I'm playing Heat 1 today, streamed live on the interwebs!

Captain tilterino put me in the first heat for the World Cup which starts today at 4pm/10am EST. Just like the EPT featured table the event will be streamed live online, you can watch the feed at http://www.pokerstars.tv/wcp/. In the live part it turns out we're no longer playing against the person who qualified the same way as you from each team, it's just all mixed up. The only pro that I recognize at my table is Raymer, who I have position on. I'll have to go do my research and figure out who's who at my table. So yeah check that out today, I'm looking forward to getting our team off to a good start.

On Sunday I went to the FC Barcelona game, and it was really amazing. Barcelona is one of the bes teams in the world and they showed why by dominating Athletico de Bilbao in a 3-1 win. Seeing how fast and how skilled these guys are in person was amazing. It wasn't even that Bilbao played poorly, Barcelona was just so ridiculously good. Ronaldinho scored twice, on a free kick and a penalty, and this huge African midfielder Toure-Yaya "scored" on an absolute rocket from outside the box. Scored is in quotation marks because the ball hit the crossbar and never looked like it went in, but for some reason the linesman completely unexpectedly called it a goal anyways. I'm told replays confirm he was quite wrong. In fact there was quite a lot of questionable/outright poor officiating towards the end of the game but this time going against Barcelona so we got to hear 100 thousand angry fans whistle at the ref. It was an incredible atmosphere, but I'll get back to that in minute.

Also playing for Barcelona was Thierry Henry, though he looked a step slow recovering from some injuries. He still very nearly scored in the second half but was denied by the post on another of Barcelona's good scoring chances. The most impressive player that day behind Ronaldinho was Messi, who consistently made defenders look foolish throughout the game in helping set up a lot of Barcelona's best scoring chances. The stadium is just enormous, it seats 99000, and most of those were filled for this game. 99000 people cheering and applauding every scoring chance, whistling at every foul or missed call, and gasping at ever close call makes for an incredible atmosphere. The cliffs notes is that watching live soccer in Europe is just awesome, so much more exciting than on TV. Schaefer and I are trying to get tickets for a Chelsea game while we're in London now.

Because of the time difference I got home in time to play Sunday tournaments, so I lost some money. Yesterday was the beginning of the World Cup, we had a welcome dinner at a Japanese restaurant, Shoko, near the hotel. I finally got to meet the rest of the team as well as some of the players from other teams. We discussed some strategy and socialized for a bit before heading to the casino where I quickly donked out out of the $1600 freeroll pushing blind half the hands. Then I just went back to the hotel and crashed. Unfortunately I'm up kind of early as I only woke up at 4pm yesterday so I didn't sleep for long. I'm gonna go get the free breakfast buffet and see if it tastes better when you sleep before it.

Mike