My, how hard it used to be to find a game of poker. You could call round all your friends to see who was available - but you needed a large pool of friends who knew how to play the game, and enough of them free on the right night. Even if you managed that, you were stuck with the awkwardness of taking your friends' money.
Until the UK and Ireland Poker Tour was launched, the game of poker had got a bit samey for me. As a member of Team PokerStars Pro, I was travelling the world playing high-level tournaments where everyone seemed to be the same: young, male, clever, mathematical, dressed in sports gear, wearing iPods and talking about statistics.