blonde poker

 

Me and Nick nipped over the Walsall £300 Freezout on Saturday night. On the downside it started late and did not reach 100 runners, I think this was due to the £300 freezeout that was being held at the Luton Grovesner the same day. The UK poker calender is getting so congested, there was also a £50 freezout at the Broadway that apparently only got 12 runners. On the upside I thought the structure at Walsall was excellent and staff were as usual, very efficient and frirendly. So much poker available in the UK now, even Grovesner are clashing events and fighting for players internally.

Quite a few players were laughing at the Broadway's 12 runners, I think there is some rivalry here. I found myself wondering if anyone will be laughing at me and the DTD Club one day, if we only get small fields, but then I remembered that I could just ban anyone who takes the XXXX and I felt better.

Off to Barcelona on Friday. It was not in my original plans for 2006, but I'm self justifying this trip on the basis that I need to go to  Gibralter and Tenerife anyway, which I intend to do when I finish playing the heads-up in Barcelona. The beauty of the internet is that wherever you are in the world, you can continue working and catching up on things, we coped without it before..and mobile phones........god knows how.

I've been getting plently of practice for the heads-up on the Blondepoker site, I like the NL heads-up formats there, although the turbo formats are a waste of time. Since I started playing on the BP I have not won a bean on the cash games, in fact, I'm 4k down, but I've won a bit on the heads-up and I think I'll stick to them from now on. Poker software is a really funny thing, I hated the tribecca software when I first switched to Blondepoker from Littlewoods, but I find it really easy to use now.

Pete has just arrived at my house with the latest version of our web site to show me. Its tedious work, trying to get even the most basic of things right, but I'm very finicky about stuff like that, and keep changing the goal posts. Our first version which will be launched in next 2 weeks is very basic (just so we can collate members for The Gaming Board) but we will continue to develop the site up until the club opens. I've spoken to Kevin O'Connell's son, Adam, about doing some work on the site content in the future and he's sent me a few ideas. He's studying journalism at Uni and seems a nice lad. As always, I like to try and use people that I know, or know people I know, even if they are not the most experienced (or have no experience!).

The DTD crew is ever growing, even with no club or online room open yet. If we don't get the gaming licence I'll be handing quite a few P45's out sharpish! We have Pete (IT), Darren (General Manager), Chubbs (Online), SundayPM(Chubbs assistant),  Aces (Poker Host), Nightfly (Card Room Manager 1), Mr X (Card Room Manager 2), Mr Y (White Licence Complaince Officer) plus me and Nick.

In the long term, me and Nick will have no operational hands-on responsibility for DTD, as we both have our "day jobs", but at the moment its all hands to the pump. I never realised in a million years the amount of crap there is to do setting up a venture like this and I take my hat off to The Gutshot and all of the other independant casino/card room operations in the UK. Would I have done it If I had known how much red tape was involved?

Okay, time to get some work done this week, I was well on top of things last week, an example of supreme organisation, now I'm back in chaos again, with 23 emails and 13 phone messages to respond to.