Audley Harrison Interview

As someone who has grown up watching boxing , I jumped at the chance a couple of years ago to interview Gus Hansen & Theo Jorgensen for their boxing prop bet – I figured that’s as far as I would get in boxing journalism (And it was a godawful joke of a fight). Thankfully poker has that universal appeal that brings people from all walks of life together and it would afford me the chance to go one better – to actually interview a proper boxer ahead of one of the biggest world title fights this country has ever seen.

If you would have told me 6 months ago that this opportunity would come via Audley Harrison, I would have laughed at you. Partially because the idea of him fighting for a legitimate world title would have shocked me as that is not the way his career seemed to be heading, but also because I’ve never been his biggest fan. My generation of boxers who got me into the sport include Benn, Collins, Eubank, Tyson, Lewis, Holyfield, Barrera, Morales, De La Hoya, Jones, Bruno then later Calzaghe and Hatton – and my all time favourite when he was at his peak Prince Naseem. With the exception of his last couple of fights, Harrison has been dull to watch and doesn’t even come close to these guys in terms of excitement.

But he does interest me as a poker player, he has had two massive scores in Vegas and kept it quiet – that takes a lot for a celebrity poker player. This month I got a press release saying that Lock Stock star (Is it still fair to call him that? It was nearly 15 years ago) Nick Moran nearly made day 2 of the Ladbrokes Irish Festival. If failing to survive the first third of a tournament is headline worthy then for Audley to have kept this quiet must have been a miracle.

Of course he isn’t keeping it quiet anymore and striking while the iron is at its hottest, just before the biggest fight of his life and one of the biggest in British boxing for a while (I wish we could have had Hatton vs Khan a year or so ago, that would have been much better). I must say, he was a really nice guy and he also knew a lot about poker – much more than 99% of celebrity poker players.

But as you can imagine, never having been the most popular boxers in the UK, this has been met with a bit of bemusement from the poker forums – as it probably would have been from me had I not interviewed him personally. Lots of people do not seem to see the connect, it amazes me how shrewd poker players can be and how willing they are to exploit a fool with money at the tables – yet they are outraged when a celebrity gets the nod over a pro, they don’t see the value and say its unfair – when has poker, business or life ever been fair?

Poker sponsorship is all about bringing new blood to the tables, and for me there are only a handful of pro players that do that. Its only players like Ivey, Daniel, Hellmuth, Doyle, Tony G, Liv Boeree, Gus etc that can bring that sort of value to a poker room – they bring something else, a character, a hook, a gimmick, a WWE persona. This is why players from regions where poker is less popular also have value, because they are famous, relatively, in their own country, compared to places like the UK where they have hundreds of rivals. It amazes me that so many players who are ‘just good’ at poker and are decent ambassadors get deals at all.  

Take someone like Jake Cody, he is a really nice guy, great ambassador for the game and obviously tremendously good at poker – but how many players is he going to get playing on a poker room? I hate to say it but if I was starting a poker room I would much sooner have Anne Widdicombe represent my online room right now than Jake Cody, and that is a horrible truth to admit.

Whether they love him, or hate him, whether he wins or loses, Audley Harrison is going to get a lot more people checking out Full Tilt Poker than a half the Red Pros combined. I really think that PokerStars are going to offer Haye bags of cash to wear their logo on the night in retaliation.

My full interview with Audley Harrison is here. 

Oh well, enough of all that, I’m off to Dublin this weekend for the IPO. It was a cracking event last year so more of the same this time round hopefully. 

Portorose, Slovenia - Future Poker Mecca imo

So I went on holiday the other week, my old mucker Mike Lacey told me about Portorose in Slovenia and said it was ‘Monte Carlo’ without the price tag and a great place to take the missus. He has been running some events over there and fell in love with the place, and now we have too. I’d never heard of it before last month, but its now my favourite place in Europe and we are already planning the next one.

It’s an easy thing to say in hindsight, but as soon as we arrived in Portorose I knew I loved the place. The weather was great, the views were amazing and perhaps most of all it felt very safe. I always feel a little vulnerable whenever I go to a new (non English speaking) country but not here. Usually within the first hour I have seen either a potential mugger or a drunk Brit pissing in the street, but there were none to be seen. With a population of only 4000 crime is nearly non existent in this tourist town which is one of the more hospitable places I’ve been to.

We landed at Trieste in Italy but it’s a 30 minute drive into Slovenia from there. Portorose is 5 minutes away from Croatia and an hour away from Venice. But we didn’t go very far because the small town we were staying in was lovely. Slovenians are like very relaxed Italians and everything was done at a ridiculously slow pace all week.

