Man, I’ve been so busy it’s been unreal. I’m honestly not sure where we left off with the last blog, but I went to Barcelona for the EPT and busted out about an hour in with AK vs. AA in a late position battle for about 70xbbs which is okay IMO, especially since I thought I had him “on tilt” from the hand before when I raised him on the river and he had to fold. Anyways, Anita and I take the night train first class back to Paris, France. Once we arrive, we get there and buy tickets for the Eurostar Train going through the English Channel. We go through passport control/immigration and we get pulled aside for further questioning. We didn’t have a hotel reserved yet, because we were just going to go to the tourist information desk when we arrived and have them help us find a good hotel. For some reason to enter the U.K., you need to have hotel reservations before you get into their country for some idiotic reason. We got detained, and questioned on and off for a couple of hours, causing us to miss our original train….no problem, I’ll answer all their questions, I’m no criminal, I’m no terrorist, neither is Anita obviously, we’ll catch the next train or the one after that….WRONG! They ended up not believing I was a Professional Poker Player, or that Anita and I were also on our honeymoon for 3 months traveling across Europe. The British immigration authorities turned us over to the French police with automatic weapons and escorted us away from British territory. We couldn’t believe what happened. In the midst of all of it, the two immigration officers who were handling our case were the most disrespectful and belittling assholes I’ve ever encountered in my life. I’ve been around a wide variety of people in my days, but these guys trump anybody else.

We decided to take the train to Brussels, Belgium two days later to take the Eurostar from Brussels to London so we wouldn’t have to deal with the same authorities again. The immigration officers in Brussels were the exact opposite of the people in the Paris train station. They were more than willing to figure out our situation as quickly as possible and get us on our way. Obviously we were in the system as “access denied” and had to answer all the questions over again, but this time they figured out we were telling the truth, which shouldn’t have been unreasonable in the first place.

We get to London and find our hotel and basically just chill out. Over the past couple days; I’ve been hanging out with my good friend Tom Dwan a.k.a. “durrrr” on FTP and “Hold_emNL” on Stars. We played a few sessions and exchanged strategy a couple times together over the past few days. I went down on Day 2B to rail Tom at the featured table for a couple of hours. I happened to run into Daniel Negreanu while I was there and chatted it up a little bit about some of the Stars high stakes NL regulars and also to thank him for making positive changes to the tables on Pokerstars, such as increasing the minimum buyin to 50xbbs on the 100/200 tables instead of the measly 20xbbs which allows short stackers to effectively “rathole”. Tom was playing the $20k WSOP-Europe Main Event and had made it to Day 3 today with an average chip stack. He then busted a few people up and got all the way to a Top 10 chipstack. Then all of a sudden he missed an open ended straight draw, loses QQ vs. AQ, loses TT vs. AA, and for the second time in the tournament for a large pot, runs KK against AA, and before he knows it, the chips left him as quickly as he got them and was out of the tournament. That’s too bad because durrrr is a great guy and always does the right thing. Of course he was one of the favorites to win the tournament when it got this deep as well since he’s a fantastic player.

I’m fairly excited because today was the beginning of the 2007 World Championship of Online Poker hosted by Pokerstars. I’ll be playing almost every event and plan on taking them very seriously. I had a pretty good finish in last year’s WCOOP PLO Rebuy tournament and hopefully I can have more success this year. I entered in a sidebet with a couple other professional online tournament players with a $1,000 buyin for who has the best results throughout the series, based on a system similar to the Tournament Leaderboard.

Unfortunately, there hasn’t really been any high stakes cash games here in London yet as far as I am aware. However, in about a week when the European Poker Tour comes to town, I hear there will be bigger games and it’ll be time to play live. I’ve been really concentrating on my PLO game recently and I have a feeling you might possibly see a large run up by me in the near future to the ultra-high stakes PLO games.

I apologize that this blog most likely poorly written but I’ve been playing over 4,000 hands a day for the past week and I’m just dead tired. Not to mention it’s already pretty late over here. I might’ve missed some stuff but will write another blog soon.