Travel Report, EPT12 Dublin, Day 5 -- Gutshots

We had a somewhat shorter day yesterday with the EPT12 Dublin Main Event as Day 2 only lasted six 75-minute levels, meaning we were done before 9 p.m. or so. The rest of the evening was also short for me before getting back to the hotel around 11:30, although the time spent in between was very enjoyable.

First came a delicious dinner at the Italian restaurant called Belluccis which is just across the road from the Royal Dublin Society. Went over with my colleagues Howard Swains and Stephen Bartley and had a terrific caprese salad followed by a ribeye steak while listening to the two of them share stories about the Gutshot Poker Club.

Open from 2004 through 2007, the Gutshot was essentially an illegal poker room in London that purposely challenged the Gaming Act, eventually losing the case brought against it and closing thereafter. Howard and Stephen spoke of a brief revival of another club with a different name, though that, too, only had a short run before getting shut down.

Was fascinating to hear about the various characters associated with the Gutshot and to compare how the club, Late Night Poker (which originally ran in the U.K. a few years before), and other details of the explosion of poker’s popularity in London paralleled the “boom” in poker that happened in the U.S. during those same years. As both Howard and Stephen played at the club and in fact helped chronicle it by writing about it at the the time, I told them they needed to compile an oral history of it (or some kind of narrative about it). They’d surely be the best to do something like that, if they wanted to.

As entertaining as the conversation was, I couldn’t stick around long post-meal, though, as the media tournament was scheduled at 10. I ran back across Merrion Road and soon was seated along with around 40 others for the tournament, among them Lex Veldhuis of Team PokerStars Pro Online and Friend of Team PokerStars Felipe “Mojave” Ramos.

We played in the cash room which has actually been set up inside the Royal Dublin Society library. Was kind of a comfortable setting for your humble scribbler, the walls around us all lined with shelves full of books from floor to ceiling. (That pic above taken by Mickey May is from the tournament, although you can’t see the books over to the side.)

I know Felipe pretty well from covering LAPT events -- in fact, most recently in the Bahamas I talked to him at length about poker’s growth in his native Brazil. He and I ended up playing a somewhat memorable hand in which he raised under the gun, got a caller in middle position, I called from the button with K-J, and someone from the blinds came, too.

The flop came 9-10-J, giving me top pair and a gutshot straight draw. Felipe jokingly asked the dealer if king-queen made a straight before continuing with a small bet that only I called. I called another slightly bigger bet after a blank came on the turn, then the river brought another jack and a check from Felipe.

I’d made trip jacks and thought I was probably best. I’m sure I would’ve called a bet again, and perhaps even for all of my relatively short stack (given that we were playing lightning-quick 10-minute levels). But after he checked I thought about it for a few seconds and decided just to check back. He turned over K-Q, and when I showed my cards the table was surprised I’d escaped without losing more. But I couldn’t see him calling any bet from me on the end there with worse.

Anyhow, felt a little like I was freerolling after that, but soon lost my short stack in a hand that saw me pushing with A-10 and getting called by K-10. If I wanted to be dramatic -- or press forward with some sort of leitmotiv here -- I’d call the king that came on the flop a “gutshot,” but that would be misleading. Was a fun hour or so of poker, and I didn’t mind that much having an early night of it for once.

Ending up having to walk back to the hotel through a pretty steady and cold rain, but I wasn’t soaked too badly and am glad to get to sleep at a decent hour.

Back at it on Wednesday for Day 3. There are 127 players left from the 605 who entered the EPT Dublin Main. Check the PokerStars blog for more today.

Photo: courtesy Mickey May/PokerStars blog.

Jesse May Interview, April 2011 (Part 2 of 2)

Here’s the second part of that interview with Jesse May, conducted just about four years ago in the spring of 2011 (Part 1 here).

In this part we focus more particularly on the story behind Late Night Poker, the first series of which appeared in 1999. That picture down below of the two of us, by the way, comes from this year’s PokerStars Caribbean Adventure where I had a chance to interview Jesse once again for the PokerStars blog (photo by Neil Stoddart).

* * * * *

“The Betfair Poker Interview: Jesse May, Part 2”
[Originally published at Betfair Poker, 8 April 2011]

This week we present the second half of my conversation with poker player, author, and commentator Jesse May. After focusing primarily on May’s 1998 poker-themed novel Shut Up and Deal, we turned our attention to the early days of Late Night Poker, the groundbreaking show that debuted in the U.K. on Channel 4 in the summer of 1999.

