In London

As I write this I'm sitting in a house in the Notting Hill district of London. I've been here for about a week and will be here for another 2 weeks or so. I've rented the place with poker players David "DavidP17" Peters, Joe "floes" Serock, and November Niner John "JRD312" Dolan. Keven "stammdog" Stammen will arrive tomorrow, I think. It's the first time I've spent significant time with these guys and they're all really chill. What brings me to town is the World Series of Poker Europe. Sadly, it's off to an inauspicious start. I busted the first 4 (out of 5) bracelet events and will play the WSOPE Texas Holdem poker Main Event in about 9 hours.

There's almost nothing interesting to report as I'm about a $26,000 loser on the trip so far. In addition, I had my Vodaphone internet card completely go out on me during a Sunday online poker tournament
session which had me time out of about $5000 worth of tournaments. After the WSOPE is over, the EPT London will take place. There are a couple of side events I'll take part in as well as the 5000 GBP main event. It would be really nice to knock something off here. All that said, I'm still enjoying myself. It would be hard to complain about being in London. This is my third time being here, and the culture here is always my favorite part. At any given busy pub, restaurant or nightclub there might be 15 different nationalities and tons of different languages being spoken. That might be my favorite part about the city. Things are really expensive here which is pretty annoying. I feel like everyone here must really extend himself because I for sure would go broke living in this city. I've been doing a bunch of walking around the city which has been nice. I've also been eating a lot of good, big meals and living a markedly unhealthy lifestyle in general as I've been sleeping all kinds of different hours.

In the rest of the month since I last posted, I moved into my condo in Birmingham. I really, really like it as it's pretty much a perfect fit for me. I have a ton of people I know in Birmingham which always makes for an interesting time. On the second night playing poker at the condo, I outright won the Full Tilt Poker $1k Monday for the 2nd time in my career. The score was worth $120,000 or so and was the second largest of my online poker career. The few online tournaments I've played have salvaged the calendar year for me as I've been getting bludgeoned live. All in all, I'm up a decent figure on the year.

I've got a fairly busy October planned as I'll likely play WPT Festa al Lago in Vegas, $10k WSOPC in Northern Indiana just outside of Chicago, and WPT Foxwoods. These tournaments will have to work around the Braves playoffs schedule provided they make it though. I'd kinda like to be back in Birmingham relaxing, but I also feel like I should work a little bit since I was sort of out of commission for 21 months while finishing up school.

That's it. I'll probably continue to just blog once every few weeks as I'm able to express random thoughts more easily via Twitter. I'm at a point in my career and my life where I don't have the drive to really sit down and recount or analyze hands like I used to. In fact, I could see myself completely stopping blogging at some point as the idea of keeping a super low profile is somewhat appealing.

SS