January Sales

Virgin Atlantic are doing a much better sale than you'll find anywhere in the High Street, and you don't need elbows like Alan Shearer to take advantage of it. Cheap flights to Vegas !

£283 for the WPT Championship in April ? Or perhaps £403 for the first two weeks of the WSOP ? Personally I'm much more tempted by the former, but whatever's your poison, snap it up ! Usual referral percentages apply.

Another Rock And Roll Christmas

Seen another one off. It's a lot better when you don't have a TV, I highly recommend it. I had a nice couple of days off. Obviously I had to watch some kind of pre-produced entertainment, this year I rented Super Size Me, I know it's only one side of the story but it's definitely worth a look, and I particularly enjoyed Bill Fillmaff's latest instructional video on "Female Women". There's one entirely predictable but, or should that be and so, extremely funny bit where "Amy Luke" is talking about how much she loves her kids, check it out.

Naturally I found some Christmas value online, but (perhaps fortunately after Super Size Me) it was of course uneatable. The 25th being on a Sunday was particularly handy for some of the weekly guaranteed tournaments, although the added money was slightly offset by the higher than usual proportion of sociopaths in the field, sociopaths of course being better poker players, if I say so myself. I would wager that if I had turned on the avatars, I wouldn't have seen quite as many gurning babies as usual.

Almost regrettably football has kicked in again with another grim-sounding 1-0 reverse for the SuperHoops, but I enjoyed a welcome win for Barnet this afternoon (and some fresh air), and hats off to the PA guy who gave us a special medley of "Spirit Of Radio", "Radar Love" and the obligatory "Sweet Child Of Mine". Now that's what I call Christmas !!

Red Letter Day

Today was the last Friday I will ever go into work. Have gone into work. Hopefully. Good fucking job too because they want me to do crappy bollocks Unix system test. God I hate Unix. If I ever do go on a killing spree expect me to be screaming "how are you supposed to remember whether its a forward or a backward slash - well take this for a forward slash !" (sound of chainsaw).

Fortunately for all concerned I am effectively back on a 4 day week as of now. Woo hoo ! Watch out Thursday, you're next.

Wrapping Up

Almost done and dusted here, it looks like Colclough is out and they're down to five in the main event, but I'm not spending my last day inside a darkened room watching people play poker, so check Pokerpages if you care.

I would have liked to play the main event, man for man the field looked a lot weaker than, for example, the $1000 NL earlier in the week. It was a fairly quick structure which would suit me. For example, around the bubble the average chip stack was only 10 times (the blinds and antes) which is small. After they made the money, they went 6-handed which wouldn't suit me so much but it's a good move I think, fair enough let qualifiers make the money but it's only right that skill should out in the end as much as is possible. Which isn't much, but there you go.

I only played one more tournament, a $300 NL. Playing 75-150 with around my starting stack of 2500, I called a raise in position with JJ. Flop came 7 high, bash bash bash all in, he had Aces. Never mind. Basically I did not observe Greenstein's number one tournament tip "play lots of tournaments". Various reasons which I might save for later. In the end this is a beautiful place but there just isn't the 24/7 poker action that you get in Vegas. I don't mean that I want to play at 3am, I want to play at 10am, but at that time there are tumbleweeds blowing through the cardroom. Never mind, when I get back I'm going to put the hours in online and build up a bankroll so that I can play $500+ tournaments instead of punting at them. That might take a few months but poker's not going away just yet.