Ok, the week in Miami is over. Time to get aboard of the Freedom of the seas.
We arrived at the ship at around 1pm and were about 30minutes later on board. The ship is absolutely amazing. It's hard to describe, because you have to see it by yourself. You can do waveriding, climb a wall or just go to the iceskating arena.
(Not to mention all the standart stuff like bars, restaurants,nightclub, cinema, pools and everything else you can imagine)

There were 3100 guests and over 1400 crew members on board. Everything which had to do with "eating" was incredible good. I don't think I ever ate so much in my life within a week. They offerd everything you can imagine. From buffet restaurants to fine dinning, a pizzeria which was open untill 3AM and midnight buffets by the pool. 

I qualified through Interpoker and like always they took care very good of their PlatinumClub members. We had several parties on board, they organized a catamaran cruise while our stop in St.Thomas and a poccer tournament in St. Maarten. ( poccer is half soccer and half poker. You play soccer to dertermine you starting stack in the upcoming poker tournament )

I don't need to say that the combination of 30°C, the Caribbean itself, lots of drinks and the very good programm made the week absolutely fantastic.

We had 3 ports of call. San Juan(Puerto Rico) , St.Thomas and St.Maarten. While San Juan was not that spectacular for us ( we just got off board at around 3.30pm and had no tour booked) St.Thomas and St.Maarten were absolutely great. The reef were the catamaran stopped for some snorkeling was very nice. Lots of fish there :-)

Unfortunately there took no "ExtremePoker" place this year. 2007 we played a 2 table tournament 20feet under the water.
(Very nice experience.Heads up, Flo Langmann lost a 4-1 chiplead to some scandinavien guy)

Except for one SNG, i played no poker at CPC 09, which had mainly to do with, that I didn't had a vacation without poker in the last 30month. So i decided to get some distance to the game a took two weeks "completely off"
The CPC offered a wide rang of tournament between 200$ and 1000$, with a 2500$main event. Cash games and SNGs ran everyday. Thomas Kremser and his crew ran the tournaments, like the year before.(Like always pretty good)

So unfortunately the week passed way to fast and I'm a little sad sitting here with -2°C in Germany :-/

Just a few words to the SupernovaElite thing. To make it short, i'm not going to make it. Main reason for this is simple that I got absolutely destroyed in the SNGs. As there is no way to make it with NL Cash games, I'm not getting it. Another reasson is, that I'm moving to Australia by the end of the year. As you can imagine it's not pretty cool for me, spending my last days here in Germany sitting infront of my PC day and night.
I know that it is pretty lame to cancel it after talking about it in my first post, but in Poker, things change more often then anywhere else in life ( Just my experience)
I decided to go for it at 550k VPP and stopped at around 690k VPP. This is in my opinion the latest stage very you can stop without beeing commited to SNE (due to the very high bonus at 1Mio VPP)

 GL @ the tables 

Hi everybody.

I just got back from Miami, so here are the first impressions.
Our plane landed on Nov 15 at around 10pm local time.The weather was pretty nice, around 23°C by night and ~28°C by day.
We stayed at a pretty nice hotel called "The Albion" which Ican absolutly recommend to everybody. It's only a 3 and a half star hotel, but was for sure the best 3,5* hotel I ever stayed in. I would prefer that hotel in comparison to 80% of the 4-4,5* properties I have been to. It's just a 1 minute walk to the beach, Lincoln road (with tons of shops, bars and restaurants) and the world famous Ocean Drive. We got a great bang for our buck at this hotel (we only paid like a third of the prices that the direct beach front hotels charge)so it was a great choice. The beach @ SB is definitely a place to be. It's so good to just hang out there, enjoy the sea and watching the people walk by. (Which are for sure worth to be seen :-)  )

We did lots of shopping, dinning and had some drinks at one of the countless (and super cool) bars at night.
A Miami City tour showed us how many faces this city has. It's incredible to see the huge Downtown with lots of 40+stories buildings and just a five minute ride later you are in a whole different world with lots of palms, single familie homes, parks and a golf course around (Coral Gables). (Biltmore Hotel should be your choice of hotel if you prefer to chill out more than partying (+chill out) )

Another interesting fact I didn't know before was that due to the heavy influence by Cuba and other caribbean islands, 60% of the population in Miami speak Spanish. It could happen to you that your taxi driver doesn't speak English :-)

On Saturday night we went to the welcome party from Interpoker which took place on the rooftop terrace of the Hilton downtown hotel. It's always cool to meet people you haven't seen in a while (But with most of them you spend more than one night partying all night long :-) ) Fortunately we could manage to be back in our hotel by midnight, so the first day of the crusie was not too rough ....

Ok, this should be enough for the first post back in Germany.
GL to all of you

PS: I'm going to write some more about the Supernova Elite thing in the next days. I don't really have a clue at the moment what I should do as I don't really see a future for me @ SNGs (at least about High Stakes and the last 35 days of this year).
Another thing is that I would also love to play some cash games. I was tired of them but don't playing cash games for 5 weeks made me hungry again.

Another thing I want to point out, is that the issue with Pokerstars ( servercrash ) was finally handled in a good way for me. After 2 weeks and several mails.

I got feedback in a positive and negative way about writing in English. There was slightly more on the positive side so I will continue writing in English. I will also choose some more clear topics than "Argl".

Hello everybody,
just a short intrudution of myself. I'm 24 years old and started playing poker in early 2005.Most of you might never heard my name before. As i never wrote in the forums and haven't played on any site as "Trogger" for the last 2 years, that's no wonder.
I started (like most of the players in 2005) with Fixed Limit cashgames, but switched to NL cash games after a year and a half. At the moment i'm trying to learn a little more about SNGs and tournaments.
The reason i,m starting to blog here,is that i decided to do a little challange for my self.
I'm sure most of you are common with the VIP Club on Pokerstars. Just for the few who aren't, it's simply the way, the more you play the more you get (not just in absolute $ also in %)
The highest Level is called Supernova Elite. I already reached this status last year ( like 37 other people) For various reasons i decided to not go for it this year.
---Untill October 21th--
My problem is, on Oct. 21th I only had like 550k VPPs (= basepoints, you need 1 million for SNE, ~200k rake)which means i need to "rake in" about 90k $ in the last ten weeks of the year. Sounds crazy, probably it is.
Sharing my race with you guys, might hopefully push my "working morals"
Today i'm standing at around 640k, so i'm on pace.
That the whole thing doesn't get to easy, i'm attending the Caribbean Poker Classic Cruise at the end of november( 16th to 23rd. Flying a week earlier to Miami)

For not getting this post to long, i will make a break here and post another upadte at the end of the week.

-Have fun and good luck @ the tables)-
Trogger

PS: I'm not a english native speaker, nor do i have good English skills, so if there are (which i'm sure of :-) any gramaticall mistakes...i'm sorry for that . I just decided to write this in English, as i'm sure that nearly everybody, who reads this blog is  common with the English language, but ther might be some potential readers who are not familar with german.