Mendoza

Upon some request my blog will be in English from now on.

There was going to be a live poker weekend in Mendoza, and because Jose wanted to see his family, and we both wanted to visit the sights of the city, we decided to have a road trip. One other friend of Jose's joined us, he works for pokerworks.es and happens to have the same boss as me. When I first met him, I thought he was someone else...

He didn't know who Paolo Nutini was. How can you look like that and not know who Paolo Nutini is? His name was very similar as well; Pablo.

Anyway, the Argentinian freeway sucks. 1000 kms of two-way traffic on just a double road. This means that every time you want to overtake another car, you have to see that there are no cars coming from the other side . And there was a lot of overtaking in this trip, not only because of the many trucks but also because Jose likes to drive like a maniac.

For me there was almost no live poker on this trip because as it turns out, the Park Hyatt Casino is one of the very few Argentinian casinos that won't let you play until you're 21. It wasn't that big of a shame though, there was only a $350 rebuy tournament and the cash games were minimum 20BB buyin, not really my type of game. Instead we enjoyed the nightlife of the city a bit. Jose had a lot of friends and family in Mendoza, and they showed us around . The nightclubs over there are absolutely massive... The average popular club in Mendoza hosts about 3000 people! We also chilled in the mountains for a bit and took a full day to go to the Famillia Zuccardi, a famous winery from Mendoza. This was a lot of fun, it started off with a 5-course lunch and of course a different wine with every course, and then a tour of the winery and of course some more wine tasting. I posted the first photos of my Argentinian trip here:

One thing that really caught my surprise is how cheap everything is over here compared to Europe. The peso is not doing so well, I guess. Maybe it's just that Europe is so much more expensive than every other place in the world, but over here money is just worth five times as much. A good reason to buy some stuff, and since we didn't have that many CDs in the car and I've always wanted to build up a CD collection, buying them over here for 4 euros each seemed like a good plan. I've limited myself to 5 CDs per visit, and 2 visits per week, otherwise I might have to bring home a bag with nothing but CDs... The first five:

Paolo Nutini, These Streets - A pretty good first record, and we had a copy of Paolo Nutini in the car that had never heard of him..
Faithless, Forever Faithless - For me Faithless is the best music to listen to during poker. I would have preferred to buy a real album, but they only had this CD and this is a pretty good compilation.
Coldplay, Parachutes - Not really good car music, but still a great record, and everybody in the car said they loved Coldplay.
Nirvana, Unplugged in NY - A real classic
Manu Chao, Clandestino - When road tripping in Argentina you need some Spanish language music and this was the only record I knew that I liked

Since this is a poker blog, I'll wrap up with a hand that I played last week.

The villain in this hand is a winning TAG player that can get tricky sometimes. He was the last person I expected to raise me after I bet the turn. If he flopped anything he probably would have bet the flop, so his raise really came out of nowhere and I could only put him on 33 or maybe 34s. I wasn't sure what to do here, as this also seems like a really silly spot for him to bluff, but he might do it more often just because of that. Still not sure, what's the right play here?

We planned to go back to Punta del Este today, but as you might have heard, fires have blanketed the city with smoke:

. We were supposed to fly out today but because of the smoke it's been cancelled... Still not sure if we'll be able to catch another flight but we'll see. Bye!