History Repeats

I was in a hotel elevator in Cardiff when I got my first real introduction to European poker. It was two hours before the filming of the first heat of the second series of Late Night Poker, and I was looking over a piece of paper on which I had jotted down odds for the tournament. I didn't know very much about oddsmaking back then, but I did know that watching the heats without betting on them was only for fairy tales, and since I was going to be watching the play, I thought it best to prepare.



Into the elevator stepped a courtly man with his lovely wife. I had never seen him before, nor he me. It quickly transpired that this man was on my list of runners for both heat and outright betting. And inasmuch as I had never seen nor heard of Bambus Xanthus before in my lifetime, me who thought I knew everything and everybody in the poker world, I had made Bambus one of the outsiders. Bambus looked over my list of odds and nodded sagely, then politely asked me how large a bet I might be prepared to take. "Here," said Bambus, handing me a stack of bills. I was broke before the elevator hit the ground floor.



Bambus, I was to find out, is a very good player. Had he won the tournament and not just his heat, I likely would be paying him still to this day, and he nearly did. But it pointed to something else that I was to discover about European poker players, a trait exhibited by men like Noel Furlong, Carlos Mortensen, Lawrence Gosney, and a hundred others. The fact is that they are never intimidated by laurels and never influenced by other people's perceptions, and they relish the role of being thought of as an underdog. They also have no trepidation at all of looking like an idiot while trying to win. European poker players try very hard.



It was to take several years before I began to understand the depth of European poker, before I began to realize that the ones calling themselves the greatest might not necessarily be, and before it became a painfully obvious fact that I am one of the worst sports bettors to ever fling a fiver.



I can't help thinking about these things, because I'll soon be back in Cardiff to film an event that hearkens of those old days, the William Hill Grand Prix. By my count, only 17 of the 56 in the field were ever a part of Late Night Poker, and some LNP stalwarts like Malcolm "The Rock" Harwood and Peter "The Bandit" Evans are sorely missing. But of the reams of poker events filmed in Cardiff since LNP VI hit the books, this is the first one with a significant smattering of the players whose names are synonymous with the beginning of televised poker, not to mention one of the strongest tournament fields in recent memory.



One of only two Americans in the field, Antonio Esfandiari, also has me thinking about LNP. "The Magician," as he's known, is coming for his first visit to European poker full of confidence. Antonio has sent advance warning that not only is he among "the half-dozen best players in the world," but he "feels the need to conquer Europe to earn a place among the poker gods." Methinks Esfandiari may be in for a rude awakening along the lines of another American, Phil Hellmuth. Phil and his ego provided two of the best moments in all of the six series of Late Night Poker, first when he was outplayed and dismantled by the then unheralded "Smokin Steve" Vladar, and then when he was humiliated by Robert "Le Dangeroux" Cohen. Both Vladar and Cohen are European players in the typical mode, quiet tigers at the table who play a top-class game without the need to brag. A glance at the Grand Prix draw shows Esfandiari in the same heat as Bambus Xanthus. I sure hope it's Antonio I see in the elevator first, and not Bambus, this time around.