Short-Stacked Shamus: Late Night Poker is one of those shows I’ve always been curious to learn more about. A lot of fans of poker on television -- especially those of us over here in America -- don’t necessarily realize how important and influential Late Night Poker really was when it comes to televised poker. What are some of your memories from the show’s early days?

Jesse May: I remember the whole thing very well. It was one of the most formative things in my life, really.

I was invited as a player for the first series. I had become friendly with Nick Szeremeta. My book [Shut Up and Deal] had been out, and I was spending more time in Europe around that time. I had recently gotten married and was trying to get some gigs as a writer, and Nick was getting me some work.

Nick had been contacted by Rob Gardner [the show’s original producer] to help get players for the show. In fact, they’d had a lot of trouble getting players for this first series of Late Night Poker. Most people turned them down. At the time I was on the way to going broke. After about five years I was kind of at the tail end of my professional poker career. And the action had been drying up a little bit.

SSS: What was the buy-in for that first series?

JM: The buy-in was £1500. It was a massive, massive buy-in (laughs). At that time there might have been three tournaments during the entire year with a buy-in bigger than £1500. And I had about £1800 to my name... that was it! And I can’t remember why, but I felt like I needed to be a part of this.

And as it turned out, most of the people who showed up at that first series of Late Night Poker had the same sort of idea. In that first series there were maybe three or four legitimate pros -- Dave “Devilfish” Ulliott, Surinder Sunar, and a couple of others. There really weren’t many, a lot of the pros had turned it down. Everybody else, we were all just kind of chancers in a sense. But for some reason I felt like I had to be part of it.

SSS: So they taped all of the heats for that first series at once.

JM: Yes, it was in Cardiff in the spring... it must have been April. I remember I played in the very first heat. Back then, all the players who had bought in got a free hotel room for the week, which was quite a big bonus (laughs)! [That meant] everyone showed up and stayed all week.

So I played in the first heat, and I embarrassed myself, basically. I didn’t know anything about tournaments -- I probably hadn’t played 10 tournaments in my life! I ended up getting third in the heat. I got knocked out after going all in with something like 9-3-offsuit... it was pretty embarrassing. People were giving me pretty awkward looks as I walked out the door (laughs).

So then I had the rest of the week to hang out, and I had those thoughts: “What the heck am I going to do next?” I thought I might be back to selling storm windows or something.

SSS: But then you ended up being brought in to be a commentator on that first series.

JM: Yes. In fact, the original idea for Late Night Poker was that there would be no commentators. They filmed it thinking that the table talk was going to carry the show. Today that might work, but back then nobody had been on television before. Everybody just froze up! Aside from maybe the Devilfish there might not have been ten words said during the entire tournament. So the producers were panicking a bit and they decided they were going to have to have commentary.

And I volunteered to do it for free. I said I’d be happy to do it, that it sounded like a great idea. I was just thinking, really, at least I can try and give some explanation for being such an idiot -- you know, maybe I won’t come across so badly (laughs). And [I was also thinking I would] maybe get a chance to promote my book or something, although I didn’t really even think that through. Who knew at the time that would actually turn into a career for me!

SSS: The show really was pioneering. When it first aired in July 1999, we were still about four years away from the World Poker Tour debuting and Moneymaker’s WSOP victory being shown on ESPN.

JM: The thing about Late Night Poker that most people don’t realize, it wasn’t just the first poker TV show. I mean, it was that. And it was the first to use the under-the-table hole card cameras. But if you go back and watch those first few series, what made it great and the reason it took off was because of the way it was edited and the way it was filmed.

Rob Gardner was the producer of the first three series, and Rob really understood that it wasn’t enough to just show everything. He knew that what was going on here was a mini-drama, and it was filmed and edited to show that. I’m talking about the shots, the way they used to reveal the hands, the way they used to show the decisions being made... plus the atmosphere! The shots of cigarette smoke and looking up at the players from under the table... the fact that they used the under-the-table cameras -- and still do, in Europe, for a lot of the stuff, while in America they use the hole-card cams and put the graphics on afterwards -- that shot of the camera from under the glass, with the person’s cards and then his face, was such a new and exciting and dramatic type of shot!

SSS: You’re right, that low-angle shot looking up at the player, who now has the knowledge of the hole cards -- a secret that we now know, too -- it’s very cinematic, really.

JM:: Yes, and it all would be worked into [the telling of the story]. And when it took off, most of the people who watched it didn’t know anything about poker. They were drawn in by the natural drama of the TV show.

