I hope you like what you see, and thank you for checking it out. As you probably know it’s taken a few months to get this up and running so I appreciate your patience. Whilst I can’t take the credit for designing and building this, I can assure that I have been a busy girl and doing reasonably productive things with my time!

The past few months have been centred around flat-hunting and poker. Buying your first place (as those of you who’ve been through it know) can be an enormous headache – you think you’ve found the perfect place and then boom, there’s something wrong with it, or even worse some “investor” comes and outbids you at the last minute. Fortunately though, my new home has finally been found and is *almost* mine…

In between trawls around London in estate agents’ cars I’ve been doing the decent thing and playing some poker. Since October it’s taken me to Cannes, San Remo, Amsterdam and Prague in the pursuit of tournament glory, with some mixed results. The WSOPE in Cannes was a blast, catching up with some old friends/poker heroes that I hadn’t seen in a while, and I had an excitingly deep run in the Main Event to finish 36th.

San Remo was bitter-sweet. I amassed a top-10 stack by the end of day 1, but sadly the wheels came off on day 2 at a surprisingly tough table for what is ordinarily the juiciest EPT on the circuit, and I busted towards the end of the day. EPT Prague was a true tantaliser – I was playing some of my best poker of the year and had a very healthy stack from early on. The bubble burst and I got into a huge pre-flop confrontation with the tournament chipleader. It was ultimately a coinflip (my AKs vs his 10s) and sadly the coin didn’t flip my way, but oh, how lovely a top five chip-stack would’ve been with only 80 people remaining. At this moment one of my biggest goals is to become the first two-time EPT winner. Bizarrely, after 70-odd EPT’s over the years there has NEVER been a double winner, but it’s only a matter of time as more and more excellent players snag titles.

Other than that there’s been a lot of glamorous parties, embarrassing karaoke, photoshoots in Rolls Royces and TV filming (notably University Challenge which deserves it’s own blog).

Most importantly though, Christmas is around the corner and I can’t wait to have a relaxing few weeks off catching up with friends, family and the animals. I truly hope you also have a wonderful festive season wherever you may be, and here’s to a happy, healthy and successful 2012 for one and all!

Liv x