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London/Malta/Poker/Prismata

At the start of October I headed down to London to compete in the EPT. I’ve played it once or twice before in London and found it to be pretty tough on the whole. My starting table was relatively tough but I chipped up quite nicely. I got moved to a table that was definitely the softest I’ve ever played at in any EPT. Naturally I lost chips at that table, made it through to day 2, had a tough spot where I ended up folding jacks pre, then didn’t fold queens pre and lost to kings.

With varying amounts of discipline I managed to find time to bubble both the £1k re-entry and the £2k side events as well as losing in a couple of others. All in all not a very lucrative trip financially. It was great to catch up with old friends from my university days though who I haven’t seen in a while.

Earlier in November I went to play the “Battle of Malta” which is a €500 re-entry. I played a satellite to it online and won it, but it was a bit presumptuous of me to assume that the majority of the €1500 package would be going to the buyin so I was somewhat disappointed to learn that I had 6 hours of travelling for a €500 tourney. Nevertheless, I managed to fight my way through the 2pm start all the way to 3:20am before deciding to lose a flip. I’m not a huge fan of a) starts later than midday b) finishes later than midnight. So a 2pm start 4am finish was right up my alley.

Malta itself was alright. I’d never been before and it absolutely pissed it down for 3 of the days. So much so, in fact, that as my flight was landing, around 1000ft above the runway the pilots decided to take off again and circle around the island for an hour. Before going to Rome. Marvellous. Fortunately I did make it in that night otherwise the weather could have been more costly than frustrating.

Back home I’ve been participating in two activities: poker and Prismata. The poker has been going fantastically – after much whining to Mickey, and the obligatory (pretending to) “talk strategy”, my results in my minuscule sample of 1200 tournaments have FINALLY turned around and I won the big 162 last week and the 100r on Tuesday to keep the bailiffs away for another month.

Prismata (for those that don’t follow me on Twitter), is a turn-based strategy game where you build armies and try and kill your opponents. One comment described it as “this is basically plants vs zombies PvP” which is a fairly accurate description, although others have drawn parallels to StarCraft/Hearthstone/Chess etc. In short, it’s really addictive, and really fun. I think the developers are doing a great job in ensuring it’s not one of those scammy Candy Crush ™®© pay-to-win or grind-to-win type games. When it’s released (it’s in alpha testing) it will be free-to-play with no grind/pay incentives that detract from the quality of the game (purely cosmetic). It’s a model that Valve is employing to great success with DoTa 2/TF2 as well as LoL in the big games category. I really love the game and if you’d like to try it out you can buy an early beta key (as well as other incentives) from the Prismata Kickstarter which launched yesterday. There’s already a decent collection of poker players playing it – Timex is currently #1 in the world, SirWatts #9 (I’m #99 as of writing… Likely a remark on our relative poker abilities too).

Anyway, so that’s what’s going on. Next week I have my grade 1 piano exam and then I’m heading to Prague to play the EUREKA (but not the EPT, conflicts with Christmas jumper pub crawl). After that it’s back home for the festivities before deciding what to do in the New Year. I’ll probably fire out another update before the year ends, but if I can’t be arsed then hope everyone has a great Christmas and a messy New Year!
The post “London/Malta/Poker/Prismata” was first posted on Rupert Elder’s Blog.