Around the World with LG
LG... Life's Good
Love love love love love Monaco!
I'm in Monaco for the PokerStars and Monte-Carlo®Casino EPT Grand Final. I came here straight from EPT Berlin like most others here, and I'm in heaven. This place doesn't feel real. The riches, the cars, the yachts, the cleanliness and beauty of this city all make it feel like you've just busted in on the set of a Hollywood film. Here is a quick tour of the town:
An Italian Photo Blog
I've been lucky enough to spend the past week in Italy - a nation that's addicted to caffeine and carbohydrates. And rightfully so - everything here tastes so damn good!! We've been spending most of our time in Milan, but over the long weekend we went on a road trip through Florence, Pisa and a stunning little Tuscan town called Lucca. I'm in love with Lucca. It's an old medieval city full of the tiniest, winding lane ways within a giant wall. It's so easy to just walk around and happily get lost, taking in the gorgeous surroundings. There was four of us, so we rented a four-seater bicycle and rode around - it was hilarious, and a great way to move around as a group.
Milan
Florence
Pisa
Lucca
ANZPT Sydney
I’ve just returned home to Melbourne after covering the ANZPT in Sydney, Australia’s unofficial capital city. It’s the largest, and prettiest artificial eye-candy that Australia has to offer. While the natural beauty of the northern beaches of Australia are what really make this country famous, the stunning Sydney harbor with its extravagant architecture lining the magnificent water that streams throughout the neighbourhoods full of multi-million-dollar waterfront homes, really set Sydney as a town of glamour.
The day before a tournament starts is always my favourite, as that gives the video team our sole opportunity to soak up a week’s worth of Vitamin D as we tour the destination, catching as many sights through the lens as possible. Our tour of Sydney began on the Sydney Ferry – a public ferry that offers the best view of Sydney, making it my #1 recommendation to any visitor. You can catch the ferry from various spots throughout town, particularly the Pyrmont dock, just outside The Star.
We took the ferry around to Circular Quay to visit The Rocks, a preserved, historic area next that’s been transformed into a quaint, hippy neighbourhood full of pubs, cafes and markets. Having breakfast here on a sunny morning is one of my favourite things to do in Sydney.
If you didn't catch the tour video in my last blog post, you can check out these sights, and more, in the following video.
Every poker tournament run by PokerStars always comes with the added bonus of a player party complete with an open bar. This video shows just some of the antics that can come with said open bar.
The ANZPT’s fourth season kicked off with a bang, coming so close to breaking the record for this event at The Star Casino with 461 players each paying up $2,200 to play the Main Event. Almost AUD $1 million was collected, and dispersed amongst 54 lucky players who made it to the top 12%. After 29 one-hour levels spread across three days, and an epic final table that didn’t finish until well into the wee hours of the next morning, it was Gordon Huntly who defeated the lot. I had a chat with him, admittedly quite bleary eyed, after his win.
A Tour of Sydney
I've been trying to hold back on instagram-ing (follow me @lynngilmartin) too many pics of Sydney so that I don't drive everyone crazy - but I just love this place it's so hard not to! Sydney is definitely one of the world's most stunning cities - even when you fly in you can see exactly how gorgeous it is with a birds-eye view of the water canals lacing throughout the big city. If you've never been here, (or even if you have) then check out my quick tour around the main spots of town to see just some of the reasons why I love it so much!
Macau: Lights, Baccarat & Happy Endings
My verdict on Macau after three visits over the past three years: it’s just not my cup of tea. Don't get me wrong, most of the people visiting during the APPT absolutely loved it - especially my co-workers. The boys particularly loved the place with the cheap spas (not necessarily those spas) and gorgeous girls filling out Vegas-style nightclubs at a quarter of the price to its idol city. It's certainly every bit of Las Vegas, just an oriental translation.
The Awkward Moment When You Get in the Elevator...
At least once everyday, I had to share my elevator with a couple. Not your ordinary couple though. A 30-minute relationship that began on the ground floor, also known as the "race track", and happily ended on the sixth floor of my hotel. It started off intriguing, and while I'm certainly not judging the profession whatsoever, I just couldn't help but begin to resent the commonly rude, dominant men that I had to share my elevator with, along with their timid, unspoken "purchasee". People can certainly do what they want, and it's one of the biggest businesses in the world, but after being forced in the middle of it for a week (questionable choice of words there, I don't mean literally), I just didn't like the energy.
The Spitters
On my last day in Macau, I sent a Tweet to try to understand why many Chinese men, mostly 40+, constantly spit; at least in Macau and Hong Kong they do, from what I’ve seen. And I don't mean just spit... I mean the full "haaauuuhhooooochhhhh" as Dale 'Daleroxxu' Philip described it. You hear (and see) it every 10 minutes when walking around Macau. Some people responded on Twitter that it was about the pollution or smoking, but there are other cities in the world that are just as polluted and don't do this. Others said it was a spiritual belief of ridding bad energy from their bodies. Although they seem to just attract bad energy from those in the room around them! That was one custom I was really struggling to adjust to! Apparently now Hong Kong deliver fines for anyone caught spitting in public.
My Suggestions
Macau has been in the poker-spotlight for quite some time now, and it really is a poker-players heaven for most, with places such as The Grand Waldo Spa to spend your Sunday grind kicking back on a giant recliner while getting super cheap pedicures and massages. The restaurants at The Grand Lisboa, where the APPT is held, are simply awesome, and of course so is the stunning hotel that I was lucky enough to stay in last year. My tip: order coffee at Crystal Cafe (under the poker room) when Lincoln is working - he was the only one who made an awesome coffee! And the white bread they use there for their toast is amazing. Random, but true.
As for the sights, there are some great things to see, but I won't write about it as I think I did enough talking in the following video!
The Party
With the long days of work, hitting the town at night wasn’t an overly available option for someone who needs their sleep like I do, except for one crazy night where we celebrated the kick off to the Main Event and PokerStars’ 10th Birthday and one of Macau’s most popular nightclubs, D2. Usually the male to female ratio at poker parties is so heavily skewed, it was a pleasant surprise to see so many females when we arrived. Check out the video if you don’t believe me!
The Champ!
One of my favorite things about working in the poker industry is the awesome people that you get to meet and work with. It’s rare for me to meet a poker player that I dislike. I don’t know Randy ‘nanonoko’ Lew that well, but from what I do know, he is an awesome guy, and with that added to his monster online-cash-game skills, you’ve just got to love him! We could see it in his face with each all-in moment he had at this final table, just how much his heart and soul was in it to land that title. And that he did. Congratulations Randy!
The (Legit) Massage
Lastly, I had a few hours to spare in the Hong Kong International Airport so I got myself a chair massage in the Traveller's Lounge near Gate 1. My expectations weren't that high for a spontaneous airport massage, but oh my, the girl I had was absolutely incredible. Quite easily the best massage I think I've ever had.... Her name was Sylvia - do yourself a favour if you're flying through Hong Kong and request her!
LG xx
Three Weeks in Paradise
Since Black Friday, so many US poker players have been on the move, with a handful making their way to Mexico's Mayan Riviera. Most North Americans know it for Spring Break's ultimate destination: Can Cun; but just 45 minutes south is a little beachside town known as Playa del Carmen (which Chad Holloway wrote all about on PokerNews recently).
That's where I spent three weeks with my boy, just livin' the dream by the crystal clear blue waters of the Atlantic Ocean. A good friend of Angel's, JC Alvarado, has lived her for two years and Shaun Deeb just joined him a few months ago. Those guys left for Europe during WSOPE and EPT San Remo, so Angel and I snapped up Shaun's empty penthouse by the beach. Seriously, it was heaven on earth.
On our first weekend, Angel took me down to Tulum for my early birthday spoiling. We stayed at the Ana y Jose Hotel and Spa. Amazing, amazing, amazing, amazing!!! I'm going to let the pictures do the talking.
