Last week was manic, I left on the 23rd April (my birthday incidentally) for the long trip to Blackpool for the GB9 event at the Imperial Hotel. The long drive lasted 7 hours with traffic and I did it in one stint because… well just because I can!
I went up to my room at around 8pm and woke up the next day at 7am – obviously needed the sleep! Thanks for Tone Weafer for the two pints he had bought me prior to this, whatever he had put in them certainly did the trick!
The event itself was superb with some excellent pool played all weekend, the only problem for us was being moved from the main tournament room to the back room for the semi’s and the final on Sunday night. Big thanks to all on the GB9 team who helped move the kit to the other room and re-setup in around 30 minutes.
Videos from this event will be available shortly.
So, from Blackpool I made the trip east to Bridlington, the journey was made a it easier by having Jayson Shaw in the car who reached the semi-finals in Blackpool and needed to get to Bridlington to represent Scotland. Having a chat about pool on the journey certainly passed the time. I reached my hotel at 00:45 – they had waited up for me!
In my opinion there is not much to Bridlington, this is based solely on the walk from Rags hotel to the Spa so I don’t have much to go on in fairness, however, the Spa Theatre has provided us with the best Internet connectivity for web streaming over the past two years. This time was no exception with testing on Monday taking a matter of minutes.
The upload capacity of the line is excellent which meant I was able to stream the live content at 1200kbps, very high bitrate for live streaming!
Some good pool followed with some bad pool was the order of the week with a real mixed bag. Some great people made the week for me coming over and chatting, sharing a beer or two at the end of the day and generally providing me with some entertainment.
It was a very well-organised event (apart from putting the singles on late into the evening something that will have to be remedied for next year) and I think that everybody that took part and represented their country will come away from Bridlington feeling they have been part of something.
It was a shame that the event is no longer regarded as a World Championships, this meant less teams, but lets hope that the event can be re-invented next year to bring more teams to an awesome venue.
