The dream is realised - well almost...

It's all booked... direct flight from Gatwick to Vegas on 10th July... 8 nights at the Gold Coast Hotel & Casino (next door to the Rio)... and the plan is to play in Event #19 - Seniors NLHE $1000 buy-in.

All paid for with the proceeds of that $20 gift from Absolute Poker last August... the current balance, after booking the flight & hotel, is around $2900.

In the beginning...

Copied from my old blog, originally posted Oct '05...

Summer 2005 - I had been playing poker (Hold 'Em) online for around 18 months... after a bit of dodgy start, as is to be expected from a total beginner, I had got to the stage where I was steadily increasing my bankroll.

I then hit a losing streak like I had never seen... it seemed that I just couldn't win a hand! After 3 or 4 weeks - and losing over half of my bankroll - I decided to have a complete break from online poker while I was still ahead... I withdrew every penny from each poker room that still had some in.

I was still playing in our fortnightly live tournament, but even that had gone the same way... after winning 5 of the first 10 tourneys (and placing in 3 of the other 5)... in the second 10 tourneys I have only made the money (2nd) once!

Then on the 21st Aug I received an e-mail from Absolute Poker... I hadn't played on there for probably 6 months... while I had been playing on AP I had built up around 10,000 Absolute Reward Points (ARPs), which (at that time) you could only use to enter freeroll tournaments at some un-Godly hour in the middle of the night...

AP were offering to exchange 5000 of my ARPs for $20, obviously to entice me back... well, I thought, why not...

Once the $20 was in my Absolute Poker account, I started out playing $5 + 50c STTs. By the end of the first evening I had won 4 straight tourneys and the bankroll was at $88.

I continued playing $5 STTs until the bankroll was upto $200 and then moved up a level to the $10 + $1 STTs... To cut a long story short I continued to win more than I lost and finished September with a little over $1000.

How cool would it be if I could roll that $20 up into enough to cover a trip to Vegas and entry into a WSOP tournament... just a $1000 buy-in event would do - I'm not greedy!

And so the dream began...