Thanks everyone for the good wishes, especially the members of the Velvet Indulgence team, who we played in the final, and the Nobody Wants Us team who ran us very close in the semi-final. Both teams have been magnanimous, posting on here and making the effort to post in the chatbox of the final table after they had been eliminated. We haven"t forgotten, either, that Velvet Indulgence members played a major part in having us reinstated in the competition.
We had an amazing result in the final, as good as it could be, eliminating all six of the other team while all six of our team were still in the game, which was particularly pleasing against such strong opposition. Our second objective was to secure third place in the individual competition, so we would have 1-2-3, which we managed to do.
All six of our players scored crucial points at critical times during the competition. Most of you already know me. The rest of the Shakira team are:
John "Woody" Woodbridge
Andy "Hallstar" Hall
"Raggie" Maggie Holt
Justin "Skippy" Hazeldene
Mark "The Shark" Rowbottom
Mark is new to our team, but all the others were members of the triumphant Solent team and all of them have had podium finishes in the APAT Online League, with a couple of outright wins. Justin, Maggie and Andy have won APAT Online prizes previously. Andy and Maggie were both in the top points scorers when Solent won one of the Leagues and won seats for that. Justin was the highest individual scorer in the entire league the penultimate time it ran (which would now mean an automatic place on the England team, but didn"t then. He followed that by being second in the individual rankings this time [Is the next England captain reading?]. John also finished near the top of the points in those leagues. All of them are among the most successful players in the LivePubPokerLeague and everyone on our team has previously been picked to represent LPPL in team events, despite it being a huge league with thousands playing every week. They were also all members of the Southern League team that won LPPL"s InterLeague tournament. Andy and Maggie also specialize in winning multiple WSOP packages. Our new member, Mark, runs the LPPL and is well known on the UK poker scene.
It seemed like we were destined to win this Cup, but there were many times when we had to fight hard. When Shakira became a judge on The Voice, she discovered how competitive she can be and, as always, we took our inspiration from her:
[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2ScDoRPm6I[/youtube]
