The second day started early Thursday morning with me being the only one awake in the flat. I made myself a nice bowl of cereal and got right on the grind. I kept with the losing 5 BI immediately trend but couldn't manage a win. I was frustrated with the 3 BI loss but if I had only known what online pain was waiting for me I would have thrown a huge party in celebration of only losing 3 BI. When Tony woke up we went for lunch at a nice place down the street.
Everything on the menu looked so good so we ordered a bunch of things and split them all. We hung out on the terrace enjoying the absurdly warm weather in London sipping on our Oranginas. Tony and I discussed how much fun the next Friday at Fabric was going to be. Fabric is a crazy night club and over 30 of our friends were all going together see Jacks Beat. It's at least 34% of the reason I came to England.
I had made plans with Rob, my old Australian roommate, to meet up at 4pm so I grinded some more hands. For some reason I just had the grind switch turned on and it was all I wanted to do. This session would turn out to be super depressing. I dropped my 5 BIs as usual. Made a little bit back and then dropped down to 9 BIs. It was around 2:30 when things started to turn around with me shipping two 500BB pots simultaneously. By 3:20 I was up $20 according to HEM. I lost a pot to put me down $5 and stupidly tried to "get into the green". Don't do this to yourself. This led to 9 BIs straight down over 15 minutes. I lost three 500-700BB within the next 3 minutes. I called it quits down loads and headed to Robs to drink. Just before I left Gavin and Olivia walked in. Olivia and I had never met and we only had time for a quick conversation. They had errands to run so we agreed to have a proper meeting the next day.
I hoped on the Tube to meet Rob at Angel station. We stocked up on some food and drinks for dinner. He made us a great pasta dish and I contributed by figuring out how to get the shot glasses made of ice out of the plastic mould. If you can find frozen shot glass moulds I suggest picking some up. We ate our dinner while catching up on the newest "Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia" waiting for his roommate Ed to get home. Ed is a British army paratrooper veteran a few years younger than me. Apparently they had some couch to dispose of and Ed quickly rigged a rope up to lower it from their fifth floor apartment. Rob said he's a very handy guy to have around.
During our wait for Ed Rob made a cocktail that will blow your mind. If you want to get drunk without any bad taste this drink is for you. He took a pint glass and mashed up fresh raspberries and pear slices with ice. He poured 3oz of gin and filled the glass with a 7% pear cider. It had no burn to it but did it ever pack a punch. After the second pint a tall guy with a big white guy fro walked in the door. I instantly liked Ed as he has the same totally unacceptable sense of humour as Rob and I. He shared a few stories of his missions in Africa and Afghanistan including him almost getting eaten by a hippopotamus. Apparently he was on a boat and decided to go for a swim. His fellow soldiers thought it would be funny not to tell him it was hippo inhabited waters. They waited until he was in line of sight of two hippos before letting him know. Great friends!
Rob and Ed with his three pet ferrets
Eventually the three of us headed out on the town. We stopped at some random bar for shots then got on the Tube heading to central London. Ed tried talking up three girls on the train but didn't seem to be getting anywhere. It wasn't until I said something and they realized I wasn't British but Canadian that their interests got perked. Another little tip would be that Canadians and British people are naturally attracted to each other. For example take me I'm dating a British girl. I would suggest that yf you're single go to the opposite country and things will work out. The girls joined us to some bar but didn't want to pay cover. Conversations had run dry I didn't really want them sticking around so this worked out great.
A few bars later we ended up at O'Neil's for many many drinks. This bar was fun but there weren't any British people there. The bar was full of American exchange students and people from eastern Europe on vacation. I saw some guy wearing a Oklahoma Sooners shirt so I gave him the obligatory "your school sucks" as any real Texas Long Horns fan would. We left the bar with plans to head back to Rob's around 2am but before we could find a taxi we got approached by some coked up Irishman asking if we wanted hookers. We said no but he was very insistent that we take a look and have a free drink. He wanted us to go into some random red door with No. 6 above it. Again we said no. He continued to list the various race and nationalities available to us before we literally took off away from him. Being drunk around coked up pimps at 2am in a foreign country isn't located anywhere on my list of things to do.
Rob had to open his restaurant at 9am so were all up pretty early. I had a pretty decent hangover but nothing too serious. It was a feeling I would get used to over the rest of the trip. I headed back to the Compound and had breakfast with Liv and Gavz. I instantly liked her. She's a Drum and Bass DJ under the stage name LittleMissDJ. She recently played a set at Glastonbury and got interviewed for TV with Wayne Rooney backstage. I asked her loads of questions about the music world and she invited me out to Fabric later that night for a DnB night. I was really excited as electronic music isn't very big in Canada and the stuff that is at home usually isn't very good, not including DeadMau5.
I got on the grind and dumped another 8 BI or so. Things were getting more and more frustrating. I started doubting my decisions but couldn't come up with a better line than get it in with pair + NFD + gut shot in 3 or 4 bet pots. There's literally nothing you can do if people decide to peel random nonsense and flop random bottom two pairs on board that smash your range. I had a 500BB pot that got 5b by my AKQTss to flop AJs2s and he tabled J872ddhh and held. No need to get into the finer points of why this is absurd.
