WELP

Forgot that there was a tube strike in London today, which means I'm utterly stranded out in south London. Obviously, the one day they have a tube strike has to be the one day of the week I have 2 classes....sigh.

But, on the bright side, this does give me a chance to update my blog which I suppose I haven't done in a couple days now.

Last week was my first week of classes, which is obviously an exciting time for me. I'm taking 4 classes this semester: Elements of Ethics, Conduct of War, Public Law, and Worlds of the British Empire. I haven't had the last one yet...for whatever reason, it's not starting up until this Friday. As for the other classes, it seems as though I should enjoy them a fair amount.

Elements of Ethics is taught by this rather dashing young English guy that seems quite personable, quite intelligent, and overall as though he'll be an excellent lecturer. Apparently, we will be spend the semester studying Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hume, Hegel and Nietzsche. I have no prior background at all with any but Aristotle (although I do know that Sieff is a massive Hegel fan) so I'm excited to get learning and drop some knowledge on fools when I get back to the USA lol

Conduct of War, strangely, seems like it will be the least interesting of my classes. My professor is this absurdly uptight young British guy who openly acknowledges that the course, though it rightfully should deal a lot with war as a sociological phenomenon, will be almost completely be grounded in history. I mean, as my AP scores can attest, I can do history pretty well but I'd frankly rather not. Oh well.

I don't know much about how Public Law is going to be yet...we've only had one hour of lecture on it and we're doing very base-level stuff. I can say that I expect to be very interested by it, however. The British legal system - like all of Britain, really - is very scattershot and strange and illogical (I'm sure someone will accuse me of ethnocentrism here, but I don't think that's a valid criticism...streets that go in straight lines are more logical than streets that seem designed by an acid-fueled 5 year old with a crayon), so it should be exciting to learn about the differences our British cousins have in their legal system and to lol at the parts that are dumb (not having a written Constitution, for example).

The weekend was a pretty good one. On Friday, I went to the GW England orientation event. The orientation itself was massively boring and pointless, but afterward GW treated us to a very nice dinner at this Turkish restaurant called TAS Bloomsbury. I had moussaka for the first time there and it was excellent. I must go back there at some point.

Saturday was a busy busy day. It was Day 2 of the GW England orientation thing, so as a group we took a very lovely walking tour of London, starting in Trafalgar Square and then proceeding through some of the parks in the Buckingham Palace complex, down Whitehall past 10 Downing Street, and eventually past Westminster Abbey and the House of Parliament. After the tour, we took a riverboat down the Thames to the Tower of London and since it (somehow) wasn't raining that morning, we got to sit on the top and get absolutely splendid views of Central London. I very much recommend that everyone take such a trip at some point if they're in London. After lunch in the Tower of London cafeteria (sort of a funny phrase to type, lol), we split off to individually check out the grounds. To be completely honest, the novelty of the Tower wore off pretty quickly but I did have a good time checking out the crown jewels which are stored there. The Imperial Crown in particular (this is what the Queen wears when she opens that year's session of Parliament) is simply fabulous.

I left the Tower after a few hours and headed up to Edgware Road, where the European Poker Tour was being held. Let me just say that for a poker fanboy such as myself, it was completely surreal to be there. In the very time I was there, I saw Phil Ivey, Barry Greenstein, Daniel Negreanu, Chris Moneymaker, Vanessa Selbst, Roothlus, Boosted J, Vanessa Rousso, David Benyamine, Vicky Coren, someone I'm pretty sure was JP_OSU...I realize these names mean nothing to anyone that doesn't follow poker but it was pretty incredible. As I told my girlfriend that night, it's a very lucky thing that Tom Dwan had gone home after the WSOP Europe ended or I might have literally exploded upon coming across him. Yes, I realize that this paragraph makes me seem very cool.

Most of my time at the Hilton though was spent in the secondary poker room, where I went to go watch my friend Jon play the 120 pound charity event. This was the first time that I had actually met Jon in real life...despite the fact that we've been talking online for two years and went to the same school for the first of those years, we had somehow never come across each other. I had a good time hanging with him as he played...Jon plays a very impressive LAG style of poker that the players at his tables simply could not combat. Unfortunately, with LAGing frequently comes punting and he blew his stack pretty hard just short of the money. Oh well.

On Sunday, it was my turn to play the event, which had about a 50k pound overlay...just unheardof. I dominated my table for the first 3 hours of play or so, chipping up from the initial 6k starting stack to over 20k while seeing only one showdown. Unfortunately, I blew about a third of my chips in a meh-ish spot and couldn't regain traction after that as the blinds caught up with me and I lost a couple key flips. Eventually, I busted right before the end of the 300-600 level when I jammed my 7k stack from the cutoff with 73cc and couldn't suck out vs the SB who woke up with A7o. I actually still had 650 chips after that hand and got them in the next hand with A8o, but the guy on my left had AQ, and it was gg me. I'm pretty pleased with how I played generally, and its nice to know that the common refrain that live players are simply horrible isn't just the idle yammering of players much better than I. It's still frustrating that I couldn't go deep though...tournaments like that don't come around very often.

Cheers!
Tom