Poker took a bit of a back seat at the weekend as I flew across to England before being driven to the depths of the Welsh valleys on a surprise visit to freak out my Mum on her 60th birthday. A successful evening all round especially as my Aunt is a fireworks expert who was one of the people in charge of the Liverpool 800th birthday display which is well worth checking out at fantasticfireworks.co.uk - wasn't exactly much of a challenge for her to set up a 5 minute show in the pub car park. Heavy drinking all round ensued and despite the usual drunken arguments which are easily swept under the carpet the next day a good time was generally had all round.

Poker accounts are not looking too good with the exception of Mansion poker which I am trying to leave alone until i've worked out how to withdraw. Pokerstars account is zero and Laddies is on about 16$ and as I can't really justify depositing i'll have to ignore pokerstars for a while.

The plan on Ladbrokes is to play the dreaded ten pays five stt's until I build a roll of 200$ so i'm not likely to enjoy playing much but I guess you have to grind it out sometimes. Shame I can't play the Laddies forum xmas events but work dictates that I could only play the 3 least enticing games anyway so never mind.

I'm still trying to work out where my roll went on ladbrokes - a lot was wasted on sats to the bigger tournaments and as the roll was decreasing I kind of assumed I was due for a decent cash which just didn't happen - I didn't do anything stupid but some bad play and bad beats put me into this situation so I guess i'd better get on with it.