Paradise Poker in Prague

Feb. 1, 2012, Posted by Lee_Davy

The French Pro, Guillaume Darcourt, has taught me a thing or two about poker. I know you can defend any two cards in the blinds and still win a World Poker Tour title and close to $1 million in tournament earnings, and if I dye my hair a strange colour I will get a lot of attention. So as I headed to Prague to play in the €550 Paradise Poker Tour Main Event I decided to follow one of his traits and dyed my Mohican bright red!

I got a lot of attention but I am a good reader of body language and could tell that people thought I looked like a complete cock - literally! When my hair was down I looked like Beaker from The Muppets and when it was up I looked like the former WWE wrestler Tatanka. As it transpires Tatanka and I have more in common than just our red hair. His balls were extremely small as a result of his use of testosterone altering substances and my balls were…just small.

I decided to do a Phil Hellmuth and turn up late…OK it was only three-minutes but I still felt harder than Ron Jeremy squeezing a pimple on Rihanna’s arse. As a writer in the poker industry I get the opportunity to interview a lot of the world’s top players. The current number one in both the all-time money list and Global Poker Index (GPI) is Erik Seidel. I was lucky enough to spend some time talking to him recently and he told me that his number one tip was to remain focused at all times and be observational at the table. So as I took my seat along with 200+ other people I decided to be observational…but I doubt Seidel would have approved of my methodology.

The first thing I decided to concentrate on was the arse of the massage girl. It was absolutely fantastic! Alright, I am actually dating the massage girl whose arse I was checking out but I couldn’t help it. I think I was licking my lips when I turned to my table to find the dealer flicking me the first hand of the day, and eight other players licking their lips and staring at my girls arse. The player on my left was staring so much he put me on massage girl arse tilt and I just wanted to knock him out to stop him looking. When Jared Tendler wrote the recently amazing Mental Game of Poker I did not read a chapter on how to handle massage girl arse tilt!

I decided to concentrate on the players instead and a few of them grabbed my attention. It wasn’t the way they played that interested me but instead what celebrities they looked like. Spotting celebrity look-a-likes is another important theme often missing from even the very best poker books in the world. Right opposite me was a Samoan who I thought looked like the character Dr. Gonzo from the Hunter S. Thompson classic Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. When I first started writing I had a piece called Zombieland published on the Hendon Mob and someone commented that I was a fantastic Gonzo writer and a Welsh William S Burroughs. Somebody took umbrage to this compliment and said that my article was hardly a Naked Lunch. At the time I thought Gonzo was Erik Seidel’s nickname and didn’t have a clue who this character Burrows was. I later bought Naked Lunch and threw it in the bin after struggling to read the first few chapters of incoherent crap. I then realised if Naked Lunch was crap and I was writing crap worse than that then I must have been pretty crap!

Next to Raoul Duke’s attorney was Charles Miles Manson the famous cult leader from the late 1960s. I had no idea they had released him and thought only Doyle Brunson played poker in his seventies. Here was one man who could stare at my girls arse all day long. Each time I got into a pot with him he stared at me and I couldn’t help think he wanted to string me up and stab me to death. In hindsight he was probably just thinking, “look at that bell-end with the red hair!” He did have an impact on me as I remembered he believed that there was going to be an apocalyptic race war known as Helter Skelter based on subliminal messages hidden in the Beatles famous White Album. I switched on my ipod and thumbed it until the White Album came on…

“Desmond has his barrow in the market place…Molly is the singer in a band…Desmond say to Molly “Girl I like your face” and Molly says this as she takes him by the hand. Ob-la-di, ob-la-da, life goes on bah!”

Were they singing about Desmond Tutu? I was desperate to ask him about the hidden racial lyrics in Ob-la-di-ob-la-da but his stare was getting considerably worse, so I turned my attention to the person next to him. It was your archetypal young poker hot shot. He had a face on him as if someone had just stolen his Panini stickers and replaced them with 150 versions of Jan Molby. He was so unhappy he made Dave “Dubai” Shallow look like Coco the Clown. His strategy was pretty simple. He would raise and then barrel every street irrespective of his holdings. He eventually got caught with his pants down and smiled when he lost. Strange lad.

I had been playing for five hours and nobody had spoken a word at my table. I like that though because it helps my observational techniques when I am left to my own devices. For five hours I was able to catch up on all my missed blog posts on my Google Reader, something I never would have been able to do if Charles Manson had started up a conversation with me about how funny it was that pop groups like Kasabian named themselves after the remnants of his parties killing spree. Dodged that one…phew!

I ordered a bottle of water and got distressed that I had to pay €5 for it. But that distress was nothing compared to the stress I felt a few moments after happy boy was dispatched. There were two players heading for our table to take the spot of the young Internet misery kid. One was a delectable young female with a short skirt and a cleavage that reminded you of the good old days when you were allowed to suck on your Mums tits, and the other could only be described as a dirty looking Luciano Pavarotti. I hoped and prayed with baited breath but knew it was never going to happen. The short skirt squeezed one way past the table and said, “scuse me,” as I stared at her little bum. Then my attention swerved to my €5 bottle of water as it crashed to the ground this time courtesy of the much larger bum of Dirty Pavarotti.

When I say dirty I don’t mean Kylie Minogue, a dwarf and Vladimir Geshkenbein four-way dirty I mean smelly haven’t changed my clothes for a week dirty. But my disappointment soon abated as I started to focus on the most important thing floating around in the emptiness of my brain…was it a woman or a man?

 

To be honest I didn’t have a clue…just the same as I didn’t have a clue who won the tournament or how I even got eliminated? Observational poker at its best…thanks Gonzo…I mean Seidel.

Lee Davy is a writer who likes to write about what is on his mind. His society filter eroded some years ago and these days he just says it how it is. You can follow Lee Davy on Twitter at   or on his personal blog www.needyhelper.com. For personal contact try .