Friday, 29th March 2024 09:23
Home / Uncategorized / EPT9 Berlin: You don’t think you speak German, but you do

You don’t think you speak German, but actually you do. You just didn’t know it. I’ll tell you how.

If, like many in the poker community, you follow a host of the top poker players on Twitter, you’ll probably discover that every now and again you find them tweeting in their native language and you can’t understand a word. I mean, I’d dearly love to get to know Team Online’s Naoya “nkeyno” Kihara @key_poker a whole lot better, but I’m really struggling when he comes up with things like this:

However, when Team Pro’s Jan Heitmann starts tweeting in his native German (@janheitmann), it is a much more satisfying experience for the monoglot to examine his words. You may not think you speak German, but actually you do.

Take a look at the following, as Heitmann described his progress through Day 1A at EPT Berlin yesterday. He did almost all of it in German, and yet we barely missed a word — at least once you know that “spiel” means “play” and “Tisch” is “table”. The rest seems to follow right along.

jan_heitmann_twitter_day1a_ept9_berlin.jpg

Learn German with Jan Heitmann

It all started pretty well, with Heitmann welcoming the Brazilian Felipe Ramos to his table, and wondering if he should brush up on his Portuguese:

And then he welcomed Scott Seiver. (This one is easy).

It wasn’t long, however, before Heitmann was confessing to some sub-optimal play, yet hoping to avoid panic setting in. (Big words, huh? Easy to follow though.)

Round about the dinner break, Heitmann unveiled a new plan…

…but instead of hitting that chip lead, actually ran into a nit-roll holding a full house, and finally had more than the starting stack:

But after losing a couple of pots, the dinner break couldn’t come quickly enough. When you’re “gewinning keine Pots”, you need a break.

Etc., etc., etc. Heitmann finished yesterday with 21,900 chips and will return for more of the same on Day 2. “Gute Nacht! Danke fürs Railen” he said. The pleasure was all ours.

*****

Entirely coincidentally, Kristy Arnett of PokerStars.tv also attempted to learn some German at the PokerStars party on Saturday night. She was about as successful as us:


Don’t forget the way to follow our main event coverage. There’s hand-by-hand stuff, including chip counts, in the panel at the top of the main EPT Berlin page. There will be feature pieces below that panel, including updates from the side events. EPT Live will begin at around 4pm local time. And everything to do with the European Poker Tour is on the European Poker Tour site.

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