Everest Contest Preview

I didn't play at all this weekend hence the absence of blog updates. I spent Thursday-Sunday visiting family and friends in the area and enjoying that special holy weekend that comes but once a year: the first weekend of March Madness, when anything can and invariably does happen. Today I played a nice long session to make up for it a little bit though, and made two final tables. I finished 5th in Party Super Monday for ~$1700 and 2nd (siiiiiiiiiigh) in the iPoker (Titan) network $50 rebuy for ~$8K. So I finished up about $6K at tournaments but lost the same amount playing cash so the day was more or less a wash. I'm leaving for Europe on Thursday, with the first stop being Vienna for the Everest Poker live casting (March 28-31). I haven't really gone through what this involves on here yet so I'll take the time to do so now. The 200 players invited compete for 10 sponsorship packages. We are judged in 7 categories:

Blogging Skills: 10

This category was basically just graded on how many entries you write during the last 4 weeks. I wrote more than required so presumably I received 10/10 points.

Internet Voting: 10%

This is the part where all of you came in. We were divided into the groups of 10 players at the final tables we qualified from. I finished 2nd in my group (the winner had ~8500 hits, I got around 6000, and the next guy had under 3000) for 9 points. Thanks!

Online Poker Skill: 20%
Live Poker Skill: 20%

Presumably these are my strongest categories. Very few if any players in the competition will have the kind of poker resume I've built up in both live and online events over the last year or two. There will also be some tournaments played between us at the live casting which will have some weight on the live portion but I don't imagine that will weigh very heavily compared to results in major tournaments.

Personality: 15%

This is the part where you guys deliver your best one-liners. I'm certainly not the biggest personality out there but I'm fairly certain I'm not too big of a douchebag either.

Everest Poker Knowledge: 15%

I've been doing some studying. I'm not really sure how they will test this category or what types of things they expect me to know but I've been absorbing whatever information I can find.

Speaking Skills: 10%

Perhaps not my strongest category but the experience from being on TV for the World Cup of Poker and doing the interviews for that will help a lot as well as experience giving academic presentations and such. Again nothing I'm too concerned about.

So overall I definitely like my chances and I think it'll be a fun weekend in Austria.

After that it's off to EPT San Remo (April 1-5) which has unfortunately sold out. I hadn't bought in yet so I'll probably have to miss the main event, but there's a 2K Euro 2nd chance event and having to just hang out in Italy isn't a terrible fate. Then there's a week to travel around a bit before EPT Monte Carlo (April 11-18) which I've won a package for already. This is the big one. 10K Euro buy-in, last year first was over $2M USD/CAD and it's looking even bigger this year. Winning this would be a pretty good birthday present to myself. As always blog updates should be more frequent when I'm on the road so check back often starting this weekend.

Mike