I am still lost a little bit everywhere in Europe for the promotion of two films by Adolf El Assal who I am currently working with for his upcoming cinema releases.

In terms of Poker, I am still hesitating about where to relocate. Getting back a bit to Luxembourg is an option to be closer to the Ady crew but we don't really know where we're going there for now ... there are some rough rides ahead in terms of financing those enormous cinema projects.

Happy Dublin to all the buddies and degens out there for this crazy September weekend! It's the first time in years I skip this one. Check out my photos of last year's edition by clicking on the photo below and see you next year hopefully ;)

More of my photos in the PHOTOS & COVERAGES section. Enjoy!

Cash Game Weekend is on again these days on the shores of the Black Sea. Too busy to make it this time but this place is so amazing I gotta go back.

View the photos of my last stay at Cash Game Weekend Batumi last July.

Another big success for Roland Van de Linde's crew with the Dutch Classics in Rozvadov gathering more than 600 Dutchies and Belgians from 18th to 23rd September and there is more to come.

As a matter of fact, Pokerreis will be back at it at King's Resort with the 8th leg of the Dutch Classics in late January (from 22nd to 27th) and an even larger BENELUX CLASSICS is coming up for May 2020.

Save the dates for this festival from 20th to 25th May featuring a Main Event of €220.

In the meanwhile, as a Luxembourg-based player, I will be gathering interested players and Poker clubs from the Grand-Duchy through THE-ROUNDERdotnet.

I can help you:
- to organise your group trip
- to promote a ranking competition with your club
- to promote Pokerreis through your club and provide your members with a cool Poker trip opportunity

Room rates and more news to come soon in this blog!

For info and conditions, you are welcome to get in touch!

Who said that no administration is getting anything done over the summer months? :) It might have taken them since spring to come over and check the servers of the Belgian Poker app developer Days of Poker but the Belgian Gambling Commission finally dropped by and everybody is now waiting for final validations to come.

In the meanwhile, we have been fine tuning the app's features and I have been working on additional translations as the real money feature will be available in numerous countries.

Find details and the app of course under daysofpoker.com.

Luxembourg, Spa, Paris & Metz over the last week. It's been an intense and busy September so far and it's far from over. I am still not planning any significant Poker coverage for this fall but I'll be around playing cash games here and there and I am still trying to become an online Poker world champ :p

What's more, we are planning big things with Wady Films that should keep me on the move for a while and I've decided to add more non-Poker content to this blog as I will still be on the move a lot for film and photo projects besides re-raising plans. I have updated the PHOTO SECTION this morning with links to my latest trips and samples of recent shootings so go have a look if you care.

There is still a lot going on around my film projects these weeks so I guess I'll keep skipping a lot of Poker coverages for while.

Because there is still a little bit of an MTT masochist in me, I am intending to make my way to Germany next week to spend some days with a real online shark who will help me find my way through the late WCOOP stages. Good luck us! :-D

First, I am heading to Spa this weekend after a few days in Luxembourg and Paris working on Wady Films projects. Read more about it under www.adolfelassal.com. For now, it's going to be essentially cash games for me in Spa but I'll be back in October for the Poker One Festival for more. I am also intending to fire a buy-in or two at the main event. Check out the full schedule on the P.R.O.S. calendar.

If you bust me soon enough, I'll shoot some photos too ... should be a nice Belgian Poker highlight with all the POKER ONE crew showing up and the cash games will for sure get juicy! Vamooooos!!

To be honest, I was intending to leave Spa after the summer. I am still into it but a couple of things have changed in my plans outside Poker and it looks like I am committed to spend at least a few more weeks (maybe months) not to far from the Luxembourg area where I am involved in the production and promotion of some films. There are good things happening and also bad things at the moment. The point is that there is a lot of shit going right now. Find out more about it under adolfelassal.net.

So yes, I might stick to my Spa base for a bit longer then planned. Time to look ahead then! The Winamax Series are almost over and WCOOP is still in full swing for the online sickos. I am firing bullets here and there but I still prefer a good old live game to clicking.

The weekend cash games are still my favourite games over there but the Poker Room of Spa has a bunch of interesting Poker festivals coming up in October and Novemeber while their September's Challenge is still ongoing until the end of the month. Poker Belgique is planning one of their Poker Belgique Masters soon (more info HERE) and Poker One, one of the most active Belgian Poker crews over the last 2 years, will have its own festival in Spa in a few weeks...

I am not intending to properly cover those events but I will show up to play if I am in the area and I will definitely have a camera with me ;)

More info in P.R.O.S. the calendar under www.pokerroomofspa.com!

