Aviation Club of France

After spending the afternoon at the Louvre, we ate some quick sandwiches at a cafe and set out across the gigantic park. The park, and the shopping district next to it on avenue de Champs-Elysees, was pretty crowded. The traffic in Paris reminded Andrew of Manhattan, but I think it's more chaotic. Sure, in both places the drivers go full speed and honk to make the pedestrians get out of the way, but Paris doesn't seem to believe in street signs or pedestrian crossing signals. I mean, there's some signals in some places, but there were a lot of times you'd get to a crosswalk and look around at a wall of traffic and no light to stop it. The local drivers were pretty predictable - it's the tour buses trying to squeeze through some arch or other that are harder to move around.

We ended up at the Aviation Club of France, which is a card room on the World Poker Tour. On a lazy Sunday evening, there were two tables of no-limit Texas Hold'Em going; when we arrived, they started up a third one. The structure is a little different from American games - blinds are 2/2 (euros), no posting on the button, with a smaller take for the house - and it's sure a lot harder to read hands and tells when you don't speak the local language. But poker is poker, and the action was great - after watching for a while I got a pretty good sense of the playing styles of the other players (a mix of tight/passive and loose/aggressive, with more extremes on the 'aggressive' spectrum than I'm used to), and soon had figured out how to adapt my play for the situation. The club is super swanky, has air conditioning, and free soda. Yup, we finally found infinite Coca-Cola Light refills in Europe! All things are possible. Four hours later, when it was time for us to leave to catch the train back to Zurich, I had pocketed a net 300 euros profit - enough to cover almost the entire cost of the weekend. Andrew had fun too, but says he played too timidly and came out with a small loss. This was a very friendly club, where the host seems to know everyone (and remembered our names) - we'll definitely be back.