So I pretty much fell for that free gym trial hook, line and sinker. Within 5 minutes of entering the gym, I was in the office handing over my credit card making me possibly the only person in the world who goes in for a free trial and ends up not even getting the free trial but signing a year contract! At least I got a good deal anyway.

I’ve been out of the whole voluntary exercise spiel for quite some time and I knew that I’d take to it like a cat to a freezing pond. I brought my MP3 player with me to help get me through it but I soon learned that the type of music that I walk down the street with isn’t exactly ideal for a stint on the treadmill. I found myself just closing my eyes and running to the beats of the music… and almost being flung off the end of the treadmill. I now understood why gyms always play an endless bombardment of “UNTZ UNTZ UNTZ” over the stereo systems – insurance reasons. People would be flying off treadmills left, right and centre should they dare to play anything decent!

This poses a problem for me as I go to the gym to exercise and not to have blood slowly trickle from my ears thanks to being exposed to such drivel. So I’m on the look out for an alternative work out playlist which would ideally encompass some rock and electro and result in me not having to worry about being flung across the room. A quick Google revealed a few suggested playlists but they didn’t really appeal to me so I went trawling through my music collection to see if I could find anything that would be of interest.

A few months a go, I started to hear good things about an artist going by the name of “Girl Talk” whose made a name for himself for having a knack for fusing together the latest chart hits with timeless power ballads of yesteryear and topping them off with hip-hop beats. You can say what you want about people who “mashup” songs, but there’s no arguing that Girl Talk’s end product is extremely fun to listen to! It should see me through a few miles anyway.

Of course, once I figured that I was craving an eclectic mix of rock and electro, 2 Many DJ’s / Soulwax immediately sprung to mind. As well as consistently knocking out top-class remix after top-class remix of some of the best songs released on the alternative scene over the years, they’re also infamous for their “As Heard on Radio Soulwax” series which were sets of (usually) alternative songs that were transformed thanks to the magic Soulwax touch. With 2 Many DJ’s, you can expect great songs to somehow be made better and you’ll find yourself growing fond of songs that you weren’t too keen on to start with! Admittedly, some of their sets sound as if they don’t really have their shit together, but most of them sound as if they were hand-picked for me!

There is absolutely tonnes of material from both of those artists available free online (as in legally). I’d advise you to seek them out if you’re growing tired of the music typically found in gyms! Hopefully I won’t have any carpet burn to report!

Tonight saw one of the best value games being held in Blazin’ Aces in a long time which may have cost everyone €80 to play, but $50 is being reimbursed onto our Ladbrokes account. I haven’t checked the exchange rates in a while, but I’m pretty sure the dollar hasn’t jumped in value to make paying €80 for the $50 transfer worthwhile in itself, so the €3,000 prizepool in the tournament was also well worth playing for!

When the tournament started, I asked for a cup of coffee and took my seat. For about three orbits of the table, it’s like I have butter on my hands because I just can’t catch a card! I was just about to complain out loud when I find Queens in the small blind. The crying baby gets the bottle I think to myself as I see 4 players limp into my small blind. I make the obligatory raise and get just the one caller – the button. We see a flop of 5-6-9, with two clubs on board and I bet out 1500 which is around 2/3 the pot. I get minraised (and a bit) to 3500. I kind of freeze for a moment. Surely he’s raising his button with tens and better preflop so his range for raising the flop like this must be made up purely of sets and flush draws with the overs, but never something like AK or AQ which he probably would have raised with preflop. I really want to fold, but I call which is horrible, I know. The turn completes the flush draw AND the straight draw and I check-fold when he bets 3000… into a pot of almost 10k.

A few orbits later and I get my coffee. I take a sip and see two queens again. Alex raises under the gun to 550 with blinds at 100/200. He’s fond of the minraise and a bit in all kinds of positions at the table so I wouldn’t read too much into that. I’m a sat a few seats behind him, in early position, and make it 1800. It’s folded around to the small blind who calls. He’s just arrived at the table and I have never seen him in my life but I tend to assign new players to the table a pretty generic range of hands until I see evidence to prove otherwise. I think it’s quite prudent to do this at the table as it means you don’t get into any nasty spots with players whose tendencies you have no idea of! Anyway, I rarely think that a new player to the table is going to flat call a 3bet and then call a shove, so when Alex ships from under the gun when action gets back to me, it’s usually going to be followed by a fistpump. In this case it wasn’t. He had Aces.

I didn’t even have time to finish my coffee!

I eagerly await the $50 to arrive into my Ladbrokes account, but in the meantime I’ll have to try find something to keep me occupied and I think I’ve found something in the form of a gym membership. Running around like a Duracell bunny on Wednesday reminded me that I like to exercise so I looked into joining the local Kingfisher gym and have been offered a day pass to check out the place before committing. They offer some great Student deals so I look forward to trying out the place tomorrow! Even if the place isn’t to my liking, I at least get to kill a few hours before work!