That's it, folks! Summer is gone. At least in the BeNeLux area :p

I skipped the Cash Game Weekend Tbilisi in late August after the Spa's Poker Festje as I have been working on some film and photo projects throughout the summer. I am also looking forward to setting a foot in the cinema business this fall. More updates will follow up soon I guess.

More news will also follow regarding the next Cash Game Weekend set to be back in Batumi in late September.

From a Poker point of view, I am still on the low profile side of the Poker media action with a few shootings here and there but I keep playing myself quite a bit. Still cash games. Still PLO! Online, I have not been achieving much ...

I made my way to the Poker Belgique room in Soignies today after a meeting in Maastricht. A few drinks, a few photos and a few hours of sleep in the area before continuing to the Belgian coast tomorrow for Day 1B of the Unibet Belgium Poker Championship.

Info about the Unibet festival in one of my last posts.

Some photos of my stay in Soignies ara available below and the full album is online in my photo archive and on Facebook.

I did not get a chance to go back to Portugal since last March and I am genuinely missing it. The coffees in the morning by the ocean, the excellent food, the amazing bikinis ... :p

It's been a tough grind over the last months in the Belgian forests of Spa so I guess I deserve my beach time too! The UNIBET BELGIUM POKER CHAMPIONSHIP will soon be back on the Belgian Atlantic Coast with a €550 Main Event and a bunch of side events from the 29th of August to the 1st of September.

I will be playing the Main Event only and I'll probably be in for some terrasse side events with ocean view.

The Gran Casino Castellon will be the host of a massive SPF event very soon! Check out this insane schedule they just published on their Instagram profile!

Get your personal Damian LIB photo print starting from less than €50 !

With recent printing technology improvements and huge leaps forward in the variety of supports to print on, photos are not stuck on paper or on screens anymore :)

I will be at the Poker Room Of Spa next week during the Spa's Poker Feestje. I have repeatedly posed about it lately and you will find all information with useful links in my blogging section of this site. I will provide photo reports with daily recaps from the 14th to the end of the festival on the 18th. My production will include daily photo galleries of the Poker games and the casino surroundings with loads of Poker player portraits.

All my photography catalogue is available for this. Some exclusive shots will come in limited series but with almost 22.000 photos published and archived on my Flickr account, you should be fine :) For the vast majority of these photos, I still have an HD backup that we can work with for prints but I lost 2 very important backup drives in two photo bag thefts in Brussels (2014) and in Las Vegas (2016), so some photos might not be available ... Sorry in advance :/

For those who care, I will be available to talk about original prints of your favourite shots of mine during the Spa's Poker Feestje. The pictures can come in various styles and sizes.

I'll be back at the Poker Room of Spa next week for the SPA'S POKER FEESTJE with a Main Event of €250. In order to attract a maximum of players from the beginning of the Main Event, Day 1A will be offered at a buy-in price of only €200 besides other special offers that you can find out about in one of their latest publications.

Last weekend, I visited the Poker Room of Spa for a cash game session and I stopped by the tournament Poker room upstairs during the regular Friday event to shoot the trophies of the upcoming Spa's Poker Feestje in the middle of this month.

All festival details are online under www.pokerroomofspa.com.

Two weeks to go before the Spa's Poker Feestje at the Poker Room of Spa this mid-August! The detailed schedule including full structures in online under pokerroomofspa.com and you can use the flyer below as a nice recap of all that will be going beside the cash game action.

While the Spa's Poker Feestje mostly stands for a Poker tournaments, a fully detailed cash game planning has been released. Find all there is to know about the festival cash games openings in THIS ARTICLE.

What is more, another great August cash game spot will be the Tbilisi Cash Game Weekend for a second stop in Georgia this summer. You will find more information about this event in a former blog post.

​Where will I see you?

After a series of one-day events during the July Ranking that ended last night, the Poker Room Of Spa will soon be back in the Poker festival business with the SPA's POKER FEESTJE. Find out the complete schedule of the festival and the results of the July Challenge under pokerroomofspa.com in the NEWS and CALENDAR sections.

I will be on the spot at least between 14th and 18th but probably a bit more in case someone cares to join us in Belgium.

The Poker action goes on in Georgia after the CASH GAME WEEKEND stop in Batumi earlier this month. There a cool recap video online and my photos are available in my Flick archive. There is a lot of Poker photography but it is also a photo report of my week spent in Georgia. You will also find additional shots of my journey from Belgium over Luxembourg and Dortmund on my Instagram feed.

To stay tuned, I suggest you use the Facebook group Poker in Georgia promoting games running both in Batumi or in the capital, Tbilisi, and there is a good opportunity to visit this glorious Caucasus city as the next big Poker thing in beautiful Georgia will be the CASH GAME WEEKEND Tbilisi in late August. More about it below in this post.

