Brighton Grosvenor Trip report and Palace staying up!

Hey there.

I was invited down kindly by people representing the Grosvenor Casino in Brighton to come down to the big unveiling of their newly decorated casino. I would be put up for a night at the Hilton Metropole, have my train tickets paid for and have some gambling money on the house to play with. So a result! Thrown in was also the great company that i had. The organisers were very nice and were good conversationalists which is great considering you don't know them before this but it was easy to feel at home with them.

The night started with walking into the casino and being greeted by 4 scantily dressed women prancing around the floor of the casino and free glasses of champagne, so it could have been worse! Then we got some money to play with and i decided to play a bit of blackjack and roulette to about a £5 loss, highrolling hey! I then went to spend the rest of the free monies in a £15 rebuy tourney they had running and was shocked by how bad the play was. I saw one or two good players that were effectively cleaning up and most of the rest were waiting for AK, KK or AA, so it was quite laughable really.

What was nice was that while i was playing i was greeted with a bit of a cheering section which was nice. Hopefully a sign of future poker greatness to come hehe. Soon after getting unlucky in the poker when i shoved A4 suited in the cut off with 10 big blinds late being met with two calls of A10 and JJ, i had a little scout of the casino room to see if i fancied playing any more table games, i decided not to as i had been drinking most of the night and i am a bit of a lightweight! The casino was lovely though and reminded me a little of other london casinos with how glamorous it now looked. A good choice of games and a very good party atmosphere made it a quality night. If you want to learn more about G Casinos or their online alternative visit www.gcasino.com

A big thanks to the organisers for arranging all of this as Brighton the next morning was really sunny and gave me the opportunity to catch up with my cousin who lives down there. Also got the chance to meet two guys from www.gamblingexclusive.com with talks of maybe having my blog up on their site which would be very nice. All in all a marvellous trip!

Now onto the business of Palace's survival on sunday. YEESSSSSSS! What a nervy game to be watching! I honestly thought we had the game lost when they scored to make it 2-2. They had about 10 mins to get just one more goal and with us sitting ridiculously deep in defence i thought there was every chance of them getting it and sending us down in the cruelest of fashions. With that said i thought we were cheated in the game with their first goal being a definite foul on one of our players who was trying to clear but got clipped by their striker Leon Clarke who went on to score. He then celebrated by kicking the advertising hoardings and thats a broken ankle right there. Real clever. They didnt really have a striker on the bench and to have him go off was a relief for the palace fans especially as he would have been buzzing.

When the final whistle came there was absolute hysteria in the palace contingent with the fans effectively going berserk. Some fans felt it was necessary to go onto the pitch even though we are at the ground of the team we have personally just relegated. I thought this was a little bit out of order but if the going was good on the pitch and it all look friendly enough i would have gone on too to embrace the players, who i think did a great job. I finally decided i would edge closer to the pitch to have a better look at things, finally deciding i was going to go on and then i saw hundreds of Wednesday fans coming onto the pitch to beat up our fans and players. When i saw Neil Danns get punched in the face i knew i wasn't going to bother!

There was a huge debate about what caused the furore but it was blatantly down to the lack of police presence in the palace end. We could just walk on with no problems as we were secured by only relatively inept stewards who weren't going to try too hard to stop a mob of palace fans running on the pitch in celebration. More police at our end and there would have been no trouble. O well. It doesn't really matter to me anyway i got the result i wanted and to see this historic game in the stadium with the crowd as fantastic and vocal as they were was amazing.

It was the icing on the cake to a great extended weekend and i am looking forward to blogging on more palace success and hopefully more poker success also!

Ant