Poker players really get looked after as well, during off peak times in Portorose the casino is responsible for the majority of the tourism and as a result, gamblers are held in high regard. Poker players get a brilliant rate on most of the main hotels (including one of the only 6 star hotels in the world), if we needed a ride somewhere we could just get the casino shuttle car to take us there and we were sent to some of the best resteraunts where we were really well looked after. Aleksander, the casino host, came with us for one meal and the whole resteraunt seemed to stop to accommodate us because we were with him – it was like a scene from GoodFellas (the fancy resteraunt part, not the stabbing people with pens parts).  

Just about every view put in front of us would be one I would categorise as a ‘good place to propose’ – so much so that I put it to the test. We had had such a lovely time and it really was so peaceful and romantic that I asked my long time girlfriend Gina if she would marry me at the top of a medieval wall in the small town of Piran (Nicknamed ‘Little Venice’ because it inspired the architecture you now see in the Italian City) – obviously she said yes otherwise this wouldn’t be going in the blog.

I have been very lucky that poker has taken me all over the world to some exciting places, but unfortunately rarely somewhere I could take Gina. Not because she wouldn’t enjoy the place itself, but because she would be bored out of her mind while I spent 16 hour days inside the casino for the entire trip. This is not the case with Portorose, quite the opposite; I would say it is perhaps the best destination in Europe to bring your girlfriend while you play poker, safe in the knowledge that it’s relaxing, classy, warm, safe and beautiful (And not financially crippling) so your partner can enjoy herself while you are away. Gina is already begging me to play in the future festivals being run there and for the first time I will be very comfortable buggering off for an entire weekend in the casino and leaving her to her own devices.

I haven’t even got to the best bit yet – Italians! Slovenia is a popular tourist destination with Italians and every time a major festival is on in the Casino Portorose the Italians outnumber the locals 20-1. I’d probably go anywhere to play if Italians were there (Or French) and until recently this was the only place where Italians could go for live poker.

As you can see, I am a bit of a convert. What I thought would be a one off trip has led to me getting engaged and we are already planning our next excursion early next year (And possibly even having the wedding there). Nobody is paying me to say these nice things, I just really think I have stumbled upon one of the next big things in poker and I want to get in on it from the ground floor.

It took me more than five years but I have finally found a way of mixing my personal life and poker life in perfect harmony and all it cost me was my freedom.

Getting back home sucked major ass though, especially as it dawned on me I had to shell out on an engagement ring plus it’s the busiest time of the UK poker year in London. I for one think there has been one or two too many things going on in London this year, it’s been overwhelming. I wish the WPT would have been a different time of year because unfortunately I think it’s been lost a bit amongst all the other stuff.

The WSOPE is always great though and I headed down to see some of the PokerNews crew and generally get in the way of everyone working while I enjoyed myself. I think the coverage has been superb and the Live Updates second to none. I can’t actually wait for it to be over because since we moved I have been rushed off my feet and I really really want a couple of months where nothing happens.

Probably shouldn’t have proposed if that’s what I wanted though. 

Audley Harrison & Stalked By BT

It’s amazing how naked one feels when you have some recent technological innovation you didn’t even use two years ago taken away from you. I moved house two weeks ago (Very nice new place, very expensive move) and amongst a catalogue of errors from furniture suppliers I also went two weeks without internet, due to a string of errors from BT.

I had a pre paid dongle which kept me going, but I had the shakes throughout because I missed….YouTube, Twitter and TheOnion. Oh, and it was stopping me working too, but mainly TheOnion.

The funniest thing about the whole affair was that once it was fixed, I log onto twitter to find that BT have found me and tweeted me to see how it went. What a unique rubdown, they don’t seem to have a decent infrastructure for resolving customer problems but they do have budget to stalk their customers on twitter.

The dog is now fine and allowed off the lead since his op, back to his normal self minus two huge swingy sacks.

This month, as soon as I hang up my journo gloves, I got a rare poker & boxing scoop in one which forced me back into the game for one more time. Eddie Hearn contacted me to say he only wanted to tell the story of how the WSOP helped create the potential Audley Harrison vs David Haye title fight and he was giving it to me because we have had some really good chats about boxing in the last year.

I must say, Audleys poker story has really conflicted me. Because I really admire the fact that he has bagged two big live MTT results but purposely stayed under the radar about it, when 99% of celebrities would shout from the rooftops and sign a deal with PokerStars for getting a min cash on the Sky Poker Tour.

