The trip to Barcelona started pretty well, I made it through Day 1 of the first tournament (€10,300 Buyin) on the first bullet, meaning I didn't have to rebuy and pay another €10,300.
On Day 2 I was pretty shortstacked for most of the time but made it to the paid places, there were 195 entries, 45 rebuys and 55 spots in the money while the 1st place finisher got €413,000. I busted in 55th which meant I got €11,410 back for a tiny profit, it's a pretty low return as usually the organiser would pay money for the top ~15% instead of 23% and then have a higher mincash (which is by far the better way to do it in my opinion), but considering my chip position I can actually be happy about the result.
After that I started my Challenge, trying to turn 10 BTC into €10,000 cash in 10 days. I played 10 hours with one 30 minute break and this was the result:
In the first session I played I lost €3,007, more than half the total Challenge bankroll. About as bad of a start as it could be, right? :) Obviously I was well aware that this could happen and mentioned it in the first post, in retrospect I could've thought about some better Challenge rules decreasing the variance but I still have 2 BTC online (I transferred 1 BTC to a BTC pokersite but didn't play yet) and €1,036 in Casino chips to turn it around. No matter the outcome the next Challenge will be better planned, promise!
Besides Poker I'm really enjoying Barcelona a lot. The weather is great and I'm lucky enough to have an amazing girlfriend & friends around me. We didn't visit as many nice restaurants as usual as we've been playing a lot during the night, my favorite dinner place so far is a Mexican restaurant called Oaxaca Cuina Mexicana @OaxacaBCN, very good quality and very fairly priced. For a group of 7 people we paid around €450 including 2 bottles of wine and a bunch of cocktails. Since we usually do Credit Card Roulette for the bill (everyone puts a Credit Card, one randomly gets picked who pays for the whole group) and I didn't lose it even was free for me :).
Someone suggested in the comments to write down some hand histories from the Challenge, I'll happily do that in the next post, other suggestions are highly appreciated!