I’m back at work. Well, almost.

It’s just over a month since I left Vegas and in that month I played very little poker. For the most part I was travelling around the UK catching up with friends and family. I have no real idea of the next time I’ll be in Europe, so was important for me to see as many people as I could.

Fast forward to current time, and I’m sat in a crap hotel room in Macau trying to order room service at 5am. The menu clearly says “24 hour room service”, so I chose a tuna sandwich and made the call. No one is picking up, so I’ll just add my room service woes to the list of “run bads” I’ve had on this trip.

1) Flight delayed in Manchester, missed connection in Dubai, had to hang around for 8 hours
2) APT hotel was full apart from a pricey suite that was only available the night I got there.
3) APT accommodated me as a player in the hotel, but only for 2 nights.
4) All other hotels full apart from the dive across the road.
5) In room internet is about as stable as gobboboy on a unicycle.
6) Oh and yeah – I got rivered in the APT.

As a friend pointed out to me, I should be happy with all of these “beats” because it means I must be saving up some luck for the APPT next week. Let’s hope that’s the case…

There were just over 300 runners in the APT, and predictably the field was super soft. Not quite up there with WPT Venice, but I don’t know if that’s possible. I ran my stack up from 10k to 30k pretty easily then managed to find 3 or 4 spots that caused me to haemorrhage chips and dropped to around 15k. I should clarify, they weren’t bad spots, just ran into a few hands, on the whole I played pretty well. My busto hand, a local guy in his 30s opened in mid to 2700 @ 400/800/100. I looked down at 88 and figured it was as good a spot as any to get my 14k in. I shoved he thought for 20 seconds or so and called with AQ. As you are aware he hit the queen on the river, and yes I know that doesn’t really count as “getting rivered” it was all in preflop and I was a mighty 55% favourite or whatever, but it was the river damnit!

After busting and having the hassle with moving hotels, all I could think about was getting back to New Zealand. But upon reflection I have realised that there is still work to be done here, and I have another tournament to concentrate on.

New Zealand – yes, I’m going back and I really can’t wait to get my life back on track. For the last four months it’s been so unstructured. I’ve played hardly any online poker, made very little money and spent a fortune. If it wasn’t for one Sunday in June (thanks Jason) I’d be really feeling it.

Neil isn’t coming this time around, but my mate Mike (thebeej) is, and Shaun (mathclub) is moving in as well. A couple of other poker players will likely be staying for a while too. Another person who isn’t coming back is Dominique – our dear friend and “rent a mum” who looked after us so well last year. Who’s going to make my morning smoothies?

“Beeeeej? There’s too much banana in this!”

Of course, that won’t happen, you can never have too much banana.