However there is the other side of me who has thoroughly enjoyed booing him for the last 10 years. He has been the dullest fighter to watch I have ever seen and I am always routing for the other guy, until now, part of me wants to cheer him on because he plays poker. I also tend to go for the underdog too. The one thing I will say is that pre interview with Eddie, I still wanted to see the fight happen, it’s a decent clash of styles and a potentially big fight from a fight/British public point of view.

Anyway, welcome back the Onion


Fat Kid Successfully Avoids Ridicule By Swimming With Shirt On

The Mutts Nutts

Although I loved my time as a full time poker journalist, one thing I was looking forward to by taking this marketing role would be that I would no longer have to interview 20 year olds who have been playing for a year and managed to turn a microstakes bankroll into millions.

So one of my first assignments is going to be to interview a 20 year old who have been playing for a few years and managed to turn a microstakes bankroll into millions.

I mentioned that poker journalism and marketing are closely intertwined and this is a good example of it. One of the best ways of marketing something is to create something people would want to read anyway, which is why I have opted to do a series of interviews with successful online players that also promote some of our brands. So coming up over the next few weeks will be a series of interviews which include people like Dusty Schmidt, Bodo Sbrznesy and hopefully man of the moment URNOTINDANGER2.

Also coming up next week you can see my first crack at viral marketing, sort of. I produced a short video of me signing up to one of PokerNews’ biggest promotions, which is one where you can get a $50 bonus on PartyPoker without having to deposit. People are naturally suspicious when you are offered free money for nothing, which is why I produced the video to show it was legit. CardRunners quality it aint, and you will see me stutter, errrr, mumble, extended pause and whoops my way through the whole thing. That’s kind of the point though, idiots guide in every aspect.

Elsewhere unfortunately I had to take Charlie in to get the snip yesterday. He is such a gentle dog I didn’t want to do it ever, but the few times he has seen a dog in season he has gone nuts. This week we met a stray dog in season and he chased her out of the park and over a mile away onto a main road, running in front of several cars along the way and narrowly missing being hit. I know because I ran the whole way and was quite impressed with how I kept up with him, though I looked a horrific red faced sweaty site as I did, screaming ‘stop that dog’ all the way.

He rarely even goes more than 40 yards away from me no matter how much fun is having on our walks, so for him to run away like that and put himself in harm’s way was a real eye opener. He seems OK post-op, very whiney but up to his usual silly antics.

This is him btw:


Finally we move house (again, sigh) this weekend to a nice new bigger place, which once again is one road away from the last place. I have lived in 4 places in the last 5 years and all of them have been in the same postcode and all of them one road away from the last. At least if the dog does another runner we have a first place to look for him while he searches for his balls.

This week I am loving the Onion btw:


Breaking News: Some Bullshit Happening Somewhere

I'm a Marketing Tosser Now

Big changes afoot, well, big for me, to an outsider looking in I would wager it doesn’t look like a single thing has changed. I have had a big career shift away from the murky world of poker journalism and into the murky world of poker….marketing.

Huge difference right?

Not really, well, kind of. Poker media is so heavily reliant on advertising from online poker sites I would say that the journalism and the marketing sides of things are very closely intertwined. If you don't believe me, you try and write something critical of an online poker room/sponsored pro for a publication with an advertising deal with the same room. Anyway that’s a discussion for another day really.

I have been wanting to get into marketing for a while now, I always thought I could do a good job of it and in fairness I have been doing it for a while and just not getting paid for it. The last two years I have helped so many people promote their brands as ‘favours for mates’ and I often get people asking me for advice on things like advertising/sponsorship/getting editorial in magazines etc. When I say ‘mates’ I don’t just mean people down the pub I actually mean sponsored players, online poker rooms, live card rooms, TV companies and publishers (Who are also mates who happen to have those jobs).

My main role will be for the entire PokerNews network and will be primarily coming up with new ways of pushing their exclusive promos. This is not difficult, in that we have bigger and better promos than anyone else (See, I’m doing it already). Ironically the first thing I do after casting off a career as a writer is a shit load of writing. I would never stop writing altogether, I love it, but from now on anything non marketing-y I write will be out of pure enjoyment. Hopefully It will mean I update this blog more often now I won’t feel as knackered from writing 4000 words a day. 

The great thing about this opportunity is I will learn so much from such a big company like PokerNews, which is great for the book I am writing with Jared Tendler (Yep, that’s still happening, nearly done, I promise). Always very nice to have more than one thing going on at a time.

As for my baby, the UK Pokernews site, not sure what the plan is. I love it very much and it certainly won’t disappear, I am still updating it at the moment but that won’t be forever, your guess is as good as mine but it will continue without me.