I just spent a full week in sweet Georgia for the Cash Game Weekend stop in Batumi from 10th to 15th July. If you go to the photo section of this website, you will find a link to the archive of more than 200 photos I shot during my stay or you can scroll down to end of this post to get to the Facebook album.

​The standard program was to stroll around the city and its beaches during the day while I spent almost all my nights at the casino resulting in a pretty poor local nightlife experience all in all. While we had a lot of fun (and drinks) together last time we met in Riga, my hosts were pretty busy this time resulting in another problem I had not anticipated: there was quite some language barrier over here as very few people speak decent enough English to have a proper conversation. I am not fluent at all in Latvian but at least, I could read the signs and menus, make deductions or suppositions while I was tapping in complete darkness here.

Not that I have become super shy all of a sudden but, additionally to the harsh language Georgian is, it's completely and absolutely impossible to read Georgian for me. I cannot even identify all the letters of their alphabet and when something was translated in local stores, it was in Russian or Ukrainian which is also a writing system I don't master. The rest of the population is Turkish, Iraninan or from some STAN republic from even further East. hardly any western people seem to make it to Batumi. To top it, most signs are still handwritten here which makes writing notoriously event more difficult to read even when you know the writing system. It felt like being deaf or at least dumb which almost never happens to me with my pretty good knowledge of 8 languages by now and I think I missed out on a lot just because of that. I'll be better prepared next time...

All this would not discourage me from skipping any of the crappy western fast foods and stores that of course managed to spread over here too. Those moderne and hopelessly not Georgian places were more or less the only ones where I could actually read the name of what I was eating and drinking before tasting it. Being a vegetarian, this was a bit of a hassle and I ended up a few times with something in my hand or in my mouth that I really did not want :p Last time I was in Tblisi, there were more signs/menus/notes translated into English and I had two local buddies with me that would translate me things or at least tell me afterwards what I had eaten and how it's called so I could order it [never] again depending on whether I liked it or not :) This week, I could not even read the names of certain streets I was passing by.

I had some rather cool random encounters with locals in the streets of Batumi nevertheless, I even had a date but I mostly had a blast admiring the mixed architecture of this booming city. Georgian hospitality is not a legend!

The Poker games as such were also pretty nice with daily 5/5 and 5/10 (US Dollars) games running and occasionally higher blinds in NLH and PLO formats and the action was going on until very late/early every morning.

Talking about Tbilisi, Cash Game Weekend has just announced that their next stop will be in the capital city in late August so check your agendas and save the dates. It's coming up quickly. More info will follow soon under www.cashgameweekend.com.

In the meanwhile, enjoy the Batumi photos ;)

More personal thoughts on my Instagram feed.

Micro stop in Luxembourg between Slovakia and and Georgia. Yes, I know ... I should buy a GPS :p

After my short stay in Bratislava for the Slovak Series Of Poker Main Event, I made my way to Spa and Luxembourg for a few days before leaving to the Georgia Cash Game Tour. Belgium was for resting and preparing Georgia but Luxembourg was all about HEAVY action this time. I joined DJ DEE, DJ NOSI & DJ VDG for the Housen Open Air in Hosingen. More than 4200 people came together for this event and it felt like we had a drink with each and everyone of them ...

Thanks everybody for showing up and partying with us until late/early and thanks to the Hosingen girls and boys for having us!

There is a link to my pics in the PHOTO & COVERAGES section of this site, vamos!

Goodbye Bratislava! It was good seing you again after almost 10 years! You have become a beautiful and pleasant city! First Poker trip to Banco Casino for me with a delegation of Belgians. 889 entries came together in the Main Event which is impressive considering the amount of tournaments that were scheduled across Europe these last days. It’s Poker extravaganza indeed in the players’ agendas and I think we made an excellent choice by deciding to make our way to Slovakia, the Banco Casino Bratislava and the Crowne Plaza Hotel.

Although I am not working at the Spa Casino anymore as such, I am always welcome to shoot a set of photos over there. This past weekend, the Dutch organisation of Deaf Poker was hosting the Spa DEAF POKER FESTIVAL at the Poker Room Of Spa and I decided to show up on Sunday during the bubble of the Main Event :)

You'll find the full set of photos below and on Flickr or Facebook. Enjoy! :)

Belgium, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Georgia and U.K. for some Poker and Rock'n'Roll :p

The Slovak Series Of Poker (26.6 > 1.7) are getting closer! I will be off to Slovakia on a road trip in late June and you can still join with the LG Events and Poker Belgique packages.