Hugo's Blogspotting: 17 January

Brandi is Back!

The forums have been lit up this week with the return of some juicy Brandi Hawbaker gossip. About time too. In a 900 plus thread on TwoplusTwo we hear from pimprexel who tells a rather sad story about how he was in love with Brandi and felt that he could save her from what is now looking like her inevitable Las Vegas stripper’s fate.

The long and short of it is that after being engaged (!) the relationship has gone south and, according to pimprexel, Brandi has stolen $40k’s worth of stuff from his apartment and run off to the Commerce Casino in L.A. All pretty standard stuff and I apologise for not having any decent quotes to pull from this huge thread, but after a while it gets to be too much trying to follow all the different posters amidst the deluge of wisecracks and “crazy psycho gold digger bitch, but I’d still hit it” type comments.

Anyway, the interesting part of the story is the fact that pimprexel mentions that last summer Brandi had an affair with a big name in poker, but was upset that nobody was blogging/putting up forum posts about it. David Sklansky also chimes in (don’t forget he befriended Brandi in the summer too) and tells his readership (don’t forget that 2plus2 is basically his site) that he advised Brandi to use her feminine charms on rich poker players to get them to put her into tournaments and cash games!

Wow, excellent mentoring from the author of the seminal Theory of Poker. Of course, he had a point and for girls like Brandi these sorts of transactions are not only things they learn early in life, but often the only way they go about surviving, so I’m guessing that Sklansky need not have bothered with this brilliant bit of advice.

I’ve gone off on a tangent already, but for me the best part of the story is the fact that Brandi was upset that nobody made public the fact that she was schtupping a famous poker player. For an attention-whore to be deprived of the oxygen of publicity must be far worse than any humiliation they face from the embarrassing deeds that they are infamous for.

It turns out the big name was Gus Hansen so I guess it was a mutually useful relationship (rumours have it that Gus is a notorious skirt-chaser). But no! And here one must give props to the Great Dane. Apparently Brandi didn’t get one red cent off him. Wow. Now Gus had been around gambling a long time and can probably spot a hustler from 100 miles away, but to get away with sleeping with poker’s ultimate femme fatale and not cough up any dough is impressive. Jamie Gold certainly didn’t get away with that (word has it that Gold put Brandi into one of the earlier WSOP events after their brief tryst).

Aussie Millions Cash Game

Meanwhile it seems like all the rest of the poker world is down under for the Aussie Millions. Jay Greenspan blogs about the big televised cash game.

“Patrik and Eli immediately started talking about a straddle. They were goading the other players to commit to a permanent $1,600 straddle. But not everyone was interested. “Oh,” said Antonius, “you guys want this to be a boring game. That’s not right.”

All Aboard the Sicko Express

I guess once you’ve played in a $500k buy-in for High Stakes Poker anything else becomes kind of hum-drum. A good example of how we become desensitized to money as we move up the limits when we play poker can be found on Stevesbets’ blog. He finds himself near the train station in Philadelphia and notices the service for Atlantic City is about to depart. This train service runs on the hour and costs $6. Stevesbets and his pals would catch it back in the day to go and play $2/4 limit poker at the Taj Mahal.

“I remember it always used to be very exciting to go, but then something about getting no sleep, usually coming home broke (when our whole bankroll for the trip was $100) and sharing a 5 am train ride with an eclectic mix of mostly miserable degenerates was really depressing. The funniest part of the whole thing is, even though we remember clearly that coming home stunk, and that now we wouldnt repeat that sort of trip now even for a very nice hourly wage, we have very fond memories of doing the exact thing for no payment of any sort.”

How true – I remember going to Wimbledon dogs and getting the free coach ride back to Shepherds Bush having done all my money (probably around £50, maybe less), but thinking I had had the most fantastic night. Equally I remember driving all the way to Luton just to play in a £10 rebuy stud tournament. I think you would have to pay me about three grand to do that now.

Mummy I Want to Play!

Let’s get back to the Aussie Millions and check out the Tao of Poker. Pauly is working for Pokernews there and has plenty to blog about. In the entry dated January 14 he writes about the $100k event. Amongst the usual suspects for this big buy-in tournament (Ivey, Tony G, Howard Lederer etc) there was a smattering of young online hotshots (ActionJeff, Durrr and Michael “Timex” McDonald).

One young gun who didn’t play was Josh JJProdigy Field. You may know that JJProdigy has been somewhat ostracised from the live poker scene due to his unapologetic stance on his online cheating. Obviously it’s difficult to multi-account when playing live so I don’t think anyone would’ve minded if Josh had been able to play.

“When I asked him how come he didn't play in the 100K he said that he wanted to. However, he didn't have enough cash on hand to play. He called up his parents and asked them to wire him some money. When they found out he wanted $100K to play in a single tournament, they denied his request.”

Oh Mum, you're soooo embarrassing sometimes. What’s frightening is that he clearly could afford to play in this tournament which makes you realize that he must have won a staggering amount of money through unscrupulous means.

If I Win This Pot...

Lucky Jim has been getting friendly with his landlord and listening to a few stories and a bad beat of the old-fashioned kind:

“He used to play in big dealer's choice poker games out there, he said, and if it'd been him with three queens against three jacks rather than the other way round he'd have won a nightclub and his life would have turned out differently.”

Rings a bell doesn’t it? How many times have you heard someone who has bust out of a tournament say, “If I win that pot I have 5 times average chips and I’m bound to make the final” and so forth. I’m reminded of several poker players when Jim goes onto describe his landlord some more:

“I think he's too old and too pleased with himself to be able to listen to anything anybody else says”

Other than that how’s it going on the poker front Jim?

“…several times recently I've been broke to the point of looking hungrily through the cupboards for food left by the last guy who lived here”

Who Cares?

As I’m sure you all know by now Bertrand “ElkY” Grospellier won the EPT-PCA event in the Bahamas. As is de-rigueur these days PokerStars held a press conference afterwards. So is a press conference with a poker player as bad as it sounds? Snoopy was there and gives us the lowdown in his blog:

“After ElkY won the PCA the other day, PokerStars media coordinator Mad Harper marched into the pressroom and asked if anyone wanted to come to the press conference to interview the Frenchman. An awkward silence and the passing of tumbleweed later, and Mad morphed her request into a plea, mainly focused on my good self who was subsequently dragged out of the pressroom with my claws scratching away at the frame of the door.”

The fact is, once the tournament is over it’s not really interesting anymore. While it’s going on and the “story” is being played out is when we all want to know what’s happening. Think about how many times you check for updates in an ongoing tournament. Still, I guess once Snoopy was at ElkY’s press conference everything went fine…

“When the press were invited to ask questions, there was, again, another stunned silence, everyone too tired from the week’s blogging to actually care.”

Oh well I guess ElkY has two million reasons not to care about the fact that nobody was particularly interested in his win.

Hugo 'Chimney Sweep' Martin

Check out Poker Verdict's Blog Directory here