Monte Carlo Madness

It’s the bank holiday weekend, there’s not a cloud in the sky, I’m sipping a €12 glass of beer which, unsurprisingly, is evaporating quicker than I’m drinking it. I’m rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous and admiring their supercars which they’d happily send in for repair should a headlight have an unavoidable collision with a moth, and then, upon consideration, they would probably instruct the dealership to buy a replacement car. This is not an idealist’s drug inspired hallucination, this is Monte Carlo.

But, in truth I just want to go home to my world, the real world. The world where it rains for most of the day, our run-around costs a month’s wages to get through its fifteenth MOT, and there is a Weatherspoons situated close to every dole office.

Monte Carlo is a private members club, and when I spot the “full-up” sign due to its exclusive nature I declare I’m not interested in joining anyway. There’s no point in wanting what you cannot have.

Today, inside the vast tournament room in the Monte Carlo Bay Hotel sporting complex, two potential candidates and new members of the poker millionaire’s club will be initiated.

In truth, phase 1, the poker millionaire’s club, should not be that hard a club to join as members can be counted by their hundreds globally. The trouble is, more and more people are chasing entry — this time, 935 people, to be precise.

At this juncture just eight players remain in the €10,000 buy-in PokerStars.com European Poker Tour Grand Final. This is the hallowed final table which features a Dutchman, a Russian, a Brit, a Hungarian, a Norwegian, a Frenchman, two Germans, and an American.

The average age of the finalists is far higher than expected. Three of the contestants, in poker circles anyway, are decidedly geriatric. Namely Russia’s Mikhail Tulchinskiy who is 42, France’s Eric Qu, 47, and Germany’s Alem Shah, 51.

Play starts off tight but soon those in their twenties show wild aggression and play with an apparent disregard for the money at stake. This style of play saw Norway’s Dag Martin Mikkelsen, the youngest gladiator at the table, amass an incredible chip advantage.

He possessed half of the chips in play at one point, only to turn kamikaze and perform one of the biggest blow-ups in recent poker history, ultimately eliminating himself in fourth position for a €600,000 pay-day.

This meltdown was matched by the amazing turn-around of Pieter de Korver. The 26-year-old from Holland was down to just two big blinds at one point, yet found himself heads-up upon the elimination of Mikhail Tulchinskiy.

Korver’s opponent was another 26-year-old, American Matthew Woodward, one of 157 people to have qualified for the tournament online at the sponsor’s website, and despite enjoying his deepest run in a tournament either live or online, he had the better credentials of the final two.

After nine hours at the final table, where the heads-up advantage initially went to the American and then to Dutchman de Korver, the game was concluded. Pieter de Korver had muscled his way into a dominant chip lead with a host of reraises, and finished off his man when moving all-in with middle pair only to be called by Woodward with a lesser hand — middle pair, and a flush draw but with a poor kicker — which failed to improve.

Job done, game over. Two more poker millionaires have been made during the course of the five-day tournament, the richest in European history.

The winner, De Korver, is the second Dutchman to win the EPT Grand Final, following in the footsteps of season 1 champion Rob Hollink. He says he now plans to invest some of his €2.3 million in property. It should buy him a reasonably sized lock-up if he is looking at Monaco!

Of course there are four kinds of rich. The rich, the very rich, the ridiculously rich, and the stupidly rich. In category four, I am talking the type of debauchery and depravity highlighted by a group of characters who flew into Monte Carlo to set up their own game during the week on a £40 million yacht.

To get on board your bank account needed more digits than the square route of pi. That or you needed to be a working girl. Of course, I mean a poker dealer or someone that prepares the finest epicure food and cleans ash trays amongst her other duties for which they get well paid.

With enough money on the poker table to cover the national debt of a small South American country, what else would you expect? I’ll not name the line-up here or take the story any further. Not for legal reasons but for fear of my life!

So returning to official matters, the other big winner during the week was Vanessa Rousso, who looks a million dollars and has the bankroll to match. That roll has swollen by a further €720,000 following her victory over Randy Dorfman and Tony G in the €25,000 buy-in High Roller event which attracted 79 players and generated a €1,975 prize pool.

Elsewhere, another record was set by Bertrand “ElkY” Grospellier. The Frenchman, distinctive with his bleached hair and dark glasses, is already the EPT’s most successful player, but here the lunatic tackled 60 single table tournaments online simultaneously, and amazingly, at the end of the demonstration session, showed a profit.

My poker playing was somewhat less hectic and for smaller stakes. A lot of time was spent with Nelly, the famous rapper, in cash games in my hotel, the Fairmont, which overlooks the hairpin for the Grand Prix anoraks out there.

We almost had something in common too. Nelly was born and raised in Missouri, and I had spent sometime in the neighbouring state, Kansas. Therein he was happy to tell me about “de brovers in his hood”, while I told him about the dungaree wearing six-fingered banjo players in Kansas town in which I had briefly lived.

Sadly my partner in crime, Francis McCormack (European Deepstack Champion), with whom I shared a bankroll, was annihilated by Nelly who called a two grand bet needing a miracle 6 to arrive on the river (the final card — a 10/1 shot). From that day hence we have dispensed with the phrase “bad beat” instead replacing it with “being Nelly’d”.

So that was the dream that was the Monte Carlo EPT. By the time we woke from it we were around €8 kilos down (that’s about £7,000 grand in the imperial system). And to think we fared much better than the vast majority of players there.

Of course we are now dreaming of Las Vegas and the World Series of Poker. Hopefully, one day we will not wake from our dream — that will be the day we have landed one of these colossal tournaments. From that point on, we will be living the dream.