Life on the train can be tough. While the journeys to exotic locations, the intercontinental friendships (and of course the women) make up for a lot, riding the gravy train is a tough ride when you stop winning. It’s a natural thing that a player in a luck-based game has his ups and downs but lately it’s becoming a drag for me and others around me. I haven’t had any money finishes since my 19th place at GP: Eindhoven this February not counting the Philadelphia 4-3-2-2 experiment. My last money finish before that on the Pro Tour was a year ago in Columbus, and the only additional point I picked up afterwards was in Eindhoven, where I lost playing for Top 8. Around me Jeroen Remie and Jelger Wiegersma also stopped winning long ago and mention quitting Magic whenever they can.
GP: Nottingham didn’t make me feel a whole lot better afterwards about my Magic capabilities, but it did about the gravy life. It all happened when Quentin Martin, who I was rooming with, persuaded me to have one beer in a pub Friday night. We ran into the Irish and Scottish and I was quickly introduced. I told some of them how I’m getting a bit bored of the gravy life, never winning anything anymore. One by one they reacted by telling me that being Level 3 is so cool already, something I totally forgot since I already take that for granted. When I told them about writing for Star City, most of them knew my articles as well and encouraged me to write some more. Well lads, here goes, this one’s for you!
*Aside On The Pro Player’s Club*
I still wonder why they named it “Pro Player’s Club”, while it’s actually the “Keep Ruud Warmenhoven on the train” system. Let me explain: With me not winning anything, I should have been falling of the train after PT: London, since I lost my PT: Seattle points. The new system counts differently though, and made me Level 3 for the whole of 2005 by counting my Top 16 from PT Columbus last year. With that Top 16 I am sure to maintain Level 3 throughout the whole year and keep it for the whole 2006 season. This could mean that I could go for two straight years without having to win a single additional PT point! And yet they call it the Pro Player’s Club…
*End Aside*
This will be the best report written about GP: Nottingham. Yes, I do dare to say that. The article you are reading now just has all the good stuff: an epic competitor’s story, the stories of not one, but two DQs at the GP, photos of your Magic heros in compromising situations and even a movie clip of two PT mainstays getting into a fight. [Sorry, no movies. – Knut, not hosting The Battle of the Pro Tour Stars] Oh, and if you read between the lines, you might even pick up a little strategy as well… You get all this, and the tale of a PT purgatory member slugging it out, battling for that elusive Top 32.
I really had a blast in Nottingham but the official tournament sucked. I didn’t win a dime in the GP and was even down in money drafts. Most of the games I played in the tournament were dumb as well, and I’d go so far as to say that I only played five “real” games. You know, the ones with tough decisions and stuff, where both players actually have a decent shot of winning on turn 3. Unfortunately most games I played involved one player mulliganning to four, stalling on two lands or casting Barbarian Riftcutter (not me, I tell you). Since I’ve been to GPs before, especially Limited ones, I knew this could happen beforehand. Thus I came prepared…
The first thing I packed was my brand new wireless equipped laptop so I am able to write this report now in some airport lounge. Usually I tend to be lazy with reports, but since I bought this laptop, writing seems like a great way to kill time on the journey back home. To be able to illustrate my antics in full color, I brought my camera as well. I tried getting some pics online from PT: London in the form of a quiz but that never really seemed to work out before they got outdated and photographs of intoxicated PT champs are funny only for so long. I did get some good ones this time as well, as I’ll show you along the way. The next item in the packing sequence, which really is nothing more than me running around my room five minutes before I have to catch a train, was a hackey sack to stimulate Magic players to exercise and random annoy people while waiting for flights at airports. Additional bonus when hackey sacking with Magic players is the awkward situations when a sack lands between two players and they just stare at each other, waiting for the other to get it.
For Nottingham, every Magic player in Holland was on the same flight leaving early Friday morning so I got to crash with Jelger at no place less than the one that houses current World Champion Julien “Nut Low” Nuijten. Julien had a copy of the Finkel book, which I got to read for a bit and instantly liked. Although pretty much every reference to Magic or Poker is incorrect, the story reads very well, especially the Blackjack part. I was told by Dan Place who I first met at the GP that the best Finkel story is not in the book. Whether it’s actually true I wouldn’t know, but I don’t care either since like Mulder, I just want to believe. According to Dan, the part about the kids that bullied Finkel and even urinated on him isn’t the complete story. He told me that the word around the Magic campfire always was that Finkel, when he finally got rich and achieved success, tracked down each one of the bullies, beat them up and urinated on them to get even. Talk about facing your demons…
Because of Julien’s inability to give directions, we got laughed at by some lady the next morning when asking for a certain train station Julien said was a fifteen minute walk away. I believe her exact words were:
“BOOHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA, you boys are walking there? That’ll take at least an hour!”