Later when the World Poker Tour started -- and I think the WPT and Mike Sexton are great and majorly responsible for the growth of poker -- it was really so much different. What they were really capitalizing on was the big money that they were playing for, and the “all ins” and things like that. It was not at all like what Late Night Poker had been doing.

SSS: Well, it definitely works. Even going back and watching those old shows today, they definitely hold your interest.

JM: Rob’s background is kind of interesting -- it was actually in dance. He was a modern dancer with a dance troupe or something like that, and didn’t know anything about poker. He was hired by Presentable Productions to come up with new ideas for TV shows. And he just came up with the poker idea out of the blue, and got in touch with Nick Szeremeta and it went from there.

They sold it to Channel 4 in the U.K. which back then used to do some very, very out there kind of stuff, especially late at night. They used to have this thing called “4Later” or something like that when they would air these shows. It was the kind of idea that would never, ever get sold today. But they took a flyer on it and it just went from there. But Rob was really a driving force behind that.

Rob passed away three years ago and the European Poker Awards set up an award in his honor. It was originally called the “Rob Gardner Poker Innovation Award” and I think now has been changed to the “Poker Personality of the Year,” perhaps because there aren’t enough innovators in poker anymore.

[Speaking of,] there was a lot that came later regarding Henry Orenstein having taken credit for having invented the hole card camera...

SSS: The “lipstick camera.”

JM: Yes, the lipstick camera and how Orenstein had come up with the idea of showing hole cards. And nothing could be further from the truth. It upsets me, obviously, to see Rob denied this because I was such good friends with him.

Henry Orenstein was a poker player, of course. I used to play with him in Atlantic City. He was also an inventor and a toymaker -- he came up with the Transformers, I think -- and had many patents. And to get a patent on an idea, all you have to do, basically, is write three sentences on an A4 and get it through the committee. I think you can find the patent [for the hole card camera] online, and if you look at it, you’ll see it’s not even an idea. It basically just says “What if you could see the players cards when they are playing poker?” or something like that. And that’s it.

And so Rob knew nothing about Henry Orenstein when he came up with the idea for the under-the-table cameras for poker. But later on, when there was talk of putting Late Night Poker or something like that on in the U.S., all of a sudden Henry Orenstein found his patent and said “I own this.” And later when Steve Lipscomb got the idea for the WPT, even though it was expressed a bit differently, the idea was completely based on Late Night Poker.

SSS: The show found an audience right away. In For Richer, For Poorer, Vicky Coren refers to its debut and how “more than half a million people [were] tuning into this cultish new programme, broadcast after midnight on Channel 4.”

JM: It was an amazing time. I remember when the Devilfish won the first series of Late Night Poker, there was no question that he was the greatest winner of all. Nothing could have been better for poker or for televised poker than having the Devilfish win -- because of his personality and the fact that he really was a good player.

Right after he won they threw a big party in the hotel at Cardiff, and everybody was there. Devilfish bought a couple of cases of champagne for everybody, and basically, besides the Devilfish, of the 40-something people who had played in this, at least 39 of us were dead broke (laughs)! We’d all gone broke in this tournament! Guys like all the Hendon Mob and myself and Mad Marty [Wilson]... we had gone completely skint.

Yet there was such a fantastic feeling that night in the bar about what we had done. There was a real idea that something special had happened there. It was a great experience. I mean, we hadn’t seen the show and had no idea what kind of response it would get, but we just kind of felt that people were going to see what we loved about poker so much -- which is what ended up happening, really. It was a slow-burner, really, but it ended up growing, and there are so many people who got into poker through Late Night Poker. And I really give all the credit to Rob not only having the idea but being able to execute it.

I think a lot of poker television, especially in America, has gone backwards in the sense that they’ve forgotten what makes the game interesting. It’s not that there is just too much poker TV and people have gotten bored with the game. It’s that they are not creating formats and they are not filming them in a way that conveys the natural drama of the story.

SSS: I think about this issue in tourney reporting a lot, actually -- the challenge to find the “story” of the event. There’s kind of what might be called a “functional” approach to tourney reporting -- and this happens in TV shows, too -- where it is really just about delivering data with very little attention being given to the importance of creating characters or plot or something for the reader or viewer to be able to identify with on some level.

JM: Yes, and in many cases you’re facing a much tougher task now than people used to, because there is no story! I mean, there is a story -- someone is going to win a million dollars -- but that story is completely uninteresting. That happens now 365 times a year in poker. So that’s not the story. Is the story something about trying to find out who the best poker player is? No... for a lot of reasons people aren’t convinced that’s the story, either. Is the game exciting? Well, a lot of people aren’t even sure that’s the story. The fact is, there’s a lot of trouble with the narrative right now in the poker world.

