I may have jinxed myself writing about the PokerStars Mega-Path tournament yesterday so cavalierly. Really, when I told people I might have to hire a private plane to make it back for the local quarterly tournament I meant it as a joke!
I lasted all of 18 hands, losing nearly a quarter of my chips early with 
and a flop that that paired the ten but drew out to an ace-high straight on the river. The starting stack of 1,000 and the turbo structure with blinds coming in on Level III are unforgiving of mistakes, bad luck, and weak hands. While I got a few face cards and a couple aces in my final hands they weren’t matched with anyything above a six.
Still, I’m lucky to be playing poker at all. It was eight years ago today—just an hour or so after I’m writing this—when I collapsed on the stairs of my office with a pulmonary embolism after having broken my leg two months (to the day) earlier. The doctors said that with the number of clots I had in my lungs I’d had about a 60% chance of dying before I got to treatment. But here I am. That’s in the general ballpark of the chances of getting knocked out of the Mega-Path. I’ll take the trade-off.
Tomer Berda’s in the Czech Republic for the latest European Poker Tour event starting tomorrow. He’s currently #7 on the EPT Player of the Year leaderboard. We’ll be watching his Prague-ress.