Dinner breaks. Players love them. Reporters loathe them. But they are a necessity on a long day, and we’ll be having one today on Day 2 of the ANZPT Auckland Main Event.
The questions are, when and for how long?
Some tournaments give a big ninety-minute dinner break which is probably a little long. Others go with the even one hour, which seems a reasonable length of time. However here in Auckland we’re going for the rapid-fire half-hour dinner break.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. We don’t want to drag the day out any longer than we have to, but it does limit one’s food options, especially when you’ve been consuming the Fish Wrap with Chips from Sammy’s Place every day this week.
While we’re not complaining about the length of the break, the timing did seem a little unusual, with the dinner break scheduled to come up at the end of the fifth level of play today. That will mean we’ll be taking dinner around 5:50pm local time. Now I’m Tasmanian, so we’re used to eating dinner in the early afternoon, but even for me, that seemed a little sudden.
“Strangest decision in any sport or game ever,” commented PokerNews blogger Joshua Bell when he first heard the dinner break plans. While Bell’s reaction seemed a little over the top, especially the part where he slammed his fist onto the blogging desk in disgust*, we understand his confusion. Usually you would expect the breaks to follow after the end of every two levels, but this dinner break will come just one hour after the previous break.
“My mind can’t comprehend that,” was Bell’s response as he rocked back in his chair and took another sip of scotch and coke**.
Whatever fast foods are consumed in the upcoming half-hour, we’re sure they will taste pretty good for our chip leaders. Nicolas Oger and Stanislav Chataline have been impressive all day, while David Lim and Steven Holloway are destroying their table. Holloway is actually a bit of a local celebrity here in New Zealand as a writer for The New Zealand Herald, so he’s certainly giving himself plenty to write about with an impressive run so far. Let’s see if that will continue following a tasty Fish Wrap.
* may not be true
** also not true
Heath “TassieDevil” Chick is a Freelance Contributor for the PokerStars Blog.
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