Broken Dreams

A dream is what's brought us all here. Dreams are fine unless they become an obsession and start to eat you up inside. The guy who said, "If you can dream it, you can do it" was a tad optimistic at best. He may well have been an idiot. What if everybody has the same dream? I spent most of the last week hanging around the pool in the Golden Nugget – what's left of it anyway. Some guy who obviously had no intention of actually staying here himself worked out that it would be a great idea to put a shark tank in the middle of the pool. It's great for the kids but not much use if you want to swim. The sharks don't seem to find it ideal either. Anyway, I've been sitting there dreaming that just one shark would escape and bite one of the little f*ckers. But it's just not working out. I'm going to just let it go.

That left me with nothing to do so I went to play my second tournament of the series in the Rio. Thirty-three minutes later I was headed for Binion's. Legendary World Series of Poker floor man Scof was at the bar and pretty soon he was telling me a story from a few years ago regarding a deuce-to-seven player whose name he'd forgotten. A big part of this guy's game revolved around stealing the blinds. Manually if necessary. It's a strong play. At one stage he went very broke. It wasn't as bad as it sounds as he got sick and the doctor told him he was going to die if he didn't get a heart transplant. And soon. He also said that finding a donor was very unlikely.

I suppose these days if a very important poker player, like Phil or Daniel, needed a transplant there'd be lots of guys queuing up to give them any organ they wanted, even if they were using them at the time. But in those days nobody would want to donate as much as a toe nail to a poker player, especially one who played deuce-to-seven. As he was about to die anyway our man decided to at least enjoy his last weekend on earth so he phoned every bookie he knew and started betting on credit on anything they'd take a bet on. Some people would consider this a little bit of a liberty as he was completely potless at the time. But most of them are bookies.

Almost inevitably he won $50,000 and was in a complete state of panic when he talked to his doctor the next Monday as dying isn't quite as much fun if you have a few quid. He never did find a donor but lived long enough to lose the 50.000 anyway, which was nice. I just had to ask if he took another free shot at the bookies before he died but he was unfortunate enough to die suddenly at a time he was feeling quite well, so we'll never know what would have happened.

Visit PokerTrillion.com to read more about Padraig Parkinson at the WSOP.