Some other stuff I will be getting up to will be playing freerolls. No I’m not busto, it’s just that as part of my job will be to push our freerolls I want to understand them from a player perspective. I have already qualified for a 10k and a 5k freeroll on Winner Poker and it will be interesting to see how quickly I get bored. It’s sad, but I cant envisage enjoying playing that low.

Normally by now I would get excited about the footy season started tomorrow but unfortunately Wednesday have been relegated and the World Cup was so bad in every way, not just for England, that I kind of detest football players. No doubt the Owls will have a solid win tomorrow lulling me into a false sense of hope for the season.

De-constructing the Year of the Brits

Taken from UK Pokernews

In 2009 three UK Players won World Series of Poker Bracelets and one made the final table of the main event. At the time we considered it a massive success and coined it the ‘Year of the Brit’, suggesting that this feat was an isolated incident in the history of the WSOP. 12 months on and we are calling 2010 the ‘Year of the Brit’ too, because the success of our boys in Vegas this summer has almost overwritten what we achieved in 2009 as well as proving any doubters wrong that British success was any sort of one off.

This year UK players snagged an amazing five World Series of Poker Bracelets in Vegas. Praz Bansi won his second bracelet by taking down Event Number #5: $1,500 No Limit for $515,501. Popular Blondepoker shareholder James Dempsey took down Event Number # 9: $1500 Pot Limit Hold'em a few days later for $197,470 and high stakes star Richard Ashby won #21: $1,500 Seven Card Stud for $140,467. GUKPT Grand Final Champ Mike Ellis made it four winning Event #30: $1,500 No-Limit Hold’em for $581,851 and prolific tournament pro Steve Jelinek finished things off winning Event #41: $1,500 Pot-Limit Omaha Hi-low Split-8 or Better for $245,871.

Richard Ashby

On top of the bracelets there were a stream of final table appearances and deep finishes. Richard Ashby and James Dempsey both followed up their bracelet wins with 2nd place finishes, Neil Channing, Michael Greco, Paul Kerr, Kevin Howe, the Devilfish, Julian Gardner and Paul Foltyn all made finals, Stuart Rutter managed two final tables and Sam Trickett boasted two final tables and four more cashes making him the biggest cash winner of the year with $693,387. Our best main event finisher was Redmond Lee who finished 21st for $317,161. In total there were five bracelets, three second places, 20 final tables, 275 cashes and $8,679,918 in winnings for UK players this year in Vegas (Including 13 scores worth over $100,000).

Not only was this the best year ever for the UK it was also the most successful bracelet haul ever seen by a non US nation, which unfortunately was matched by Canada almost as soon as it happened, but the honour still unlikely to be repeated any time soon. In fact the year of the Brit is by no means isolated to the WSOP, it’s been a great year thus far worldwide for UK players. Jake Cody took down EPT Deauville, James Mitchell won the Irish Open and Liv Boeree stunned the world winning EPT San Remo.

So what does one put this major achievement down to?

Variance

We may as well get this one out of the way. It would be unrealistic not to acknowledge the role variance may have played in bagging all those bracelets and final tables, because we sure as hell would be blaming it if it were the other way round. Yes the Brits could just have run hot but thankfully the structures are getting so deep these days that variance is arguably playing less of a part than a few years ago and we are seeing more and more ‘names’ taking down gold in the last few years.

Community

The UK circuit is booming, but it is also in a way very small. Everybody knows each other, everybody has played against each other and outside of trying to take each others chips, there is a real culture of support in the UK. Poker is fundamentally a solitary game but there are so many communities in the UK scene that are nurturing and supporting UK talent.

Whether its forums like Blondepoker and the Hendon Mob, community tours like the Sky Poker Tour and APAT, staking sites like BadBeat and BlackBelt Poker or just likeminded bands of brothers like the Hit Squad and theShrewdies – poker players in the UK come together and help each other. It’s much easier to learn the game with likeminded friends and that was evident with the support shown for UK players on the rails and the forums this year in Vegas.

Well Structured UK Tournaments

A few years ago you would have to be a high roller to enjoy a deep structured event, with everything else falling into the £5 rebuy crapshoot category. These days events with well-structured 10,000 stack events are becoming the standard for a very low price. APAT, the Coral British Masters Poker Tour, theGrosvenor UK Poker Tour, the Pokerstars UK & Ireland Poker Tour and the Dusk Till Dawn Monthly £300 Deepstack all host regular championship style structured events for between £75 and £1,000, with a huge host of other one off events doing the same. All of which means that the Brits don’t show up to Vegas any more with no clue on how to handle a deep stack.

