I originally found an absolutely beautiful house in Notting Hill with a tear-drop roof, wood burning stove and a rain shower. Absolutely stunning, but we did not put in a high enough offer, and the landlord chose to go with other tenants :-(. Eventually after two weeks in a hotel (very cool hotel mind you) we found a place and moved in a few days later. I'm still in the process of moving in now, and IKEA has been deadly for me... Every time I go in there I buy things that are really cool, but just so not needed! I mean for Christ sake, I came home with three coconut palm trees - they do look very cool in my bedroom, my two IKEA lamps, my IKEA bed, and IKEA side table...!
It's curtains for James
Talking of IKEA, I also bought a pair of curtains (nice bright red, to go with my red and black bed), but when cutting to size and hemming, I messed up. I thought I'd take a short cut and cut the two curtains to length together, straight out of the packet. Little did I know the curtains had been packed opposite ends! I made a perfect surgical incision to cut my curtains to exactly 220cm, but realised when I unravelled the curtains that one set was cut perfectly to 220cm, the other to 80cm. FML!
What's more, I tried putting up a curtain rail but I swear the wall is made of metal, and my drill bit (over one hour of drilling) won't break through this impermeable layer more than 1 cm deep. It makes hanging a curtain rail bracket very hard (I have now called in a professional lol).
Anyway, our house is just like a geeks play room. The living room has two desktops covering five screens with three laptops on standby! There's a huge TV, every games console imaginable and a pair of electric 'Lazy Boy' chairs - it's like a kid's heaven (god I feel sad now)!
The Unibet Open, London
While I was looking for a house, I played in the UniBet Open at the Victoria Casino, London. It's £2500+£250 buy-in was quite steep for a standard 'GUKPT' style structure, but was the best value tournament at this buy-in I've played for a while. There were so many satellite qualifiers, it was actually hard to lose against them. At the first two breaks I was chip leader at both, and then I managed to lose a 100xbb pot all-in with AJ suited vs 77pre flop (don't ask, it was all positional and against a very bad player who was bought into the tournament as a reporter, not a player). I obviously lost the flip for the 6th time in a row in live tournaments since the WSOP Main Event. I then went on to go very card dead for the rest of the day, and lost a couple of important 60/40's and 70/30's etc.. I ground the day through, and came back on Day Two with about 40xbb's.
Day Two
Day Two arrived and I was sat to the immediate right +1 of Bernie Litman, the chip leader and also the guy who beat me heads up in Brighton for the GUKPT title earlier in the year. I started the day strong as the aggressor, but was getting abused by every player at the table, who always seemed to have a hand against me (or outplayed me). Anyway, never having a hand better than AT I was unable to defend to 3-bets etc... I doubled up once through Bernie with KK vs his 67 on 579 board, but I was very short and it did not really increase my stack. Anyway, with 10 players left before the money, I get it in with A9 suited vs 88 (versus a guy who had 5-outered someone all-in on the turn for a huge pot and binked the river, the day before). The tension mounted as we waited 5 minutes for the TV cameras to come over, and rightly so. The table went nuts when he 'only flopped quads'... lol.. GG, ciao!
My attempts to get detoxed have been plagued by failure, and I'm sure this will continue. However, much as I want to detox and exercise, I have just bought a bottle of Jaegermeister to be kept in the freezer at all times!
I am planning to have my computer set up and house ready by the end of the week for some hardcore online grinding, as I have kind of lost the feeling for online poker at the moment, and need to get it back prompto! Hopefully you shall see me rinsing the cash games before I hit Luton GUKPT next week!
Play with James666 at PKR.com or chat with him in the PKR Forums.