Tulum's main feature is the ancient Mayan Ruins. I just loved visiting this place. The energy was incredible, and obviously so was the setting!
For two of the weeks there I was going to school learning Spanish. I absolutely loved being "back at school" and that's given me an extra urge to study again. But first I have to nail this language which is going to take a loooooong time. I was expecting to be studying with mostly northern american's, but surprisingly of the 15 or so people that I met, only two were American! There was such a range of cultures, from Irish to German to Swiss to Aussie.
I felt like a bit of a local after three weeks living in Playa del Carmen, and while I obviously haven't tried everything, I of course came away with some of my top places of what I did try. Here they are:
• Best Place for Breakfast: Green Box has the best bagels I think I've ever tasted and yummy freshly squeezed fruit and vegetable juices. It's an awesome little shack sitting on the corner of Calle 38 Norte and 5ta Avenida.
• Best Place for Lunch: Fri-Das on 5ta Avenida near the corner of Calle Corazon. Everything we had there was amazing.
• Best Place for Dinner: Byblos on Calle 14 Norte and 5ta Avenida. Surprisingly this was right out the front of my Spanish school and I had no idea! I never gave the place any credit as it looks really basic, but when JC arrived back in town he took us to his all-time fav restaurant in town which he goes to religiously, and just as he promised, the food was incredible. Seriously, incredible.
• Best School to Learn Spanish: IMAC at International House - located on the corner of Calle 14 Norte and 5ta Avenida - stunning location!
• Best Facial: There's a little spa tucked away in the middle of two central resorts just off 5ta Avenida - Mosquito Blue and La Tortuga Hotel & Spa. There's just a couple of spa rooms and it feels like they're hidden inside a little secret garden. Most importantly, the facial was awesome, and that's coming from a well experienced opinion!
• Best Hang Out: Canibal Royal at Grand Coco Bay, it was our "local hangout" and is clearly on my list for the obv reasons displayed in the photo below 
Next time you're planning a holiday, or perhaps if you're looking for a new poker-playing-home, then I highly recommend Playa del Carmen. Incredible place!
LG xx
UK, Ireland, Colombia!
For the first time ever, the PokerStars.net LAPT has come to Colombia. I've been in Medellin for four days now, and like every other Latin American country, I absolutely love it. The people are simply the friendliest in the world and I just can't help but smile as I walk around the streets. It's such a severe contrast having come here from EPT London. I did have a great time there with an unexpected (and extremely welcomed) heat wave! Everyday was no less than 26 degrees. One day even going as high as 30 - in October! My boyfriend and I hired those bikes you can pick up at any corner and rode around town - we loved it! The only let down is the vibe of the people. Of course there are always exceptions as I do have many friends who are from, or live in, London, and they are beautiful people, but from my experience with the hotel staff and the general gist of most shop attendants, waiters, etc - people just don't give a damn. Perhaps I just had an unfortunate string of bad luck with my interactions, but that's the vibe that I was left with when my boyfriend and I happily boarded the train/ferry combo over to Ireland and escape the gloom!! Our time in Ireland was brilliant. I was born in Dublin but moved to Australia when I was just a baby. I've been back many times throughout my 26 years to visit my extended family, and every time I have a blast. This time was particularly fun with Angel and I hiring a car and road-tripping across to Galway for a few days. We stayed in Galway City where I saw my friend (and future singing superstar) Coby Grant play in a local pub as part of her European tour. We then drove up to a stunning castle called Kylemore Abbey where we stayed the night in a quaint little Bed & Breakfast. It was then on to Dublin for the chaos to begin with my crazy, booze-hound cousins!
Now, we're on dinner break of Day 2 in the LAPT Colombia Main Event. It was a huge turnout with 681 players - the most players we've ever seen in any LAPT. The poker room of Casino Allegre has been chaos all day, everyday with the hundreds of players plus even more hundreds of spectators coming to watch and support their friends. Of course with the emotion that comes with a Latin American game of poker, the excitement is rife and the chaos is nothing but enjoyable!
On the first night we had the the PokerStars Welcome Drinks at a bar called The Charlee in Zona Rosa - it was AWESOME. The bar was on the rooftop of the hotel, up on the 19th floor, surrounding a pool and overlooking the spectacular views that come with Medellin, no matter where you stand. Check out this video from PokerStars.tv:
The city centre is in a valley with the 2.5 million residents sprawled up on mountains surrounding the city. Colombia is most famous for it's beautiful women and it's amazing coffee (yes, there's one other thing Colombia is so famous for but I'm happy to say I haven't crossed paths with anything related!) but you might not know that the city is full of public artwork by law, giving it a funky vibe of an outdoor gallery. Roads, buildings, parks, everywhere has some sort of sculpture, painting or construction that's aesthetically pleasing - it's such an awesome addition to a city that I would love to see more cities across the world adopt. You can see that, and more, in the following PokerNews video:
For more videos from the PokerStars.net LAPT, check out this link. For now, it's back to work! LG xxx
Sweet As, Queenstown!
What a place! Think Lake Tahoe... But even better. Ten times better! Queenstown, New Zealand is the Southern Hemisphere's best kept secret. OK, it may not be a secret, but is definitely the most underrated holiday destination in the world. Many of my friends had told me in the past that it's awesome but they were all snowboarding junkies so I assumed it wouldn't have been as awesome for me being the sun-chaser that I am: I've never picked up a ski or snowboard in my life. Boy, oh boy, was I wrong! I've never seen such a stunning view. Ever. This is my view as I write this very blog enjoying a coffee at a little cafe Patagonia (with free, unrestricted wifi - rare here) before work. Jealous??
All the reasons why I love this place have been jam-packed into the following four minutes. If you've never been here before, do yourself a favour...
- Behind-the-scenes "glamour" - keeping warm in Queenstown!
- A little nervous going up the chairlift with our cameraman, Ash
LAPT Punta del Este
I just had a nice and relaxing week at home in Melbourne, Australia after a whirlwind trip to Uruguay for the PokerStars.net Latin American Poker Tour in the awesome beachside party town of Punta del Este earlier this month. The LAPT’s are notorious for having fast-paced final tables, but I rarely see one over in less than five hours! That’s what happened when Alex Komolomi entered the final table of eight with 35% of the chips in play. He dominated his way to heads-up in just over three hours, and after a couple of unscheduled breaks and one chip-lead swap that only lasted a few minutes, we had a winner in lightning speed. The great part was that Komolomi was a local, not only being the first Uruguayan LAPT champion, but also winning it on his home turf. He was so nervous after his win that he politely requested he do his interviews after calming down for half an hour! What a sweetheart. As the event was drawing to a close with just the eight players returning for the fourth day of play, we put together a little string of highlights, taking out the hardwork for you if you failed to follow along at the time, rolling all the fun into one video.
The Mantra Resort, where the LAPT was held, was amazing. It is the middle of winter right now and freezing cold in Uruguay, but the sun came out to say hello on one of the days while Christian de Leon was drowning his sorrows after an unsuccessful LAPT. This was my favorite interview of the entire week simply because of the setting. You’ll notice that it’s not a PokerNews video, but actually a PokerStars.tv video, which the team here at PokerNews also produce.
Once the tournament ended it would have been a waste to come all this way and then just go straight home, so I added a couple of days to relax before the long journey back to Australia. Angel Guillen and I headed over to Buenos Aires for two days. I had no idea how amazing that place is. Leo Fernandez said to us one morning when convincing us to go "it's like Paris" at which Angel laughed, but now I understand why he said that. Argentinians are like the French, the walk with so much confidence and are so well dressed - and I didn't see a single overweight person there! Jose Ignacio Barbero took us to his "favourite restaurant in the whole world" - Osaka. It's in the heart of the stunning Palermo area and is a combination of Japanese and Peruvian food. It was incredible! He also recommended Guido's - a little Italian restaurant right by our hotel (across from the zoo so it was a bit of a stinky walk). You don't get given a menu here, you just get fed anything and everything the owner feels like feeding you! As you're sitting down the appetisers are already coming, and all the meals are like home-cooked Nona's specialties. It was so cosy inside, I loved it!
