PokerStars Things

I think my policy on PokerStars is well known. I like them, and for more reasons than the one my boss announced across the bar here last night, that I was “loved up with one of their employees”. I like the company ethos though - they pay shitloads.

But anyway, I may hate them by the end of the week. Two PokerStars things in two days starting tonight with the three last World Champions (and I can link to these buggers) coming to play at Gutshot, and then an official media event tomorrow night in Picadilly. The idea is that here the ordinary player can sit down to play with them. So, there's a £20 freezeout arranged. Demand will be high. They'll be a lottery for seats.

So that's Chris Moneymaker, Greg Raymer and Joe Hachem on the way. I intend to sandbag a corner of the bar and stay there all night. I may need some kind of defence system, for I have to write something about the thing, and historically I've run into trouble with World Champions. Well, one of them.

I interviews Joe Hachem in Copenhagen in January. He seemed nice enough and the interview went well . Not sure he liked me talking about the Australian Inland Revenue but you have to be probing. I also interviewed Noah Boeken that week (record number of links here today). In it he said that in the poker world today, any number of internet qualifiers could win the World Series and do just as well as Joe Hachem. This, it seemed, pissed off Joe a little bit.

A few weeks later in Monte Carlo Joe asked me if I had a second. Naturally I told him I'd be a few minutes - I'm not giving ground to the World Champion - and took a moment to feel important before meeting him in the '€6 for a coke' bar.

That's when he went into World Champion mode and accused me of mis-quoting Noah in the interview with him. Marcel Luske was there too, keeping Dutch neutral of course, but injecting enough fear into the chat to put me on the defensive. He has a past. I don't. And I was thinking at this rate I wouldn't have a future either.

The ass-kicker of the whole thing is that I spent an hour defending Noah, saying he hadn't meant any disrespect and hadn't seemed to be attacking Hachem at all when I talked to him. Bugger this. They were attacking me, and I missed that. I'm still a little in awe of these people.

They asked me to re-check, I did, and Noah had said what he said. I wasn't going to change it. Marcel, still friendly, talked about how 'respect was important' in poker, that a central vein of the whole poker scene was respect between players. This of course is complete and utter shite. There's fuck-all respect in poker, particularly towards the press corp.

But it all seemed to sort itself out. And if pissing people off is worth doing it's worth doing right. Aim high.

So yes. There you go. They're coming tonight. Conrad Brunner, head of the PokerStars Marketeers will be here too. I like Conrad. But not Tamar. She grimaces.