At the moment we were about ten minutes from the Champ’s house, with our flight leaving at 10:50. We shared this information with this nice lady and she told us that we should be happy to even arrive at the station at 11, but she was happy to give us some better directions. A short walk, bus ride and a way too long cab ride with a first-day driver, who screwed up left and right and was this close to hitting someone later we arrived at the airport 15 minutes before the gate closed. Unfortunately, Schiphol Airport was chock full of people and there was a line at check-in. After some smart maneuvering, cutting people left and right we got to run to customs, make some more cuts before finally cutting with the other passengers on our flight while waiting for security checks. In every stressful situation there is one person that just panics and this time it was some businessman who just repeated, “We’re gonna miss our flight” over and over. Though highly annoying, this encouraged us to run with our bags to the gate. Here is where I regretted packing all that stuff and after some running, something fell out of my pocket. I didn’t really notice or cared at the time, but twenty meters further on, I heard people yelling. Looking back I yelled at them to leave me alone and cursed them until one guy yelled, “It’s your passport.” Ouch. I tried to get him to throw it to me, but he wanted to be responsible and hand it to me. When arriving at the gate I was exhausted, sweating all over my body, thirsty to no end and then we had to wait another 30 minutes. We even arrived there before Kamiel and Rich, but hey, sometimes you just gotta catch a flight.
Wilco “Big Pinks” Pinkster was also on a flight and looked like a reborn man. You might remember him with long, untamable hair. Oddly, at the gate Wilco wasn’t his usual self. When asked about his strikingly different appearance, as he was still adamantly refusing to cut his manes at Nationals, he told me about this makeover show he’d been on. While I hadn’t heard of this, everybody seemed to have seen the show that told the story of Big Pinks and some girl he secretly had a crush on. The problem was that his best friend Roel also liked her, and that the girl had high standards. She wanted a man that was willing to go the distance for her, thereby proving his worth. And this pushed Big Pinks to the edge, doing the unthinkable:
Before
After:
Did he get the girl? You’d have to ask him yourself…
The cheap hotel we booked turned out to be very “special”, as in the crappiest place I ever stayed at. This includes back alleys in Prague, the cockroach hotel in Houston, and GWalls’s apartment. When arriving Roger wanted to take a shower, Kamiel wanted to rest a little and I really needed to take a dump. I could already envision it, me sitting privately in the bathroom, the tired traveler getting some well-deserved toilet quality time. We decided to meet up in half an hour at Roger’s room. I still remember walking into the room, eyeing the perfect white sink, taking a look around in the small room and only seeing the double bed that could hardly fit myself, let alone Quentin and me, plus a closet that was literally falling apart and the 10-inch TV with four channels and no remote. But the worst thing of all: there was no bathroom! After some inquiry, I found myself on a toilet across the building in a small room without a washing basin of any sorts, shared by many people and at least five minutes away from my room. It just wasn’t the same.
After locating the site, we managed to get kicked out for playing Hackey-sack (a trend that continued over the weekend), ate in some awesome gothic place where they had awesome chairs that made you feel like a king and the restrooms were behind a revolving bookshelf, drafted, got drunk and partied.
We invented some sort of credit card game for drinking rounds and eventual finalist Roel ended up paying to get the Dutch contingent in higher spirits. Quentin excelled at this and managed to get us lost on the way back, but was funny as hell arguing with police officers and therefore forgiven.
Next morning our alarm wakes us and Quentin first hits the shower two blocks away. I open my eyes slowly and notice a foul smell in our room, but I am unable to determine what it is. When I approach the washing basin, it turns out some a certain Englishman couldn’t hold his liquor and I see the results of what I in the middle of the night mistakenly figured for drinking water all over my contacts. Quentin, quite hung over, returns and tries to blame me. A nice play, which I have to credit him for, but one that was quickly overruled. I make fun of him a bit as he tries to clean it. Having a clear mind myself, I decide to do the only noble thing a friend would do in a situation like this and I grab my camera
And that is my tale.