Nightshift - the joy of MTT coverages

The Banco Casino Masters festival was an opportunity to get back to some live Poker coverage for me. All in all, it's been an intense week full of excitement I had been missing along with stuff I really haven't :-)

Documentation is by far my favourite activity when it comes to photography. So, naturally, the story telling around the reporting about a Poker event, as thrilling and full of drama as it is given the swingy nature and brutal psychological aspects of the game, is very appealing to me. Somehow, it's fair to think that Poker reporters have a little bit of sadistic tendencies, looking for that painful spot and ugly bust out... but there's also a bunch of masochism involved due to the incredible time volume needed for the full coverage of a festival like this one when you think of it. I spent 72 hours working on my Banco Casino Bratislava reporting mission from last Tuesday to the Main Event final table seven days later. This time commitment made me turn my back on intensively reporting over the last years. Today, I enjoy photography a lot more as a contribution to Poker coverages and I use the spare time to do lifestyle, travel or gaming industry reports when it comes to my Poker related journalism activities. For the rest, as most of my readers know, I just play PLO cash games myself, which, by now, I am confident enough to consistently make money with.

Generally speaking, it's all fine as long as the Poker rooms are packed and you have more stories and hands to report about than you could possibly digest but once the action stalls towards the end of the tournaments, the days can get really long and the passion for what we do can easily dissipate.

The coverages of the huge day 1s of the Banco Casino Masters festival easily took 12 hours each and things got really rough for me when I was assigned the coverage of the finals of the High Roller on Thursday night.

The most expensive event of a Poker series is always a serious thing and it's common to witness a long battle in the final stages of the top heavy payout structure. This one, specifically, lasted until 7am before we could crown the champion and it then takes another genuinely endless 60-90 minutes to wrap things up consisting of sorting, finish edits and publishing the photos of the night beside compiling an intelligible recap for posterity only to come back a few hours later for the launch of one of the biggest Main Event flights of the week from noon. Quite excruciating to keep up with such a rythme.

During this Banco Casino Masters Special Edition, we've used a combo of detailed updates in Slovak brought by the household reporter, Denis, and we also published a bunch of updates in English using the Banco Casino Bratislava Facebook page.

Below, you'll find examples of some of the final posts of the High Roller with time stamps...

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The 2022 WSOP are around the corner and I'll be back in Sin City in a few weeks to bring some great PokerFirma content from the world's most exciting Poker festival taking place in Nevada. Combining the documentation of everything Las Vegas and its surroundings have to offer together with throwing in quite e bit of cash game grinding myself, it will be another great opportunity to be completely sleep deprived for weeks :-D

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Damiano Nigro