#208: “Gastronomic Grind”

Paris was sublime. The Louvre, Musee d’Orsay and Pompidieu Centre are an art history student’s wet dream. The Rodin Museum with its gardens is majestic even in the pissing rain. Going to the Christmas market and giant ferris wheel is good craic but walking around the Christmas market and going up the ferris wheel while stuffing your face with churros, half-pissed on several big gulps (‘les gulpes grande’) of mulled wine is fucking deadly! And what can I say about The Eiffel Tower. Well, it’s probably the nicest looking building that resembles an electrical pile-on. To be fair, it does looks pretty cool at night!

The food, as you can imagine, was exceptional. ‘Chartier’ in the 9th arrondisement is a bit like Bewleys (in the sense that Bewleys is a bit like a big french brasserie) and it served some primo crevettes, a succulent confit du canard, a delicious creme caramel, a cheese course and wine for a head-scratching €30 a head. ‘Le Petit Canard’ was chosen as the venue for Daragh Davey’s 25th Birthday – a curious but brilliant little bistro that only served duck. To paraphrase Basil Fawlty in ‘Gourmet Night’, if you didn’t like duck, you were rather stuck as the menu consisted of eight starters, ten mains, all duck. However, my number one recommendation if you happen to be near the Folies Bergere on your next trip to Paris is ‘Carte Blanche’ – another small bistro, this time with no menu. That’s right, the chef has carte blanche to cook you whatever he wants but fortunately he is a bit of a genius and on the night, he wanted to cook Saron and I a tasting menu of scallops, smoked duck, sea bass and a lemongrass creme brulee with candyfloss ice-cream. In a word… Nom!

The poker was a bit disappointing. I made it to Day 2 of the FPS Main with less than a starting stack. I grinded for several hours, my stack mimicking the inevitable odyssey of the bitcoin; soaring, plummetting and fluctuating wildly before reaching its ultimate valuation of exactly zero. In the FPS Mini, I built a decent stack early but then got in heaps with A3 v AQ on a A39 flop, the river 9 cruelly counterfeiting me. At least the cash games were kind as I won a couple of buy-ins playing €2-€4 over the two sessions I played.

I must admit that I am a little burnt out from travelling, so, with Prague on the horizon, I have decided to give the UKIPT 6-max in Nottingham a skip. No doubt the Pokerstars Team in collaboration with Rob Yong’s ‘Dusk Till Dawn’ will put on a great festival and the Firm will be well represented by serial deep-runner Dara O’Kearney and ‘No Bowl-Comp Too Small’ leaderboard challenger Daragh Davey. The plan is to put in two sick weeks of online Supernova grindage. I’m leaving it even later than I normally do so there will be plenty of Turbo SNGs and Hyper-Turbo 6-Max Satties in the mix as I try to lock up my 4th consecutive year of over 100,000 VPPs before Christmas.