Well this week I have focused a lot more on poker and toned down the partying quite a bit. I crushed the 5/10 cash games at the start of the week and am up a few buy-ins now. I was in a really good game earlier in the week where we had a compulsory $20 straddle from the button and got the 7-2 game going also. Anyone who wins a pot with 7-2 gets $25 from each player. It made the game so juicy because my bluff radar was working at full capacity. I played the role of 7-2 officer at the table, punishing anyone who tried t steal a pot I was in. I felt like I should have been rewarded each time I saved the table $225 (or each player $25). I was the big winner in the cash games 2 nights and have just been grinding a bit since then.

I went to the best nightclub ever on Friday night to let off some steam after another baron week at the tables. XS at Encore was highly recommended to me by some friends and believe me it exceeded all expectations! It makes the top London clubs feel like tiny dingy basements (which most of them are!) Me and Steve Watts joined a VIP table with Antonio Esfandiari, Sorel Mizzi, Jon Tabatabai and Durrr, but spent most of the night outside playing "What Lodden thinks?" with Sorel. It's a great game to play in a club and leads to all sorts of other crazy side bets and prop bets. I ended up down 200 in the end which is not bad at all based on how much I was down at one point plus he had a slight edge on a few questions in the game by being Canadian! It also reminded me of how dumb the average American girl is! I was pretty annoyed that my camera had been stolen because we bumped into Ronaldinho on Friday night, who was ballin with a bunch of hot chicks! We decided to go again on Saturday night and bumped into £80m man, Cristiano Ronaldo who was just chilling in the VIP with his agent (no doubt hiding in Vegas until the heat blows over). It was strange because if it was any club in the UK or Europe for that matter, he would be swarmed by tonnes of people.

So far I'm 1 for 7 in all events I've played so far. I've played 5 WSOP events and 2 smaller side events. It feels like ages since I last cashed in a tourney and I have started to notice my play deteriorating. In all honesty I am yet to bring my "A" game to the table and probably don't deserve a decent win yet. It's pretty common to not cash in +7 large field tournaments in a row. It's just easier to handle online as it is in a shorter time-frame and less $$, in fact I went +35 tournaments without cashing online quite recently!

Well I've been out here almost a week now and my results have not been great. The pain of playing for hours upon hours each day only to finish short of the money is taking its toll on my psyche. The first Event I played was Event 4 - $1000 NL. I found it quite easy to manoeuvre the table and pick up chips going from 3000 to 8000 within the first 3 levels with hardly any showdowns.

I was planning on writing a blog bitching about how it took 24hrs to Las Vegas from London! I was also going to complain about my flight delays and having to play elbow wars for 6 hrs against a small Italian woman for an armrest! But now that I'm in Vegas I have simply chosen to delete the 29th of May 2009 from my memory and replace it with the lesson: ALWAYS FLY DIRECT!!!

I have finally escaped the 9-5 city grind and hopefully with more time on my hands I will be able to increase my win rate and volume. Leaving work in the City to play this crazy game was a relatively easy decision.