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 Pokerstars VIP Party 29th September TR
Now that I've finally recovered (sort of) from my hangover, here is a trip report from the Stars VIP Party.
If you haven't heard of it, here are the details - I paid 1,500 FPPs to get in as a Silver Star (great volume last month from me) which works out at like $20 so ridiculously cheap. I'll also admit early that the major attraction was the free bar.
My Saturday started way too early with a 7am alarm and an 8am exit. My chauffeur (aka my mate with a car) picked me up from Bristol and we drove just over 2 hours to London. We then spent over an hour trying to find the hotel and/or somewhere to park - we had a GPS so personally I think that's quite an achievement. The hotel wouldn't let us check in til 3 so we found a car park and jumped on the tube. After one wrong train we eventually got to the London Film Museum just before midday, over an hour after we had been planning on getting there. That's an achievement for me but I think my friend Jake was less impressed.
We'd missed the welcome champagne and the awkward small talk while looking at some film props with that guy I once brutally sucked out on (unlikely to be vice versa) so unfortunately I had to go straight to the free Peroni and salmon bagels:
We were given game cards to fill in at the entrance with 3 UKIPT packages being given away (~$1.5k each) with guesses on the first scorer, statistics of the match and winner/winner at half time/first yellow etc to decide the winner so we flicked it in for that. An American guy called Lee Jones (the only Lee Jones I know plays for Edinburgh rugby club and it definitely wasn't him) gave a presentation on the new Stars lobby which I'll post a detailed view on in another thread after this one. The waiters caught on pretty quickly that I was enjoying my Peronis and empty ones were instantly replaced by full ones at my table so I was kinda distracted.
After the presentation finished I acquired another beer (there's a theme developing here, I'm sure...) and a steak sandwich and went to the arcade room. Space Invaders, a skiing arcade game, a punchball, Donkey Kong, a Wii, Guitar Hero and a table football tablefilled up the room with some Sunday Million tickets being given away for the top scorers in the first 4 games. I went straight for the table football as we used to play it a lot in school and played a game against a Lithuania lad and his Portugese girlfriend. No mercy meant an easy victory! I checked out the skiing game (an unimpressive score of 25/43 gates was destroyed by the eventual winner who was a friend of mine with 43/43 gates, great effort) and then ran out of energy.
Another hour of the football and I decided to be more sociable - I couldn't remember what I'd put on my game card so there wasn't much of a sweat. I blame the beer but I think it's more idiocy on my part. Back in the games room I met some Stars heros, including Frode - of 2p2 fame - Caleb, and our very own VIP rep Dylan. Despite an assurance from Dylan he would come drinking later I received a disappointing text. Quotes include: "I fully expect a berating on FTR for this weak showing" and "I'm being a pussy". Up to you to decide what this says about Pokerstars Support  The Stars guys were all great (I met a bunch of others) and I think Dylan deserves plenty of forgiveness given he'd flown over from Canada for the week!
The rest of the day was fairly uneventful. Punted some money on a horse and headed to the Fox Casino (via a pub) with an Australian grinder who was a great life and having sobered up played the £100. The problem with sobering up was quickly realised when I became hungover at about midnight, and my hatred for live poker returned when I busted at 3am in 10th of just 40 people and 5 paid in a standard spot. Still, had plenty of fun and it was a good experience playing with antes as I've only done it a handful of times live before. Took us about an hour to get back to the hotel, eventually finding a bus that would take us there, and we then overslept by about 4 hours past check in time - oops.
Overall it was a lot of fun and a great event by Pokerstars. Future renditions are highly recommended by me!
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, but I can say that it was nice meeting you and your friends, and I hope more FTR'ers can attend future events. 