I'm in London yo

I got in yesterday afternoon and last night I hung out with my friend Paul from Waterloo who lives here now, and some of his other friends in the financial industry. Paul moved here after grad school and is working at Barclay's now. They showed me a taste of the London night life which was a lot of fun but, like everything in this city, ridiculously expensive. It's pretty nice being able to speak english to people again, even if they have funny accents and use lots of weird expressions =). I'm hanging out with Adam and the Waterloo guys (ch0ppy, cutiepi aka Will, and timex) in Adam's new hotel room right now, after playing a few of the earlier Sunday tournaments. My hotel room kind of sucks. It's really small and the internet doesn't seem to like working in the room. I guess you get what you pay for for "only" 66 pounds a night. Really though the room should be fine and the location is very good, 2 blocks from the Underground and only a few stops on there from the casinos. Adam's new hotel room on the other hand costs 200 pounds a night (400 USD), and is probably on par with a room at one of the cheaper hotels in Vegas. That's just how they roll in London.

Let's see.. I had a few other minor touristy adventures the last few days as well. Before the World Cup final Adam and I ventured on foot into Barcelona carrying a big bag of laundry since we'd run out of clothes and it cost 5 euro per item at the hotel. We'd been warned no one spoke english there so we came equipped with a few key googled spanish phrases. It ended up costing us only 17 euros and most of the route was along the beach so it was a nice walk. In London when our internet wasn't working at the hotel I was able to guide myself and Adam to within a block of the Casino at the Empire on memory of a map I'd looked at online when picking a hotel around 3 weeks ago, having never been in London before. Unfortunately we were forced to ask for directions once we got to Leceister square since the map wasn't that detailed. So, we got checked-in and registered for the tournament.

I play Day 1A of WSOP Europe tomorrow at "Fifty", starting 2pm here, 9am EST, on table 18. I'm quite excited for this tournament and looking forward to getting back on the felt. It appears the field will be a lot smaller than I was expecting with the WPT Borgata in Atlantic City at the same time taking some players. However first prze still figures to be around 2 million US and a smaller field reduces the variance somewhat which is nice in these huge buy-in tournaments. I've shaken off the finals in Barcelona and learned from the experience like always, I'm sure I'll be better this time around. With any luck I'll be back in front of the cameras soon with a nice training run already under my belt, but playing for a lot more money.

Mike