So, this week I finally got to meet Metallica, the band that got me into metal aged 15 and I've loved ever since. It all came about through Ultimatebet's Scott Ian of Anthrax fame, who was over in London this week with his lovely lady, Pearl. Scott has been friends with the Metallica guys for years and was hosting this year's Kerrang Awards, so invited us to join him on his table. I couldn't believe it when I found out our table was smack between Metallica, Rage Against the Machine and Slipknot and Machine Head, and as such we got introduced. The night then went on to Nobu for dinner and then back to the hotel the bands were staying at, where the carnage began. A lot of sake had been consumed at dinner and this led on to vodka martinis followed by champagne followed by some more vodkas. At 3am we were ushered out of the posh bar of the hotel so we all headed (and by all, I mean about 15 of us by this point) to one of the band's rooms. As the new and as yet unreleased and unheard Metallica album found it's way onto the stereo at full blast the mayhem stepped up further. No names shall be mentioned, but there was a lot of air-guitaring, things being broken and inter-heavy-metal band wrestling.

Things wrapped up around 8am after another 3 hours of lost memory, sore ears and inexplicable bruises. A night to remember, if only I could...

Sorry it's been a while folks, stuff's been mental since I got back home... first of all, I found out I was going to be playing the Poker Million VII, a huge Televised tournament shown in Europe that was filmed at the end of July. It was all rather last minute but I basically found out a few days beforehand and as such got on the phone to Annie as to how best to play these very fast structured, 6-handed sit-n-goes, as she had a lot of experience playing the from the Premier League.

As such I knew I had to have my gambling head on in order to accrue all the chips at the table in order to progress through to the semi-finals. Notables in my heat were Ross Boatman and Julian Gardener, and the friendly chat in the green room beforehand quickly died away as we sat down at the table. Now for a $20k buy-in, the structure was FAST. So fast in fact, that when we were five left, the average stack had 12 BBs (and I had 10!). So when I found QQs under the gun I pushed and Ross Boatman found AK and called. The race went his way and that was that... rather a shame that such an expensive tournament is reduced to coin flips after just 50 or so hands!

Finally, airing on Sky Sports Two (Channel 402 in UK) is the European Ladies Championships, which I do rather well in so please watch!