SSS: Like you say, the editing and choice of shots and atmosphere are all important, but as a commentator you had a hand in the shaping of the story, too. Tell me, when you did the commentary for the first series, where did the idea come from to use a pseudonym -- to take your character’s name [from Shut Up and Deal] and be “Mickey Dane”?

JM: Well, we got in there and were doing the commentary and they said it was going to be awkward if you’re commentating on yourself, so why don’t we just pretend it’s somebody else?

SSS: I guess you weren’t talking too much at the table, then, so there wasn’t a situation where viewers were going to say “Hey, that guy sounds like that guy?”

JM: Right, it just worked out. It never really came up, because I didn’t last that long anyway (laughs). There was so much care taken with Late Night Poker. Nowadays a lot of commentating will be done live, but this was all done in post-production, and you could really be a perfectionist back then.

And there was a real camaraderie among those guys, too. No one was really making money at poker back then. Everybody was trying to survive as well as they could, but it still two or three years before people really started to think they could do well at poker. You know, once online poker started and sponsorships came and so forth. It was a special time.

* * * * *

Thanks again to Jesse for this one! Check out as well his memories of Dave “Devilfish” Ulliott over at PokerNews.

Jesse May Interview, April 2011 (Part 1 of 2)

The passing of Dave “Devilfish” Ulliott earlier this week brought to mind his significant role on the first series of Late Night Poker. That in turn reminded me of a lengthy interview I was able to do a while back with Jesse May, another person who was there at the start of the groundbreaking poker TV show in the late 1990s.

This was another of those Betfair Poker interviews that are no longer available online, and I realized now might be as good a time as any for me to repost the interview over here. Took me a while to find the sucker, actually, but thankfully I did.

I’ll repost it here in two parts, just as it originally appeared on Betfair Poker in early April 2011 -- right before Black Friday, actually, which is kind of interesting to consider when reading some of the discussion of the state of poker at that time. The first part primarily focuses on May’s 1998 novel, Shut Up and Deal, while the second (which I’ll post tomorrow) delves into the Late Night Poker story.

Thanks again, Jesse, for the interview!

* * * * * “The Betfair Poker Interview: Jesse May, Part 1”
[Originally published at Betfair Poker, 1 April 2011]

When it comes to poker-themed novels, Jesse May’s Shut Up and Deal (1998) stands out as an especially accomplished entry, a book that brings alive the unique and fascinating world of the cash-game grinder of the mid-1990s.

May’s narrator, a young poker pro named Mickey, relates in episodic fashion the story of his ongoing struggles both at the tables and elsewhere, exploring in detail the many challenges faced by himself and others as they all separately strive to “stay in action.” Full of memorable characters and set pieces, I highly recommend May’s novel as both an entertaining read and an insightful exploration of poker’s many highs and lows.

In addition to his poker writing, May is well known for his contributions as a commentator on numerous poker shows, a role that has earned him the nickname “the Voice of Poker.” For May that career began shortly after the publication of his novel with the first season of Late Night Poker (in 1999), a show that would come to have great influence on televised poker a few years later with the launching of the World Poker Tour and expansion of coverage of the World Series of Poker on ESPN.

I recently had the opportunity to talk with May about both Shut Up and Deal and the early years of Late Night Poker. This week I’ll share the first part of our conversation in which we focused on May’s novel, and next week will present the story of May’s involvement with Late Night Poker.

Short-Stacked Shamus: I know Shut Up and Deal is based somewhat on your own experiences playing poker in the late ’80s-early ’90s. To what extent is Mickey’s story comparable to your own?

Jesse May: First of all, the story is true in the sense that I think truth is stranger than fiction. When I was writing it, I wasn’t worried about it being true, but I think that when it comes to a lot of gambling stories, you find that you could never make this stuff up. That’s been the case, I think, for every moment I’ve been in the gambling world.

Like Mickey, I did start playing when I was in high school. With a couple of other guys we all got obsessed with poker at the same time, then went out to Las Vegas -- four of us, all underage, like 17 or 18 -- and there discovered Texas hold’em (limit). Soon after that it became kind of a more serious thing for me. I used to go to Las Vegas quite a bit back before I turned 21, spending summers there trying to play poker. I dropped out of college twice, and after I turned 21 I ended up in Vegas and really tried to make a go of it.

