Sidebets with Joe Hachem

13. September 2006 | Category: 50outs

Sunday afternoon Katja and I left to Manchester, UK. Right the next morning we went ahead to Isle of Man to meet with some PokerStars people, including the owner. We had a day long meeting there. I was already impressed by the quality of management, employees and service PokerStars provide already but that trip only further strenghten this. They are driven, motivated and care about us, the players. I can tell you, the owner himself knews out of his head who became SuperNova after how many days of play, who is successfull (KarlMarx, you should be very proud 😉 and what single players have mentioned or criticized. After the meeting we had dinner with some of those guys and it was lot’s of fun and some nice discussions.

The next morning, after spending the night in the very beautyfull “Sefton” hotel we flew together with head of european marketing, Tamar, first to Dublin and then onwards to Barcelona.

Katja Thater and Tamar Y. in Dublin

We arrived an hour late, rushed into the Hilton Diagonal Mar, took a quick shower and went of again for the PokerStars welcome party in the Casino Barcelona, where the EPT is about to begin on Sep. 13th (today). Big news is not only that the event is sold out with 480 seats but that there are more than 100 people in the waiting list! Remember, this is a €5,000.00 buyin event this year. Unbelievable.

Geting into the casino we met lots of friends and players and were chatting for some hours. After the welcome party was a team dinner scheduled for the Team PokerStars players which attend this event (Luca, Issabel, Joe, Elky and the PokerStars staff.

The dinner should have been in a restaurant just across the street from the casino but right in the middle of the street it started raining so strong that everybody got soaking wet in just a second! We flew across the street into some kind of mall.

Heavy rain in Barcelona

Everybody got soaking wet

It was virtually impossible to go anywhere to we changed plans and took a late dinner right there in some italian restaurant. After a few minutes the fun was on! Joe Hachem started telling some jokes and asking some fun questions where he offered €50 or even €100 for the solution. No stop from here, it was sidebet time! How many letter does the full name of the waitress contains? How long is that couple married? How much will be the total restaurant bill? Everybody placed bets these important questions and it was funny to the point of embaressing (or how would YOU feel sitting there with your wife and a bunch of crazy foreigners is laughingly staring you down to decide how long you’re married??). I won one bet, the restaurant bill bet (of course lol) which I estimated correctly right to the euro (the bet was who’s closest). I estimated 340 and there have been 15 other bets, one being 337 and one being 341. It was big fun!

Katja explains to Luca why she check-raised him three times lately

Afterwards we got back into the casino (finding a not-to-wet minute) and hanging around there for an hour. We met even more players and Andreas Krause was fighting for his chance to get a seat in the EPT in the last satellite tournament (29 seats, 60 players left out of 260 or something). It was not to be, he busted out shortly before the final 29 in an ugly way (isn’t it always?). We went back to the hotel where we spend just another hour in the lobby meeting luckbox Sebastian, Seri, Andrea (one of three german online qualifiers) and Henning. Some more laughs, fortunatly nobody had a deck of cards otherwise we would still be playing chinese poker I guess, and we went sleeping very late. Katja is going to play today so I let her sleep as long as possible.