A Relaxed Stance on Gambling

People don’t really talk about this that much but you only have to look at other nations to see how valuable it is. In the UK we have a relaxed attitude towards gambling overall, we don’t have to pay tax on winnings, poker is advertised and broadcast on terrestrial television and the stigma associated with it is getting smaller all the time. Contrast this with just about every other country who either tax the game heavily, monopolise online poker or even try and ban the game altogether and you realise how lucky we are as players. It’s very easy and appealing to be a professional poker player in the UK, which has no doubt helped flourishing poker players make their mark on the world stage.

The Best Rails in Poker

It’s quite sad that most Americans think, and report accordingly, that any Britain who has had a drink and is cheering someone is a football hooligan. The American poker press did not know what to make of the rowdy rails in Vegas, completely bemused by the drinking, singing and chanting, but everyone back home loved hearing about them. The most notable rails had to be for James Dempsey who won one bracelet and came 2nd for another. Singing songs such as ‘Hes a Doctor’, ‘Pot Limits Coming Home’ and ‘Saammy Give Us a Wave’ (To Sam Farha) they also had a few railers thrown out.

Of course the question is, does that sort of support actually help a poker player? You can see how it would in an athletic pursuit where might give a sportsman an extra 5 minutes of energy, but in a game where concentration is key surely it would be a distraction? It’s hard to say, but either way, the rails were the icing on the cake for this fantastic year.

James Dempsey

It was a real shame that this year, just like it was last year, hardly any of the mainstream British press caught onto this fantastic achievement by Brits abroad. Obviously the World Cup would get in the way of any other sporting news but after such a dismal performance by England in South Africa you would think that the media would be keen to latch onto any arena where the Brits are excelling. I’m not expecting the Sun or the BBC to all of a sudden show an interest, but maybe someone like Sky Sports who have always had their fingers in the poker pie, it would have been nice for some sort of acknowledgement on Sky Sports News or even just their website.

But the attention from the British poker media is only going to get bigger, with lots of expectation going into the World Series of Poker Europe, EPT London and WPT London in September. Expect the front covers of all the magazines to be adorned with the bracelet winners and no doubt all the big winners will be nominated for British Poker Awards later on this year. Now let’s see if we can bag a couple at the WSOPE and leapfrog Canada at the same time.

GUKPT Summer Series Final Table (Which was also the only table lol)

Generally speaking I am not a massive fan of deals or chops, usually if I am in the position to make a deal I'm pretty happy with what I have achieved already and what I would get for busting out next (Tournament poker really is a novelty for me more than anything). Last weekend I did miss out on a good deal, but what proceeded it reminded me why I don’t like doing them much.

It was the first big event at the G Casino in Sheffield, the £220 GUKPT Summer Series. I say big event, it should have been, but only 9 people turned up. Normally that would be an instant un-reg, but with a GUKPT Champion of Champions seat on offer in added value it actually made the event more enticing. A seat in one of the most prestigious UK tournaments of the year for no extra cost and all you need to do is win a sit and go.

So prior to the event starting 7 out of the 9 of us had agreed that we should take the prize money back, pay the £20 reg fees and play what would have been the best value £20 satellite to the Champions event. When you consider we got a free meal on top of the juice and this would have been an amazing coup.

Unfortunately two young lads didn’t want to deal, they came here to play and they seemed decent players, so as gutted as I was for missing out I had to respect their decision. It seemed that about 3 guys at the table had no respect for that decision and spent half the game berating them for refusing the deal.

I don’t know if its just a Sheffield thing, but this is why I hate local poker. There really seems to be a ridic culture of trying to sort a deal prematurely at Sheffield casinos. I have literally played in a tournament where two people busted and someone tried to arrange a saver, just about every local results listing I see involves a silly amount of savers and I remember once thinking I was going to get chased out of a venue for refusing a saver on the bubble.

I bust out pretty quickly, but for some reason rather than being disappointed I kind of felt good that I had sniffed out a good value game. Oh well, technically I made a GUKPT final table even if it was also the first and only table. 

Hopefully the upcoming Summer Series will be a low turn out (I am horrified to think such a thing because I love the GUKPT and I really should support poker in Sheffield, but I am also a bumhunter and like easy money).

Over at UK Pokernews we have had a makeover and its looking pretty snazzy if I don’t mind saying so. Lots of fancy cool boxes, video stuff and twittery stuff. I am also about to suggest a little prop bet with my CEO that I can get 1000 facebook fan members to our Facebook Page by the end of August, so join it if you haven't already.