Winter Sports, Prop Bets and Warsaw Trip Report

A couple weeks after Copenhagen my friend Roland De Wolfe invited me out for a one-week skiing trip with him and his parents in Zermatt, Switzerland.
I elected to go snowboarding instead of skiing as I remembered having a lot of difficulty skiing as a youngster and snowboarding came really easy to me
trick cards.
For the first three days at the resort, all we did was stay in the room and play Chinese poker and online poker; sometimes both at the same time. Finally we got out and hit the slopes. The mountains were higher up than I've ever seen before - so different than the kiddy hills I used to snowboard on back in high school.
It took about 20-30 minutes by train to get up the mountain, so you can imagine how far up it was. At first, I struggled keeping my balance on the snowboard and would fall quite frequently, but eventually I got the hang of it and picked up where I left off 5-6 years ago.
After only 1-2 minutes of boarding, my legs and feet were in excruciating pain and I was out of breath to the point of wanting to stop and take the train back down. I'm not sure if I was out of breath because the air is thinner at higher altitudes, me being out of shape, or me underestimating how strenuous of an exercise boarding actually is but it was probably a combination of all three.
I felt a little bit guilty about not wanting to continue, as it interrupted Roland's ski session and I knew that Roland, being the loyal friend that he is, would want to take the train down with me instead of continuing on without me and meeting me in the room. So we went down, played some more Chinese, went to the sauna and relaxed until dinner.
Every night Roland and I had dinner with his parents at this really nice restaurant in the "Alex," a hotel owned and operated by a family and THE best hotel I've ever stayed at by far. Roland and his family had been going to this hotel in Zermatt for the last 20 years and it's no wonder why.
The whole village of Zermatt is like an undiscovered paradise, almost like a world within the world. I highly recommend it to anyone wanting to go skiing or boarding. We tried boarding/skiing again the following day and I had the exact same problem after a few minutes.
This really got me disturbed. I guess punishing my body by eating junk food and not exercising for the last two years was finally catching up to me. Nevertheless, I shouldn't be out of breath from boarding at this young of an age.
I'm a firm believer that in order to make positive changes in your life, you need to get disturbed about your current situation. When I first started playing online poker, I got disturbed about not being a winning player and developed a keen and pulsating desire to become successful at online poker - and more specifically multi-table tournaments.
I know for a fact that I can use this same strategy to get back in great shape and have exercise and a balanced diet become a part of my regular lifestyle. Of course, It also helps if there's some financial reward for achieving my goal.
So I asked Roland if he'd be interested in a prop bet where each of us are required to lose a certain amount of weight by the start of the WSOP (May 31st). He agreed and we discussed the terms the following day marked poker.
These are the rules/terms:

1. NO eating in the three hours before going to bed.
2. Must work out five times per week for at least one hour.
3. No eating the following foods: Fast food, candy, chocolate, chips, coffee, anything fried, hot dogs, corn dogs, donuts, pizza, soft pretzels, cookies, sugary cereals, cake, cupcakes, ice cream cake, white bread, pizza, fries, pies, pop/soda, hamburgers, fattening dressings, pastries, processed foods, red meat, alcohol, potatoes, white rice, egg yolk.
4. Alcohol only one day out of the week.
5. One cheat day per week (we can eat anything).
6. If one of us loses the required weight and the other doesn't, the person who didn't achieve his goal owes the other $25k. If both fail or both succeed, it's a total wash.
7. Roland has to lose 16 kilos; Sorel has to lose 12 kilos.

Starting weights:

Sorel 98.1 kilos
Roland 102.5 kilos
We get charged $1k per rule we violate to a cap of $3k in a single day. Obviously we're not going to be able to monitor each other efficiently, so we're just going by the honor system. I've already broken one rule.
I ate a cookie knowing that it would cost me $1k. It seemed worth it at the time =(. Good news is that Roland has already racked up $4k in violations and isn't showing any sign of slowing down so I'm liking my chances.
EPT Warsaw was a little bit uneventful. I got down to $1,500 chips after three-barreling some guy who called my K-Q UTG raise with 6-2 on the button, flopped trip 2s and called my bet on every street. I raised to $275 at $50/$100.

Lesson learned, again, at EPT Warsaw: Old guys always have it when they re-raise.

He called the button, I bet $550 on a board of 2-2-9. He called, the turn was a J and I fired $1,400. He called, I bet $3,300 on the 5 river and again he called. I really didn't put 6-2o in his range :(. Oh well, I don't feel too bad about the hand as I would have played A-J, K-J, QQ, KK, AA the same way for value.
I managed to get back up to $10k after a few lucky double-ups - QQ vs TT against Luca Pagano and then AA vs Q-K on a K-high board against William Thorson. After recovering, I made the same mistake I've made in every single EPT tournament this year - overvaluing A-Q when I have a very loose-aggressive image.
It's always the same thing: someone at the table makes a comment about how aggressive I am, and then I think that they think I have nothing and are re-raising me light and I three-bet all-in for all my chips.
I really have to stop thinking so deep when I get re-raised by older live players. They always have it!
I've run A-Q into KK and A-K 5/5 times this year in live tournaments when I could have avoided the situation, and only sucked out once (Irish Open). A-Q is the devil.
-- Sorel Mizzi