Five Balls, Online Grinding, and “Memphing”

Europe on €5,000 a Week

Topics: Player Columns

I want to give a quick summary of a fantastic three-week poker trip with a great group of guys, where we did two EPT stops and two WPT stops. Sharing the trip with friends, it was a refreshing change from the normal life of tournament poker.

Travelling around the world playing poker is a lot of fun, but even that can become a grind after a while if you find yourself just going through the motions. Not much time at home, adapting to a travelling lifestyle, always seeing the same faces from the tour in different places. It can feel like a travelling circus.

There are ways to make the trip extraordinary. A lot of tour regulars, however, tend to do the full grind of playing the main event and all side events and then when not playing live, returning to the hotel room to grind online.

The way I see it, you never know when it will be the last time you have a chance to be doing this. I know many people who would die for a chance to get away from their regular jobs and travel the world with free time on their hands!

Unofficially, this is my second season on the professional poker circuit. I played my first WSOP last summer and have been playing on the EPT circuit for a full season. I am at the point where I have been to most of the major poker venues throughout the world. The time is coming for me to visit some of these exotic places for a second time.

I tried different living arrangements over the last year. I have shared rooms with poker players at fancy hotels, usually next to the playing venue. I've also stayed with friends at stops where I know people. I have even occasionally stayed as a guest with locals through travelling community couchsurfing.org, where I have been actively surfing and hosting for years.

On this occasion, in Spring 2011, some Scandinavian poker friends offered to let me join them for a tour of Austria, Slovakia, and Germany. We would play, in rapid succession, EPT Snowfest, WPT Vienna, WPT Bratislava, and EPT Berlin. It had the makings of a great trip.

Our group started out with Anton Wigg, Kevin Stani, Martin Jacobson, Michael Tureniec (Sweden and Norway's finest,) and me. (Technically, I’m Finnish.)

As soon as we all made it to our villa in Hinterglemm, Austria, we played a five-way sit-n-go to see who would get the master bedroom for the week in EPT Snowfest. I am happy to say that I took it down and the rest of them had to share bunk beds for the rest of the week.

Unfortunately, that victory was my best result on the entire trip! Luckily, my roommates bailed me out since we all swapped “five balls” (five per cent) with each other for the entire three weeks. Martin Jacobson came through for us with his third EPT final table of the season at the end of the trip and finished fourth in EPT Berlin. (He said he was actually happy with fourth because he didn't want to finish second in a main event for the third time this year!)

Swaps were also made with Jesper Hoog and Simon Charette, who later joined our group. Both players cashed in WPT Bratislava and Jesper Hoog final-tabled and finished fifth.

Obviously it's good to swap with good players! It reduces variance and it increases the camaraderie in the group when someone final tables something. It was great grinding online as a group as well, especially in Vienna where our grindroom was in a beautiful penthouse apartment with two rooftop terraces.

On the other side, I learned it can be tough for group spirit when a friendly Chinese poker game starts out at €50 per point and stakes rise to over €1,000 per point. (We agreed to not let things get out of hand like that again!)

As for other activities, we had lots of fun skiing, dining in fine restaurants, and partying. (There was even a night where some of us ended up wandering the streets of Bratislava carrying a bottle of Vodka.)

We taught each other new expressions - and not just when drunk! Anton Wigg calls things and people “bossy.” Like, “he played that like a boss” or someone looked like a “bossy boss.” After Michael Tureniec won EPT Copenhagen, I heard Anton call him a “Life Boss” on a webcast, and it stuck. For the entire trip, Mike was “Life Boss.” After I had problems figuring out how to connect a charger to a MacBook, I picked up the nickname “Neanderthal.”

But the catchword of the entire trip was definitely “Memph.”

The story is simple. Kevin Stani plays most of the EPT High rollers and usually ends up sitting next to an eccentric Austrian guy who calls himself “The Wolf.” He smokes an electronic cigarette that blows out smoke, and he checks with his elbow. Any time he busts somebody he yells “Memph! Memph”! He once described a hand as follows: “He tried to bluff me. I have two pair. I memph him, now he is here [pointing to his stomach] but The Wolf is still hungry … fifty more.”

To us, he’s no longer The Wolf. He is The Memph. The Memph owns a security business and supposedly used to be an undercover agent who would “take care of business” in foreign lands. (I have images of him standing above a sleeping victim and whispering “memph” as he kills him.)

For the rest of the trip, every action has a “memph” component, whether we were “memphing people,” “getting memphed,” or witnesses someone “getting their memph on.”

I loved travelling around with these guys and seeing how they reacted to non-poker situations. After all, being in a house with six guys is messy, even if we were staying in “baller” apartments! I'm happy to say that they all did their part to keep things pretty clean and chip in when it came to simple chores.

Frankly, I think it is good to polarize your life-range. Go from scrubbing dishes and taking out the trash to playing a €10,000 High-Roller. Why not? Maybe that's why it was such a pleasure sharing apartments with these guys and am looking forward to the doing it again on future trips. Having a fair amount of genuine humility and life perspective is without a doubt part of why they are all so good at poker too!