Behind The Online Poker Mask

On a bleak and blustery night in Boston, Lincolnshire, the rain-lashed, wind-swept streets are deserted and my cockles are in serious need of warming.

As any whisky-lover will confirm, there’s something about a fine single malt that restores your good cheer in even the most inclement of weather conditions. Sadly places to drink, not only Scotch but most medicines of an alcoholic nature, are traditionally a bit thin in Boston.

Let us not forget this is the town which the Pilgrim Fathers, a religious group who either did not drink or simply could not get a decent drink, sailed from seeking the new world back in 1620.

Doubtlessly, in a town where a remarkable sum total of absolutely nothing of interest has happened in the intervening 390 years, the arrival of Texas hold’em into modern day Bostonian society has been wholeheartedly embraced.

Here the princely sum of £6 does not only buy me a pint of ale but also enters me into a hold’em tournament! I confess I had more than an inkling that this particular tavern was staging a poker tournament as did the local newspaper who were on hand to cover the event featuring a whopping £25 first prize!

At break time, desperately seeking conversation other than the pulsating reckoning of the number of potatoes, cabbages or cauliflowers individuals had picked from nearby fields during the day, I eventually found a theme which stimulated the grey matter. It transpires the landlord was once a famous wrestler, his name: Kendo Nagasaki!

Being of an age where I can remember the X-Factor was once called Opportunity Knocks, presented by heartthrob Hughie Green, and Saturday afternoons were all about the World of Sport and its presenter Dickie Davis who brought a staple diet of horseracing, Evil Knievel (attempting to break his neck once, week-in-week-out) and wrestling to our television screens, I was fully familiar with the name Kendo Nagasaki.

Therein I had to question how this character who charges £2.50 for a pint, weighs-in at 25 stone and could easily be passed off for a 25-year-old was mixing it with the likes of Giant Haystacks and Big Daddy live from Preston’s Guildhall every Saturday morning in the late 70’s and early 80’s.

Indeed, at the time, the landlord was simply a component of his father’s libido but Kendo Nagasaki was an ageless wrestling character as he wore a mask at all times.

Subsequently it transpires there has been a wrestler by that name for five decades and it is now fully apparent that Kendo Nagasaki is not the most age resilient athlete since Lester Piggott. As it happened I was talking to the third or fourth edition.

That weekend, escaping Boston and returning from the ice age to the modern world complete with wireless internet, I discovered PokerStars is now sponsoring the online persona known as Isildur1.

This sits uneasily with me. Rumours say this mystery man is likely to be Lawnmower Man lookalike Viktor Blom but for all we know he could also be complex robot program or a Bostonian potato picker.

In the early days of my former home, Ladbrokespoker.com, the alias Cheesecake gave me the kind of headaches you normally have only when your skull is in a vice.

Totally unpredictable my notes on him were seemingly re-written on a daily basis. In time the reasoning became apparent as, in time, I was to meet three young Swedes all of which played that particular alias/account on occasion… and there were apparently more of them!

True, like wrestling, poker is something of a pantomime, an amusing pastime for railbirds but, while the various incarnations of Kendo Nagasaki’s do no harm to a paying audience, the hidden guise of an unknown poker player or poker players playing for hundreds of thousands showcased and sponsored by the site which he/they play on is waltzing on very thin ice.