EN Weekly Round-up: fine dining, paintballs and promotions
Barry Carter looks back at our best recent promotions and threads, a fun weekend in London with our VIPs, and gives you a sneak peak of the week ahead.
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| Pleno1 - food hero |
As one of our VIP members said to me, there is no better ice breaker than shooting each other.
I've just returned from London where we hosted our VIP paintball event. It was a really fun weekend, the only low point of which was that I mostly acted like a coward on the battlefield after having a paintball hurtle at 200 miles per hour directly onto my nipple.
We'll have a full trip report posted later on this week; until then let me tell you about the highlight of the weekend for me.
He may be a master at the felt, but he is no shark when it comes to dining - watching our poker school hero Patrick 
pleno1'
I'm not sure I've ever met a fussier eater. For literally everything he ordered, he requested that they remove every ingredient that gave it any flavour - much to the waitresses' shock and disgust.
The loaded potato skins with bacon, cheese, spring onion and sour cream became dry potatoes and the sirloin steak with peppercorn sauce became dry steak (and they had the nerve to bring a salad on the side, which he had to poke away with his knife).
Towards the end of the night she couldn't understand him over the noise of the restaurant (and his accent) and he had to write down 'just plain vanilla ice cream' on a napkin. Unfortunately for him, the very small amount of chocolate sauce that arrived on it was a deal breaker and we all stared in amazement as he navigated his spoon around the white bits before giving up entirely.
I'm already putting forward my suggestion to have the next VIP event at a seven-course French food banquet, complete with frogs legs and snails.
Threads of the week
One thing I like about some of the discussion in our community forums is that they are often on quite novel topics, but still are high quality.
Here is something not every serious player thinks about, but should - a backup internet connection.
In particular if you are a high volume tournament/SNG player, the results of disconnection can be devastating. There's lots of great insights in this thread about how costly it really can be.
I love a crazy challenge, so my blog of the week is just that. It is not technically in the blog section (yet) but ivicailiev77 is going to attempt to earn 100k VPPs in four months playing $15 six max turbo SNGS.
He needs to play 4,200 of them by the end of the year, so if he is reading this all I have to say is "stop reading this and load up some games".
LOL of the week
Featured in our Daily Rewind last week, I could not resist reposting this video of a man behaving in a live poker room the way most of us behave when we are all alone playing online:
In case you missed it.......
Several interesting new exclusive promotions last week, not least a promotion to win gift vouchers for high street stores.
Before you say "that's not balla" I would have you know I once furnished an entire house with vouchers I had made from VIP points. It feels so much better knowing that you didn't have to buy them with real money.
We also had the debut video from our new MTT coach sphillips22. From what I understand this coach is going to be a regular fixture in our poker school so get in early with him.
On the fun side of stuff, we started posting our best poker look-a-likes last week and I am giving away a copy of The Mental Game of Poker to the best one.
What to watch out for this week
Look out for another new $10,000 Depositor Freeroll announcement this week - we really do spoil you with those.
Also keep an eye out for a big PokerTracker announcement too.
Expect all the regular weekly videos and coachings from the likes of CollinMoshman, Skodljivec and Uri Peleg.
These are not guaranteed yet (I think probably one of them won't happen) but also look out for new offerings this week from Schitzelfisch, Pleno1 and W34z3l.
Finally for those of you who refer your friends to PokerStrategy.com, watch out for a big announcement.
I want your feedback on what you would like to see more or less of on the news pages of PokerStrategy.com. Let me know your thoughts, good and bad, in my editor thread below:
