I knew there would be a lot of gambling early on as we started with 2000 chips and blinds of 25 50 , by the next level of 50 100 a raise and reraise was usually all in .

On the first hand in the SB i saw a very rare unraised flop of A 8 4 , holding KJ 44 , i checked to the button who bet , i raised and we went all in , he had A8 for top two and i doubled up , during the next 3 levels there was hardly a pot where someone wasn't all in , therefore i had my AA and KK cracked and when i hit a rainbow flop of 8 T A with KJ Q9 i was taking my third rebuy , eventually the 110 players managed 190 rebuys and during this period we only lost 2 , the add on gave 4000 chips for the same 200 , in my experience usualy 75% will take the add on , here it was 105 of the 107 !

After the add on the average chips was 9500 and blinds of 100 200 , i had 6300 , i played one hand slow which cost me half my stack , after one limper i also called with AA KJss expecting one of the aggressive players behind to raise but they all flat called , flop was J 5 2 , checked to me i bet and was raised , i called as he could have a J with a straight draw , turn was a 7 and he put me all in , i passed annoyed i hadn't raised preflop.

I now changed gear , with 78 9Jds i raised and got reraised and called all in , my opponent was in bad shape , he had 45 67ds in the same suits , the flop helped him , 2 3 J , but no straight came and i rivered the flush , the very next hand i raised again with AK QTds but got no calls , then in the BB i saw a flop with 9T JQds , flop was 4 6 8 with one of my flush draws , i checked and called a half pot bet as did one other , turn was a 9 , i moved in as i was calling anyway and it gives you an extra chance to win as they may pass and was called by one player who had A4 85 for two pair and the nut flush draw , i still had plenty of outs but none of them came and i wa a very disappointing early finisher .

It is not as cold here as i expected , usually it is -5 or worse but it is around 0 , the casino is 50 meters from the hotel and is huge , the tournament is being held in what is usually a restaurant and is very well organised with the best plasma information screen i have ever seen ,it is mostly Scandanavians with 6 Brits and Pascal Perrault from France trying to get some last points for the European Rankings .

The cash games surprisingly are mostly Pot Limit Omaha , eg last night when i arrived there were 5 PLO from €200 to €1000 Buy In and only one No Limit Hold-em with a maximum buy in of €400 , i sat down in the €200 with a €1000 , it was very volatile but i got paid when i called a raise preflop with 99 AJ as did 4 others , flop was T 9 9 and the raiser with KK in his hand bet every street , one thing i saw was a player who seperated his cards into 2 hold-em hands and kept looking at each of them in turn , although he won a couple of pots he eventually did it all when one of his " Hold-em" hands couldn't beat a full house !

After St Kitts last week this is quite a change but with two events left i am confident of one more result .