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The hotel Arts (where the tourney is held) is probably the best hotel I've ever stayed in, and the architecture of the city is unbelievable. On a day off a group of us went and visited the Sagrada Familia, the famous cathedral designed by Gaudi.

It really is the most breathtaking thing I've ever seen - if you visit it, go when the sun is low in the sky as the stained glass lights it up on the inside, not that my photo really does it justice:

Poker wise, Barcelona was mildly torturous. I made it to day 2 with 30k, which although short was a playable 25bbs. Things were looking up as I chipped up to 40k fairly quickly, and then I picked up AK into aces. Standard, yes, except for I was dished out the worst slowroll imaginable. After we got the chips in (my opponent was the EPT Vilamoura season 6 winner, Antonio Matias), I immediately flipped up my AK and he looked at it and sighed. Sweet, I thought, he has AQ. However, he refused to turn over his hand, saying "I wait for the cameras." The table responded, "no, you can reveal your hand immediately." But no, he waited, a full tick-tocking three minutes for the camera crew to come over and assemble themselves until the dealer finally forced him to reveal. Which he did one card at a time. Whilst smiling. Ace...... Ace. You like? No, sir, I do not like.

Why do people think it's ok to slowroll with the nuts in a heads up pot where your opponent is all in? I can perhaps understand that there can be some edge gained from slow-rolling when calling a river bet with the nuts, where your opponent is still going to be left at the table and getting them so tilted that they can potentially steam off the rest of their chips to you in a later hand, but to do it when they are all-in pre and extremely unlikely to survive? Hmm.

Anyway, onto Galway, Ireland, which was the very first stop of the brand new season of the PokerStars UKIPT. Despite the snow piling up high on the runways of the UK, an impressive 266 runners still battled their way to the event making it a big success. As the event was televised I got to flex the old TV hosting muscles alongside my friend and co-host Nick Wealthall which has got me hungry to do more presenting again! We also did a fun photoshoot on a diving board over Galway bay in -2 degree weather, surrounded by crazy Irish swimmers who apparently like to take weekly dips in the freezing water. Below is a photos courtesy of PokerStars and Mickey May.

The next tour stop is in Nottingham on Feb 11th where there will be a £200,000 guarantee.

I've just spent ten days in Los Angeles for the NAPT - this was the first one I'd been to and was pretty excited as I'd heard great things about these tournaments. I won my seat to it on the PokerStars Steps route and as such played day 1A with most of the qualifiers, again something I was excited about when I saw my table only had one person I recognised.

After winning a few pots here and there, I reached the dizzying heights of 32,000 from a 30,000 starting stack. And that was the peak of my lofty stack - from then on it got chipped away at, particularly by a couple of very frustrating hands - for example when I opened red A-Q middle position, a lady who plays a very strange game of poker calls out the small blind and the board comes [ad][Kc][5c]. She now leads out (she has a weak ace, yay) and I call. Turn is [8c] and she now looks at her cards and check-calls my near pot bet. River is a fourth club and she announces all-in proudly for double the pot. So that hand took a chunk of chips and a few more whiffs with A-K/A-Q dwindled me down to 13,500.

So then there's an open to 750, a raise in mid-position to 2000 and a flat by a big stack on the button. I'm in the small blind with Jacks and shove. First guy folds A-x, second guy calls with A-K and the third guy folds and shows A-K. Good shape, no? No. Bye bye NAPT main event.

However, there was more poker in store for me, in the form of the $3000 side event and most excitingly, a shootout in Compton. Yup, that's right, a 81 person bounty shootout invitational televised for ESPN $5000 that was held in the Crystal casino in the heart of South Central. I found myself at the feature table with Phil Hellmuth, Kevin Macphee, Shaun Deeb, Nick Binger, Jean-Robert Bellande, Chris Moneymaker and Jonathan Little.

I doubled fairly early on by check-calling Little's bluffs on all three streets with top set (which filled up on river), but then had a small blind vs. big blind confrontation against Macphee with my sevens versus his A-10 all-in pre-flop, which he duly won by making quads (the photo below captures our facial expressions as the board ran out perfectly...).

So after that there was no more poker for me - just three free days to enjoy the fun LA had to offer, including messing around on the beach (more photos below) and rocking out with one of my favourite bands who happened to be playing LA that week, too.

A metal end to a pokery trip, what more could I ask for?