London Calling

With all of the traveling required to play in major tournaments, I consider staying home to be a vacation, so convincing me to go all the way to London was quite a feat. Since there were about four different tournaments going on in the span of a week, I figured this was as good a time as any to check out the international poker scene.

The first tournament was the celebpoker.com event at the Palm Beach Casino in London. I showed up to register about an hour before the event started, only to learn that I wasn't dressed "smart" enough. Apparently, they take their dress code pretty seriously, and I was instructed to take a quick shopping trip before I could enter the casino. As we were about to walk out, we noticed several other players walking in who were wearing jeans and casual attire (presumably fellow Americans who were unfamiliar with the concept of a dress code at a casino), and ended up convincing the lovely staff to allow us to play in the tournament even though we were dressed "inappropriately." It was a relatively small tournament of about 130 players, but it was a lot of fun to play – even though I didn't win.

We then went straight to the next tournament, which was the Victor Chandler Cup. I was really looking forward to this event because it was a shootout format, and there are rarely major live tournaments that adopt this structure. The event was held at TV studios just outside of London, and drew a pretty impressive and tough field of American and European players. I didn't make it past the first day of the event, but that meant that I would be able to play in the London Open.

I had a couple of days of downtime in between, so I checked out the Grosvenor Victoria Casino in London for some live cash games and a pot-limit Omaha eight-or-better tournament, which I was really looking forward to playing since I have played them only online and have yet to see one offered in the States. After busting out from a pretty sick beat in the tournament, I decided I should probably try to rest a little before the London Open. It's a good thing my regular sleep schedule is so screwed up that jet lag really wasn't an issue!

I went to the London Open gala party for about 15 minutes and then headed over to another cardroom in London called the Gutshot. I love that place. It's like an Internet cafe/poker room, where you can hang out and play some chess, or head downstairs where they have poker tables set up and you get to deal yourselves and spread whatever games you want. I wish we had one of these places in Vegas. I met a ton of great people there, many with whom I have played online but have never met face to face before. My love for London is growing.

I was amazed by the amount of poker available in the UK. There are four cable channels dedicated to poker and there seem to be casinos and tournaments everywhere. London is starting to become my new favorite place!

Next up was the London Open – with a $2 million guarantee and about 130 players. I made it through day one and started day two with a decent chip stack. I made it down to about 30 players when my queens ran into kings. Luckily, I had plenty of time to make it over to the Victoria for the main event of the European Poker Championship that began at 9 p.m. I even had a few moments to play some cash games in between the tournaments. I made it through the first day of this event, as well – which turned out to have 124 players with a £5,000 buy-in (with the exchange rate as it is, that's pretty much equivalent to a $10,000 buy-in). Day two started with 65 players and I just couldn't seem to make it through to the end of this one, either.

Perhaps I should just stick to the cash games for the rest of the time I am here. However, the UK Open events start in a couple of days and there is a sixhanded $15,000 buy-in winner-take-all live televised event called "Poker Den" coming up, so I'm not sure I'll be able to resist. If all else fails, my hotel has wireless Internet access.

Play online with Scott on his new site, www.thefishtank.com. Enter his referral code, scott88, for a bonus, and look for him at the tables under the screen name ScottFischmn! Scott welcomes questions, suggestions, and feedback, and can be contacted via e-mail at scottfischman@thefishtank.com.