I was now approaching the nasty -20 BI mark but refused to let it bother me. Shortly after the session Gavz, Tony and Mike's friend Stu arrived to play the £5000 EPT Main Event the next day. Despite the fact that Stu is a well respected live grinder in England he had never played a tournament over £500 before so this was a huge deal for him. With Stu's arrival the plan was for me to sleep at Robs Friday and Saturday night to let him sleep up for the main. Stu is from north England and talks much differently than the others. The word "ya" gets thrown into every sentence. As in "Ya, we're gonna play the main and win it ya." We didn't talk much that day as he headed off with Tony to some private game. With the flat empty and my failed sessions behind me I took a nap before what would be a big big night out.
I was woken up by Liv and saw she was done up and ready for the club. It was time for me to get ready for a proper night out. I have no idea where Gavz and Liv took me but we met up with four of his Uni friends at some pub. I had met James back in May but hadn't met the other three. I recognized one of them, Ben, from a Drum and Bass Facebook group Gavz had invited me to. We finished a few pints then headed down a street that can only be described as a war zone. Every other second we heard smashing bottles and drugged up fiends falling into each other. The street was packed full of trouble. I was hoping our destination wasn't going to be in this mess and luckily it wasn't. We made out way to, what I called, Little Bombay. Both sides of the street were filled with curry places or off licence booze shops. We were meant to eat at "The Best Curry in London" spot but had to settle for the less busy place next door.
We ordered our meals then Ben and James disappeared for 5 minutes to come back with a dozen half litre beers. This is quite the culture shock as you just can't do that in Canada. You can bring your own wine to restaurant and pay a corking fee but stocking up on booze for your meal was unheard of to me. The meal ended and our group grew larger when James' girlfriend and friend joined us at another bar. A few round later it was finally time for Fabric. Our group was cut down to Gavz, Ben, Liv and I with Nial and his buddy meeting us at the club. Liv knows a lot of the Fabric staff so we skipped the cue and it was on. I walked in the door and down the dark purply lit stairs. The bass hit me like a ton of bricks. When we walked into room 1 and I saw the sea of people raving I was so happy. I really love that kind of party. Gavz planned not to drink much as he had the EPT main event the next morning so Ben and I hit the bar hard.
Once we satisfied the drink quota it was finally time to get in the madness and let loose. If you've never been to a night like this or don't like Drum and Bass don't worry. I was like that before May but once you've been there in the crowd feeling the energy and the bass you'll have a blast. Its impossible not to have fun. I knew we were coming back to Fabric the next Friday for the mega party so I told Gavz we could leave anytime he wanted. We pilled into a cab and headed back to the Compound. Ben and I were pretty drunk and Gavz said under no circumstances could we wake up Stu. Ben couldn't go home as his sister and her child live there and he was too drunk. My internal clock was all messed up and my brain was just jacked from the club so sleep was out of the question. Ben and I decided to grab more booze and explore London at 3am.
When we got to Gavz place Stu was awake lying in bed. This gave me time to drunk dial Sophia and tell her about the night I was having. Its quite convenient that Canada is five hours behind London time and she was still awake. She asked me how poker was going and I summed it up by saying "its slightly less painful than a shovel to the face". Everyone wanted to sleep so Ben and I grabbed a 26oz of Jose Cuervo and left the Compound at 4am. The plan was to come back at 9am when Mike would be awake. This clearly didn't happen.
Keep in mind that Ben and I had literally just met within the last 6 hours and we were now setting off on a great adventure. Both of us were strangers to London so we didn't have any destinations in mind, we just started walking. Every now and then we would stop and hang out at various places. We met many people along the way. Its quite amazing how many people are out that early in the morning. At 8am we found some park that had hammocks and chilled out there for awhile. We were near Kings Cross waiting for Rob to open his restaurant so we could stop in for a drink. We strolled into Robs for some morning mimosas around 9:30. After our "breakfast" we decided to really see the city. We headed towards London bridge before jumping on a bus. Its not really much of a surprise that we took the wrong bus and ended up near the Hilton where the EPT was playing.
Our liquor infused minds thought it would be a good idea to rail some of our friends. We ran into Luke Fields in the lobby and I gave him a big hug. He laughed at us for awhile and then headed into the poker room to take his seat. With all the poker players filling into the main room I tried a second time to find Serena the PokerStars Social manager. She had texted me that she was running the Twitter board but at that precise moment she was on some errand.
With no intentions of playing poker we left to head back to Gavz to sleep. I called Mike and he told us he'd be working out for two hours and Liv was out running errands. This wasn't the news we wanted to hear and then it got much worse when the Northern line stopped at Kings Cross and we had to walk. My feet were really sore by the point and the prospect of more walking was dauting. We finally made it to the flat but as expected no one was home. We bought some McDonalds and sat on the side walk across from the flat in the shade. Just two puddles of human beings desperately searching for a place to lie down. Thankfully Liv got back 15 minutes later and we both crashed pretty quickly.
A few hours later Mike woke me up. I knew that couldn't stay at the flat that night so I headed over to Frank's flat ten minutes away. He's on a 9pm-6am super healthy living sleep schedule and that couldn't have worked out better. I really needed to rest up for the next day when I was going to Tottenham vs Arsenal with Andreas Torbergsen and eight Norwegians then back to Brighton in a limo. That story involves me taking years off the back end of my life but making so many memories in the process. Until next time.@Gakn29