WSOP in a Nutshell
After spending the most part of the last three months in Las Vegas, having the time of my life while covering the 42nd Annual World Series of Poker and of course being a part of Kristy Arnett’s amazing wedding in May, I’m now so happy to be home in the freezing-cold Melbourne weather! Anyone who has been to Las Vegas in June or July will know the severity of the heat and how it punches you in the face every time you step outside. It’s awesome if you’re there for a week, but after that long I was well and truly ready to escape it. I’ve never been so excited to put on a pair of boots and wrap my scarf around the neck of my coat! That's exactly what I did the day after I returned when I went on a little road trip with my best friends to Victoria's Yarra Valley wine region for a day of wine tasting and lunch in the vineyards. The perfect welcome home!
As I said, I had the time of my life during WSOP. I had an awesome little apartment at the Meridian Luxury Suites just behind Bally’s. Close enough to walk to the strip, yet far enough away to escape the strip. I played as much as I could in the Aria Poker Room, although not as much as I would have liked. I saw Rihanna (amazing), Nicki Minaj (amazing) and Britney Spears (yes… go ahead and cringe. She was horrible obviously) in concert. I saw the Beatles’ Cirque du Soilei show “Love” (with Angel, the mad Beatles fan, for his seventh time!!). And I ate… A LOT! Which was the motivation behind my previous blog about my favorite restaurants in town.
One of the biggest highlights was when one of my besties, Casey, came to town for a week. This girl is wild and we had such a fun time. She won herself the $9,000 progressive jackpot on a Three Card Poker table at Binion’s when she made a spade Royal Flush. She had never played poker in her life so she sat in between Angel and I as we taught her what the hands meant. She flicked up her three cards about five hands in and said “oooh” when she saw a hand full of black cards. I didn’t even click until I saw Angel’s face. He instantly demanded that she put the cards down and not to remove them from the table. It took a solid minute for her to realize that she had won the $9,000 on the screen that we had been talking about only minutes beforehand when a guy sat at the table and taught us to put a single dollar on the lit up circle for the jackpot. Two hands later, we won it. Had that guy not sat down and told us about the dollar, she would have won $260. I’m a big believer in fate and things like that solidify it for me.
Of course, working daily with the PokerNews team, especially my crazy two co-hosts Sarah Grant and Kristy Arnett, was another super highlight of my time in Las Vegas. It’s rare for me not to be in fits of laughter when I’m around these two girls, whether we are at work or not. Although this caused some difficulty when shooting The Weekly Turbo together where many, upon many, takes were required as shown in the following video…
While we were winding down from WSOP mode, the PokerNews team got together for a night out at Downtown’s Insert Coins after a boozy afternoon playing the WSOP Media tournament which Sarah dominated in, making her drunk way to the final table and taking sixth place in front of her roudy rail. Annie Duke eventually went on to win which was her good karma after giving us all a free copy of her book. I am yet to read it but eager to get started. Insert Coins was a blast, there's not much more I need to say beyond the following pictures...
Unfortunately WSOP’s poker side of things was not one of my highlights. I entered the $1,000 Ladies Event and survived exactly 55 minutes when my flopped set of 7’s ran into a flopped set of 8’s. In Kristy’s famous words… Balls.
Now I'm sitting in the Crown Poker Room for the first day of the PokerStars.net APPT's fifth season. It's finally made it's way down to Melbourne at the world-class Crown Casino, also known as the home of the Aussie Millions. Nicky Pickering is hosting our videos this week so make sure you check them out on PokerNews! As for me, I'll be on a flight bound for Uruguay on Tuesday for the LAPT in Punta del Este! Just living the dream
