Hello from London, England! Right before I came to London, I spent the last week of August wrapping a few different things up in L.A. Also a highlight was going over to Courteney Cox’s and David Arquette’s beach house in Malibu to celebrate Michael Jackson’s birthday since Courteney is a huge fan. They hired Michael’s former private chef to bake his favorite cookies even! Some of the cast of the show “Cougar Town” were there along with a few other random people, about fifteen people total. We ended up watching the Emmy’s a bit and it was pretty comical to see how actors and producers react to watching this award show. They get so wound up it’s like their super bowl and start hooting and hollering whenever someone wins, whether they like them or not! LOL! Jennifer Aniston was also there and she asked me nicely to play poker with her and give her some tips as long as I wasn’t going to ask her to stand up and do a monologue! haha. David ended up playing a bit with us too and we had a good time staying up till about 2 a.m. and I needed to go home to get some sleep for my impending London flight. Jenn is a sweetheart and we had a great time! She also has some “card sense” too, so watch out!

I arrived here in London the day before the 15,000 POUND WPT London High Roller event began. Day 1 and Day 2 were pretty smooth. I was never all-in on either day and I don’t think I busted a player either which is kind of crazy. We began Day 3 at the WPT televised final table of the remaining 8 players. It took 8 hours to lose ONE player! INSANE! Also to note, while at dinner around 8:30 p.m. or so, Mike Sexton was sitting at the table next to me in the restaurant at the casino, and he was talking about how this was going to go all night. I thought for a few minutes and decided that I thought the tournament was going to end at 4:19 a.m., and he could lay me 20 cents (20% odds) and pick under or over! He respectfully declined. As soon as we ended up losing one player, we almost instantly lost a couple more to put us down to the final four players: Freddie Deeb, Bruno Fitoussi, Tony G, and yours truly! I had lost quite a number of pots in the first ten hours of play doubling people up and such while having pretty good hands. I felt pretty fortunate that I still had chips to compete with despite losing multiple sizeable pots, and felt that if I could start winning a few, I had a pretty good idea how I would take this final table down! Fortunately, we played for a couple hours to get in some great TV with the players remaining. I felt as time went on, my edge would increase as I could sense fatigue setting in with the players, and since I’m at least half their age, I felt like that was a good edge to press to wear those old guys down! Haha. I’m just kidding, those guys are cool and pretty entertaining, it was definitely fun playing with them, kind of like a home game. Eventually, Bruno got eliminated, and I played a few key pots with Freddie, including the final blow which was a pretty climatic sequence of events throughout the hand of an all-in preflop coinflip with great turn and river cards for television. I took on Tony G heads up with a 3-1 chiplead 1.5 million to his 500k. In the first ten hands, I lost an allin with 88 vs KK, and then had to make a huge fold on the turn after deliberating for a very intense ten minute tank. It turned out to be correct, and after that I battled right back chopping away and made a huge all-in bluff for a big pot. I then flopped top pair vs his open ended straight draw, held up, and finally grabbed my first title, a WPT one at that, along with 140k Pounds, I think probably about $225k USD. This was my third time at a WPT TV Final Table, and you know what they say about third time being the charm! Overall, I’m extremely happy with the way I played, and I was fortunate in a few key spots, which certainly helped. Thanks to my entire Twitter Rail, other friends and family following, and my wife Anita, Tom Dwan, Peter Jetten, and Tatjana for putting in the live sweat right on the rail! By the way, might I mention that as Mike Sexton and I were standing next to each other doing the champagne toast, he mentioned to me how incredible it was, that we finished at exactly 4:19 a.m.

Thankfully today is a relaxing off day so I can chill out, since for the next three days I’m playing the Full Tilt Million Dollar Cash Game. After that, there will be about a week of nothingness until WSOP-Europe, where I plan on maybe going to a “Football”(Soccer) match or two, some online poker, and partying maybe? It’s nice to get a win on my first event in London this year. I feel pretty optimistic about going deep in some of the other events this month as well! We will see!