Obviously it was during that poker explosion, and so as far as the places in the book go, they did kind of coincide with where I was. I spent a lot of time in Las Vegas. I was in Foxwoods within a month after they opened up [in 1992] and stayed there the better part of a year. I was in Atlantic City the very day they opened poker [in 1993], and stayed there about a year-and-a-half. Those were really interesting times as far as poker goes, because it was so new. There was no internet, obviously, back then, and all the action was there. I think the world had never seen anything like those two major openings -- Atlantic City and Foxwoods.

SSS: In a way the novel kind of chronicles this interesting and important moment for poker. For a lot of people who only came into poker post-Moneymaker, they might not realize how significant that earlier “explosion” really was for poker.

JM: That’s true. Also, it was interesting... at the time there were some poker texts, but most people really didn’t have access to them. So it was a combination of there being so few people who played poker -- not even well but just marginally -- and there being so much money around.

It was incredible, because it required such a different skill set to become a poker player then -- a professional -- than it does today. The skill sets then were really about money management and surviving in that hustling type of world rather than sitting around talking about hands. People didn’t sit around and talk strategy then. You talked about who was cheating and who owed you money and that kind of stuff (laughs). And I loved that world, and so for me it was a great time.

SSS: It’s funny, the world your describing was really much more similar to what came before -- even stretching back to the 19th century -- than what the poker world has become over the decade.

JM: It’s true. I look at a guy like Amarillo Slim [Preston]. You know -- throw out all the personal controversies that he’s had -- people have been very critical of his game, saying that he’s essentially not a poker player. And to some extent that’s true, but the fact is that in his time, and even when I would play with him a little bit back in Foxwoods, he was representative of a guy who was a great professional as far as poker went. Because he knew everything else. He knew how to get a game together, how to get an edge... he knew all that stuff. And I always had a lot of respect for him.

It was people like that -- like the Bart Stone character [in Shut Up and Deal] -- who really were able to thrive back then, and who wouldn’t be thriving now. And it really was, as you’re saying, the tail end of that era where that sort of “road gambler” was able to succeed.

SSS: So what led to your decision to write the novel?

JM: The book itself was written as a catharsis, really. Back when I was playing, you got such a strong response from people when they found out you were playing poker. You kind of continually felt yourself defending your lifestyle to others and to yourself and trying to make order of it.

I used to take a lot of breaks when I played poker, and this particular time when I had the first crack at writing the novel, I had been playing in Atlantic City and took off nine months to travel in Asia. It was during that period I wrote the bones of the novel, writing every day.

SSS: So the places and chronology of the novel roughly correspond to your own experiences. The characters -- Bart Stone, John Smiley, Uptown Raoul -- I assume they, too, are somewhat based on people you knew and with whom you played?

JM: Yes. Actually there were some liability issues with the publisher that made it very important for me to go through and change certain things -- ethnicities, physical qualities, names, things like that. But a lot of times [with a given character] there was some person I had in mind, and sometimes characters were compilations of different people.

The Bart Stone character, for example, was probably as close to real as you could get [i.e., the person on whom he was based]. He was such a strong personality, you couldn’t exaggerate him. His life was so amazing... he really was one of the true road gamblers. He was a guy who had a church-going wife and completely lived this sort of “picket fence” existence for three weeks out of every month, then for one week he’d get into his car to some town -- just start driving -- and find a town, find a game, and find a way to get the money.

He had this saying. He said he’d go into a town and first he’d try and beat people on the square. If that didn’t work, he’d try and cheat them. And if that didn’t work, he’d just pull out a gun and rob the motherf*ckers. That was his philosophy of life!

SSS: You actually start the novel with Bart Stone -- with a sketch of his character and telling the story of him cheating others. It’s interesting, because I think by starting the book that way you kind of indirectly introduce Mickey as a contrasting figure -- a “good” guy, that is, who looks at Bart and expresses a kind of awe because he could never live that way. But then he weirdly admires Bart, too. And Mickey, as we come to find out, isn’t without flaws himself.

JM: I guess it’s kind of flattering to hear you say that. You know, I recently just read Vicky Coren’s book. I don’t know if you’ve read that.

SSS: Oh, yes -- For Richer, For Poorer. It’s terrific.

JM: Yes, I quite like it, too. And I think the reason I like it so much is that unlike a lot of these “tell-all” poker books or whatever they are, Vicky never tries to make herself into sort of an elite. She throws herself in with the poker players -- they are her peers, and she’s not trying to pretend that she’s not as bad or as good or as sick or as addicted or anything as any of them. And I always thought that was kind of important in the poker world as far as keeping your own order together was concerned -- that if you do think you’re different or better than everyone else, at least recognize that you’re a hypocrite (laughs)!

