blonde poker

Having travelled more in the last year following poker with the ever-growing blonde update team than I had in the previous five, catching the three-train combo to Truville-Deauville was less daunting than it may once have seemed.  Having taken trams from Vienna to Baden, and experienced the Metro at rush hour, the trip from Waterloo station to France was pretty relaxing, more so as in this case it was all organised in advance by Jonathan Raab.  To play in one of the EPT events has long been a dream, and having watched a good handful run their multi-day course it was with great excitement that I put on the BlueSquare hat in travelling with the last Unusual Suspects to Deauville.

 It didn’t stay on for long (the invisible hat, that is) as a Day 1B draw for me left a whole day to either chew off my nails or follow the blonde contingent (pretty hefty it was, too) with one eye on the time and the other on Tikay’s press pass.  Duly appropriated, that got me a foot in the door of both worlds, with a red wristband (permanently attached to all participants’ arms for the week) as well as a yellow Media tag.  But a whole team of blondeite reporters were doing a good job already (Snoopy, AlrightJack, Tikay and Ben -whom I referred to as ‘Sunday’ for most of a day) so it was a fairly laid-back day for me.  The tournament room was exactly the right size – large enough to accommodate 200+ players per day, but not losing any of its comfortable opulence the way the largest of venues end up resembling B&Q warehouses rather than ‘salles de jeux.’

There were loads of those faces I recognised from other events in the UK and in Europe, but instead of being daunting, there was something reassuring about watching Bad Girl, Flushy, Julian Thew, Roland de Wolfe, Peter Roche, Jan Boubli and even Greg Raymer (briefly) play cards for up to ten hours.  I think I’ve been normalised to that kind of environment through updating on the familiar players’ progress, and far from encouraging the jitters or creating tension, the crowd of recognisable people was fun to both watch, and later, play against.  There were also a fair number of internet qualifiers, and a lot of PokerStars shirts, but it was the impressive result for the blondeites which really kept my attention all day – John Falconer and James Dempsey (the other Suspects) both went through to Day 2 along with Stuart Fox, Marc Goodwin, Ram Vaswani, Ken Powell and Stuart Nash.  And that was just Day 1A.

Watching one of these long-blinds/big stack tournaments from the ‘inside’ i.e. at the table, is a very different experience indeed.  The distorted sense of the passage of time is the first thing I noticed – some hour levels disappeared in what felt like minutes, while others dragged on and on, like the one preceding the dinner break.  A handy purseful of pains aux chocolat kept me going when the energy threatened to run out, and I must stress that bringing snacks was probably the smartest thing I did over both days.  And when it all felt a bit tiring, I had only to have Tom Murphy show up with notepad and pen saying “Swap?” to be glad to be playing still…

Not that updating is a bad job – far from it – there is just so much going on in a room packed to the rafters with poker tables which passes you by when you’re focused wholly on the seven players sat on your table (they played eight-handed after the first level or so).  You only get a tiny slice of the day, and almost no overview of the tournament as a whole.  Luckily, Snoopy would pass by with easily digestible nuggets of information just when I felt most left out.  Having said that, there was no point of the experience, including going out on the dreaded bubble, which I regretted or didn’t, in some way, enjoy.  That included watching Mickey Wernick (on the last table I sat at) go from a short stack to finishing just off the TV final, and also seeing so many blondes battle through the large field so successfully.  There was no bad feeling on the tables I found myself on – everyone was pretty friendly and occasionally very entertaining (like karaoke star Sverre Sundbo).  One French player whose river bluff I called named me “Call girl,” which wasn’t meant to be offensive (I think).  As for the Unusual Suspects, I would be happy for any of us three to head to Monte Carlo, and with the points so close at least there’ll be some drama to the concluding heads up round.

I leave the tournament report in general in the more-than-capable hands of Snoopy – I was wandering round in a sort of daze the next day – but wanted to make a couple of side points clear: As to the ‘frumpy’ pics of me in my Mrs. Merton cardy clutching a handbag made out of a material so base it has no name, they were the product of several things.  My be-logoed BlueSquare shirt was a man’s one, large and with funny buttons, the air con necessitated some kind of jumper, and the bag was only hoisted when I was all-in and ready to do the decent thing and stand up.  So there.  If I’d known about the alphabetical order re-draw for Day 2 I would have been more prepared for sitting next to the glamorous Isabelle Mercier (it’s pretty disconcerting being on the other end of the cameras) but honestly – if I could wear my pyjamas and play cards I would.  Ah, there’s always the Internet.