Antepost

Kiwis are a Strange Fruit

There are certain questions people ask when they discover you are a poker player: What’s the most you have ever won? What’s the most you have ever lost? What is the worst bad beat you have suffered? Point one is an ongoing project, I refuse to reflect on point two, while point three didn’t actually happen at the poker table. Nevertheless, it was a sick beat in every sense.

Some time ago, sat at home late in the evening after losing an obscene amount of money at the foolish and impulsive click of a button, I was contemplating one of two things… Compiling a 30-page thesis on why not to do what your inner demons are telling you — therein refuting the rule that you should go with your gut instinct — or do something that would increase my fledgling affiliate business whilst fulfilling the needs and demands of my sponsors. I opted for the latter, and a stroke of genius led me to contact newspapers in territories untapped by that sponsoring online poker site, Australia and New Zealand, to place adverts within their pages.

I was soon banging off enquiries left, right, and centre with a simple and cunning advert designed to create curiosity, which normally leads to all-important website hit-count. A few days on replies were coming in with advertising rates and concessions on block bookings. Of course, by now I had fallen back in love with online poker and lost all interest in hit-counts.

Fast-forward a week or so, on a daily basis, cranky e-mails started to arrive. Like really cranky. One talked about long distance relationships, another about swapping pictures before possibly meeting in Thailand, where we could enjoy the bars and clubs together.

I was genuinely bemused by it all, suspecting it to be the work of deranged pranksters. Then, amongst a wave of e-mails, came the most hostile mail of all — an invoice! It was from a publication in New Zealand and it read: “Dear Mr Brindley, thank you for your recent advert: ‘NO ONE TO PLAY WITH TONIGHT? COME SEE ME AT MY WEBSITE… ‘COS I GRIN WHEN I GO ALL IN!’, which we have run in our personals section under the Gay & Lesbian personals column. We hope you had a good response and will consider advertising with us again soon.” ♠