One of the things about poker, especially back then, is that you are faced with so many moral choices. I think that’s what excited me about the story more than anything else. Just because of poker’s nature, the decisions that you have to make every day... you are constantly testing out your own morality. And other people’s, too. You find out a lot about what lengths they’ll go to, what depths they’ll sink to, really who they are as a person. Poker reveals so much about people’s personalities because the ethical dilemmas -- the gray areas -- they come so fast and furious.

SSS: There are several themes present in the novel. One seems to be the way people tend to view poker either realistically or they romanticize it -- that there’s a “reality” of poker that some get, and there’s a “romance” about the game that others prefer to see.

JM: I’ll buy that.

SSS: A related theme in the book -- and this is interesting because you’ve already used this phrase a couple of times with regard to the writing of the novel -- is this idea of “making order” of your life. Mickey is constantly trying to do that himself in the book, and struggling, at times, between being “realistic” and being “romantic” about his life as a full-time poker player.

JM: I think that for people who play poker professionally today, that “order” is so much more readily available. And it’s an order that is very similar for all of them. They’ve identified profitable ways to play, mistakes their opponents make, and all of the numbers involved that they can see with the tracking software and things like that -- the order is there. I think it was much harder before, but believe me, they still have a lot of chaos in their lives, because the nature of poker and gambling is obviously based on the streaks of winning and losing. That stuff throws off your sense of balance.

Then there’s the “moral” order of setting up rules for yourself, which obviously is a whole other thing. The order of believing that what you’re doing is the right thing to be doing. To me that’s always been the major theme of gambling -- not just poker -- that you’re always making up new rules for yourself. Maybe it’s like that in life, too, you know, something works for a while and then something throws it off and you have to go back to the drawing board. But it’s very important for people to have a sense of order, and I agree that’s something that Mickey struggles with in the book. As everybody in the poker world does.

I think everyone takes this little, sort of vicarious pleasure in seeing someone who’s completely on top of the poker world run bad. You know, when somebody like Brian Townsend is writing that he’s questioning everything and going back to the drawing board. You recognize that the poker world can be as chaotic for them as it is for the rest of us.

SSS: I think you’re right about it being a different situation today than for players in the ’90s, not just in terms of being able to track results and see “order” that way, but when it comes to the moral questions, too. Poker still isn’t completely accepted today, but -- to go back to what you were saying earlier -- poker pros aren’t necessarily having to defend what they do as much today as before.

Okay, one last question about the novel. What writers -- poker and otherwise -- would you list as ones you admire and might consider as having influenced you when writing Shut Up and Deal?

JM: As far as poker writers are concerned, I love Al Alvarez (The Biggest Game in Town), of course. And Jon Bradshaw, I love the way he profiles people in Fast Company. Also, Damon Runyon, to me, is one of the great writers of all time when it comes to creating the characters of gambling. I feel like he is so underappreciated, although now that I think about it I probably never read any Runyon before I wrote the book. And Mario Puzo’s Fools Die...

SSS: You allude to that one in Shut Up and Deal.

JM: Oh, that’s right. You know Puzo was a big gambler. To me, Fools Die was the greatest book on Vegas that had ever been written. There are a couple of scenes in there in which he describes Vegas that I think heavily influenced me.

For other [non-gambling] stories, I used to read Somerset Maugham quite a bit. I love storytellers who are happy to tell the details they want to tell, you know? Writers like Hemingway or Djuna Barnes... who show that it doesn’t have to be a [linear] sort of narrative where you say “he said” and then “she said” but that you can just relate what strikes you about people. I always felt like that at the poker table, but essentially there you are just watching people, which I love to do.

Come back tomorrow for Part 2, covering the early years of Late Night Poker.

Dave “Devilfish” Ulliott (1954-2015)

Sad news this week regarding the passing of Dave “Devilfish” Ulliott who succumbed to cancer just a couple of days after his 61st birthday.

Ulliott occupied a meaningful place in poker lore for many players, especially those who came into the game just before and during the “boom” of the mid-2000s and most especially for players in the U.K. who watched him star in (and win) the first series of Late Night Poker back in 1999.

As detailed in Des Wilson’s Swimming with the Devil Fish (2007) and Ulliott's autobiography, humbly titled Devilfish: The Life and Times of a Poker Legend (2010), Ulliott had a colorful life including tales of safe-cracking, robberies, fist fights, and prison time as a younger man, and lots of gambling and poker dominating his story thereafter.

He’d win a World Series of Poker bracelet (in 1997) and come close several more times. He also had success on the World Poker Tour (winning an event during Season 1), helping make him a familiar character to American poker TV viewers as well.

