Just Another Day in the Life of a Poker Pro

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 30th, 2011 at 9:21 am

Marvin Rettenmaier

Hi, I’m Marvin Rettenmaier from Team Titan. So, I’m doing a road trip with Marko Neumann these days. We started in Vienna for the Spring Festival, went to the IPT in Nova Gorica in Slovenia, from there we drove back to Austria for the Snowfest, and now we came to play the WPT in Vienna. Next stops on our tour will be WPT Bratislava and the EPT in Berlin.

Saturday, March 26th

I had quite a good start on Day 1 of WPT Vienna, getting the 30K starting stack up to about 85K by Level 5. Then I have to say that my cold influenced my thinking processes a lot, and I brought myself into quite some bad spots I am usually able to avoid. Also I had a very tough table: To my left was some Lithuanian guy who just really enjoyed bluffing me – he wasn’t good, but it really pissed me off that he took 2 terrible/obvious bluff spots, which both worked since I didn’t have anything to catch him with. Next to him was Anton Wigg, EPT Copenhagen champ from 2010, and his successor, Michael Tureniec. Also on the table were Daniel Drescher and Arnaud Mattern. And if it wasn’t ridiculous enough of a Day 1 table draw, another Scandi by the name of Jakob Carlsson, runner-up at EPT San Remo, joined us for the last 3 levels of the day. Until the end of Day 1 I watched as my stack slowly and painfully dwindled down to as little as 24K.

A couple of wise words:

NEVER PLAY WHEN YOU ARE TIRED, DRUNK or WHEN YOU ARE SICK!!!

I still felt like tomorrow everything was going to be better. So I really wanted to go to bed early, but then we obviously had to celebrate Ronny Kaiser’s 3rd place finish in the 300 Turbo WPT side event. That night I also learned that Tobias Reinkemeier is not only one of the smartest poker minds in Germany, but also a sick business man. Ronny doesn’t like trophies that tell him that he didn’t win whatever tournament. So he sold his trophy to Tobi for only 5 Euros. I mean really: Who wouldn’t want a 3rd place trophy of an official WPT tournament, right? We had a late-night dinner and Sam Trickett and James Akenhead were sitting at the table next to us and noticed this precious trophy. James offered 20 Euros and Tobi accepted. Sadly for Tobi, James only had a 100 Euro note, so they played a game where Tobi would win the 100 Euros 1 out of 5 times for an EV of 20 Euros. Tobi lost, but it was still a good investment, I guess…