee, bread and croissants with apricot jam, butter and margarine, fresh salmon, scrambled eggs, bacon, cheese, and approximately seven types of sausage. The sheer amount of sausage was, quite frankly, overwhelming. It seems that Germans have sausage with everything. I kid you not, when I phoned room service for breakfast one morning, the conversation went like this:

'Hi, is it too late to order breakfast?'
'No, what would you like?';
'Can I get some coffee...'
'Ja, would you like some sausage with that?'

If I'd been sharp and awake, I would have said 'No, just milk and sugar would be fine'. What I actually said was 'Yes, that would be nice'. Hmm.

I liked Germany a lot and would definitely like to go back. Maybe I'll play in next year's EPT German Open or something! For now, I'm looking forward to my first real holiday in six years - Las Vegas. Roll on April!