I can’t say I had a great deal of interaction with Ulliott, although I did cover him in many events at the WSOP. The most vivid memory of came in 2011 when at the $10,000 NLHE Six-Max event Ulliott pulled out a harmonica during the early levels of Day 1 and played it for a few minutes before tournament staff made him stop.

Soon after he’d pulled a guitar from a case and began playing a blues riff, getting part of the way into the first verse before being stopped again. “Was someone complaining?” deadpanned Ulliott, to which the TD responded “You just can’t have a guitar at the table.” (Here’s a short report of that moment.)

I remember after that him picking the guitar back up during breaks that afternoon to serenade passersby. Such center-of-attention antics were the norm for Ulliott at the tables, inspiring a lot of positive memories on the forums and over Twitter this week and a few not-so-nice ones, too.

Of course, Ulliott’s willful seeking of the spotlight was one of a few crucial elements of that first series of Late Night Poker -- along with the under-the-table hole card cams, Rob Gardner’s production, the commentary of Jesse May and Nic Szeremeta, and others’ contributions -- ensuring himself a significant role in chapters about latter-day poker’s history.

Visit The Telegraph for a more substantial obituary covering the highs and lows of Ulliott’s colorful life and career.

Queen Victoria!

Was simply a terrific day here on the farm yesterday where Vera and I hosted family for an Easter meal and a very relaxing time amid perfect spring weather.

Would eventually turn on NBA playoff basketball to watch my Bobcats play their first playoff game in several years, hanging tough for two-and-a-half quarters before fading versus the Miami Heat. Charlotte’s a huge underdog, obviously, even to take a game off the defending champs. And speaking of pulling for underdogs, like a lot of you I followed closely the delayed online stream of the final table at EPT Sanremo, enjoying watching Victoria Coren Mitchell’s come-from-behind win to grab the title (photo by Danny Maxwell for PokerNews).

Coren Mitchell had begun the penultimate day of play 16th of 16 in chips on Saturday, then managed to squeak into yesterday’s final table still on the short side and in fact eighth of the remaining eight to start play. Thus did it seem reasonable to think she probably wouldn’t be getting too much further. Even she consistently downplayed her prospects pretty much the whole way this weekend, demonstrating what Rick Dacey on the PokerStars blog styled “the power of positive pessimism.”

She didn’t really begin to build a stack, either, until after there had been a few eliminations, then took the lead with three left after a hand in which both she and start-of-day chip leader Jordan Westmorland flopped trip tens, but she had him outkicked.

That hand saw Coren Mitchell having to call a Westmorland river shove after having led out, a call that had to be made but was nonetheless still difficult. And while she’d been dealt some good cards in that hand as well as in the final one in which she flopped two pair with Q-J to crack runner-up Giacomo Fundaro’s pocket aces, she also made some good decisions and savvy plays throughout the final table.

Today on Learn.PokerNews Nate Meyvis talks about one small hand from early on that showed Coren Mitchell playing smartly postflop. There were other good hands for her, too -- including an inspired four-bet from the hijack seat at seven-handed when she was holding after Fundaro had defended his small blind with a reraise (and happened only to have had ).

So because of the chip situation for much of the last couple of days, her winning was unexpected. Also the fact that the EPT had gone 97 tournaments and nearly 10 full seasons without having a two-time Main Event winner (!) made the prospect of it actually happening this weekend with Coren Mitchell seem all the more unlikely to occur.

It had become a running gag of sorts with the PokerStars bloggers who have been more or less obligated to trot out each EPT over the last several years the fact that no one had won the sucker twice. As every Main Event wound down to the last couple of days, if there were a former champ around in the field notice had to be given regarding the “streak” and the prospects for it finally ending.

I’ve written here before on several occasions about Coren Mitchell. She’s been a prominent presence on the poker scene for more than a decade now.

She was a participant during Season Two of Late Night Poker back in 2000, the popular U.K. show about which we recently ran a three-part history by one of the show’s creators, Nick Szeremeta, over on Learn.PokerNews. She then took a turn as a commentator on the show with Jesse May during the show’s third season.

It was at EPT London during Season 3 that she won her first Main Event title back in 2006, becoming the first woman to win an EPT. She’d join Team PokerStars soon after, then in early 2010 her excellent “poker memoir” appeared, For Richer, For Poorer: A Love Affair With Poker, a book I continue to recommend to anyone looking for interesting (and sometimes laugh-out-loud-funny) nonfiction poker writing.

