EWC Day #1

Although I was pretending to be an executive, I wasn't quite as professional as the real thing. I set my alarm for 8:00 and after 5 snoozes, I crawled out of bed at 8:45. I expected it still to be completely dark outside at such an early hour, but to my surprise it was light outside. At first I figured that one of my neighbors was shining a light on our bedroom window, but after further investigation I determined that it was the sun! What is this the freaking arctic circle? I thought 9 a.m. was the crack of dawn?

I was supposed to be "at work" by 9 so I had to rush through breakfast. I gulped down a few bowls of cereal while reading the paper. I actually didn't get much reading done because it turns out that I'm unable to see through cat and one of ours decided I should be paying attention to her and not the recaps of Sunday's football games.

I arrived in my office at 9:05 unshaven, in jeans, with no shoes on and wearing the wrinkliest shirt known to man, but I did managed to squeeze a tie around my neck in the 20 minutes between bed and work. I took a timer from the kitchen and set it to count down from 10 hours. Instead of playing my normal $100 SNG's I decided to drop down a limit to the $55 level. The only thing worse than working 50 hours in a week is working 50 hours when you're losing. I definitely wanted to book a win to start the week and this seemed like a good way to ensure that. I planned to play for about 6 hours but after 5 hours and 19 minutes I decided to break for lunch. In this first part of the day I was right around even most of the time. I played 47 tournaments and ended up with 20 money finishes, but eleven of them were 3rds with only three 2nds and six 1sts. I was ahead about $200 at this point and feeling ok.

I had a bowl of soup while I watched Around the Horn and Pardon the Interuption (a pair of sports talk shows) on ESPN. I have a daily routine where I always eat while I watch Around the Horn and I've noticed that if I TIVO it and watch it later in the day I always get a very pavlovian craving for my lunch time staples. I went for a 30 minute run following lunch and after a quick shower I was ready to get back into the action.

In my second session of the day I had tremendous success. I had two sweet streaks of money finishes. To start I made the money in 10 of my first 13 tries and I had another streak where I made the money in 9 of 10 tries. In the second set overall I had 24 money finishes in 37 tournaments with nine 3rds, seven 2nds and eight 1sts.

On the day I ended up winning a few dollars short of $1,900 and I set a few records. First of all my previous best for tournaments in a day was 62 which I eclipsed with my total of 84 (I'll shoot for 100 tomorrow I think). Secondly I made the money in the fastest time and the fewest number of hands that I can ever imagine. It only took 7 hands and 8 minutes to make the money in one tournament. I hadn't won a pot or seen a flop and wasn't even paying attention to that particular game when I noticed that there were only 3 of us left and one player had 10,500 chips! It typically takes about 35-40 minutes to get down to 3 players and the fastest I can remember making it to the money is about 13 minutes so I was really amazed by this turn of events.

Another thing I saw for the first time was a guy playing in 18 games at a time! The most I'd seen before was 12, but I noticed this guy in all of my games so I did a search for him and saw he was playing in eighteen $55 SNG's. This is TOTALLY insane. I've played 9 games at a time before and I think I could handle 10 or 12 for a few minutes, but nowhere close to 18. And he was playing like that all day. You need at least 2 and probably more like 3 or even 4 thirty inch monitors to run that many games comfortably. It didn't seem like he was doing very well which is not surprising.

If tomorrow goes anything like today I might have to make this work all day thing a habit. I feel pretty tired, but I'm hoping after a good nights sleep I'll be ready to get back to work. Tomorrow I'm planning on wearing my tie that has lobsters putting tobasco sauce on themselves which I love, but never get to wear because it is ridiculous. I'll let you know what happened.