I reviewed For Richer, For Poorer for Betfair Poker when it first appeared (here, too), then interviewed the author as well. Among my questions for her was one about the book’s title, an obvious allusion to marriage and the wedding vows.

“Well, poker is not a job for me (I enjoy it too much) and it’s not a hobby (I devote too much time to it),” she answered. “It's a way of life; I have embraced a life. In that sense, it’s like a marriage -- or like a marriage should be. For better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, poker and I are together for the long haul. I might kick against it sometimes, it might annoy me, I might hate it, but deep down I will love it for ever and I never plan to say goodbye. If I ever get married, I hope I’ll feel the same way about my unlucky groom.”

Of course, she would get married in November 2012 to the actor and comedian David Mitchell who is probably best known for his role on the British show Peep Show where he stars with his comedy partner Robert Webb (one of several hilarious productions with which Mitchell has been involved). Meanwhile Coren Mitchell has an especially large following of non-poker people in the U.K. thanks to her weekly columns in The Observer and The Guardian and her co-hosting of the popular quiz show Only Connect.

The mainstream press across the pond have already been trumpeting Coren Mitchell’s win loudly, encouraging some to whisper about another “boom” of sorts for British poker perhaps being a consequence of her win yesterday. And as often happens when women win big tourneys -- no longer as great a rarity as back in 2006, although still noteworthy especially given the disproportionate number of women who play big buy-in events versus men -- that, too, won’t hurt going forward when it comes to promoting the game and getting women interested in poker.

Of course, as even just that quote above suggests (I think), Coren Mitchell is a tremendous ambassador for poker, not just because of her mainstream connections and celebrity but also because she’s great at explaining why the game is both fun and worthwhile, especially to newcomers. “Queen Victoria!” tweeted a few following her win yesterday, a title she’s earned not just for having beaten the other 97 EPT Main Event champs to two-time-champ status but for her already-established position as an influential promoter of the game.

Lots of reasons, then, why her win yesterday should rightly be considered “good for poker” (in the general sense). Inspiring, too, for those of us who like to write about poker, and who like her have a great enough love for poker and the endless stories and characters it can produce that it has become more than just a hobby but a “a way of life.”

There are a lot of us who thanks to that love of the game are in poker “for the long haul.” It’s fun, then, to see someone else who is as dedicated to our favorite game and who does well describing what’s so good about it do well.

Before the Boom: Remembering Late Night Poker

During my travels over the last couple of weeks there have been some interesting items posted over on Learn.PokerNews. I’d been meaning to point out a few of them here, and now that I’m back I finally have some time to highlight one recent series of articles in particular.

We’re now more than a decade on from the start of the televised poker “boom” that was ignited by the debut of the World Poker Tour in late March 2003 and then fueled even more dramatically by ESPN’s showing of the World Series of Poker Main Event a few months after that.

Both of those shows featured so-called “hole card cameras,” of course, which distinguished them from earlier WSOP broadcasts. When coupled with commentary and other bits of post-production, the shows proved immensely successful, with the rise of online poker (and, importantly, the sponsorship of sites) helping to create a genuine cultural phenomenon for the next few years.

Before all that, though, was Late Night Poker, the U.K. poker show that debuted in 1999 and created a kind of mini-boom mostly confined to the other side of the Atlantic. The influence of Late Night Poker is significant in many ways, including its use of under-the-table cameras to show hole cards. Many mistakenly think the idea originated with the WPT later, but it was LNP that pioneered the technique.

About three years ago I had the chance to talk at length with Jesse May about the creation of the show for a two-part interview over on Betfair Poker, and he provided a lot of interesting back story for how the show came about and was received.

Anyhow, getting back to Learn.PokerNews... one of the creators of the show, Nic Szeremeta, recently shared a lengthy, three-part history of the making of Late Night Poker with Learn that begins here. The history had been published before in Poker Europa magazine and Szeremeta kindly offered it to be reproduced over at Learn. He then did an interview with Michelle Orpe in which he adds a few other thoughts about the show and his life in poker.

Coincidentally, Howard Swains found reason to write about Late Night Poker over on the PokerStars blog just a little over a week ago (right before we ran Szeremeta’s series) thanks to the fact that Jin Cai Lin, one of those playing in Vienna, had been a regular on the original show. Read what Howard had to say both about the show and Lin by clicking here.

Meanwhile, back over on Learn.PokerNews there have been other, cool strategy entries of late and features, too, by a variety of contributors, with new content going up each day, so get clicking.

With all of these trips and my travel reports, today marks 19 straight days of scribblin’ over here. Thanks as always for stopping by, and enjoy the weekend. I know I will!