FULL TILT POKER BLOG

#237 – London Journal #4 – Dispatch from Davidoff

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[This was written yesterday afternoon, September 7. Although it recites at the end that I rushed off to the tournament, I merely THOUGHT that was what I was doing. A future entry will describe my midadventure with Ted Forrest, in addition to overdue entries on my experience in the HORSE, my tour of London with Tony Holden, and the action I keep TRYING to catch up on in the tournament.]

It’s 3:40 PM and I have set up provisional WSOP-E headquarters for The Full Tilt Poker Blog at Davidoff on Jermyn Street. Jermyn has historically been a man’s avenue. If you need a suit or a short or a belt or a hat (especially if it is bespoke – made entirely to your specifications), you go to Jermyn Street.

Davidoff is a premiere seller of cigars, named for its late founder, the legendary Zino Davidoff. The brand name means so much more now, but forget that. It’s not 2007 in the calendar of my mind, but 1958, the year of my birth. Or 1955, the year Winston Churchill, as a private citizen (though still, I think, a Member of Parliament) traveled to Cuba to inspect cigars for purchase under the watchful eye of another legendary cigar merchant, Chicagoan Jack Schwartz.

There is a picture in the back of this store of Schwartz showing a delighted Churchill a box of Montecristo out of a giant cigar chest. This picture, a moment frozen in time from more than half a century ago, fascinates me for several reasons. First, it is Churchill and Schwartz, not Churchill and Zino Davidoff. Second, the picture, which has to my knowledge only one time appeared in a magazine, has been on the wall of my study in my last three residences.

Schwartz’s heirs sold the Chicago store in the late Eighties to Joseph Howe, who became a great friend of mine when I lived in Chicago and frequented his store, Jack Schwartz Importers. The original picture, giant, hung in the store. As a gift, and I considered it a tremendous gift, Joe Howe loaned me the photograph, from which I had a negative produced. I made one photographic image of the same size and returned the original and the negative to Joe.

Cigars were a consuming passion of mine for about a decade. In fact, I may not have become a writer without them. There is a picture of me in an issue of CIGAR AFICIONADO inside a walk-in humidor, surrounded by a selection of Havana cigars that could rival the humor here at Davidoff London. That humidor was a room I built off my study in Kildeer, Illinois.

I gave up cigars as a hobby in 2003 but I still enjoy them occasionally. And invariably, almost ritualistically, I will take a puff of a wonderful Havana cigar, this one a Bolivar Belicoso Fino, which I am sampling with the proprietor, Edward, and say, “Why oh why did I give this up? What could I have been thinking?”

Davidoff’s London establishment is a thoroughly modern enterprise, yet it is rooted with one foot squarely in the past. Glass display cases above green-drawered cabinets. Scuffed marble floors. Wood paneled ceilings. And an incongruous, yet wonderfully appropriate horseshoe nailed over the door.

Of course, the horseshoe conjures up many memories appropriate to poker ….

For the moment, it is 1983. The World Series of Poker is in danger for the first time of its Championship being contested by fewer players than the previous year. The Series had grown in fits and starts – 34 competitors in 1977, 42 in 1978, 54 in 1979, a jump to 73 in 1980, 75 in 1981, then 104 in 1982 – but with the higher profile of the event (the Binion family had brought in Henri Bollinger as publicist and were issuing news releases and videotaping the final table [even when no one wanted to broadcast it]), a drop in competitors would be a blow to the prestige of the Series.

Eric Drache, who ran the World Series from 1973 to the late 1980s, was walking through the temporary poker room the Horseshoe had installed for the Series, to drum up entries. Ten thousand dollars, then as now, was a lot of money to spend on a poker game, especially when nearly everyone in the game would lose their entire stake and the opponents were nearly all among the best players in the world.

Finding few additional takers, he saw a game in progress in which he estimated that the table stakes totaled about ten thousand dollars.

“Why don’t you guys play for a seat with this money?”

They did, and the most important element to the success of tournament poker, the satellite, was born. The Main Event that year had 108 entries, 4 from than the previous year. And its winner, Tom McEvoy, an accountant from Grand Rapids, Michigan (though he had already won a bracelet at the 1983 Series), obtained his seat by winning one of these “satellites.” [The sixth place finisher in 1983, Donnachea O’Dea, was one of the first Europeans to achieve distinction at the Series. It was the first of his two final tables and six cashes in the Main Event. He also holds a bracelet in Pot Limit Omaha. Tony Holden introduced me to O’Dea at the Victoria Casino on Wednesday and he’s playing here, so I assume he is trying to add another PLO title to his credits. A nice man and a fearsome player.]

There have been other elements you could argue are more important to the operation of a poker tournament. The chief element is the freeze-out structure, featuring escalating blinds and antes. In the first years of the Series, pre-Drache, Jack Binion would say at some point, “Let’s raise the blinds and antes,” to move the action along. This is now done with computers and formulas, though it still must be tinkered with, and some players will always claim that it isn’t right.

But for the SUCCESS of tournament poker, which allows an amateur to compete on even footing with the best professionals in the world, satellites are what make it all possible. Granted, some of the mystique of the original incarnation of the World Series of Poker, an informal gathering of the world’s best players and highest-stakes amateurs in an intimate setting was sacrificed. If not for that sacrifice, however, I wouldn’t be writing about poker and you wouldn’t be reading about it.

We could even move forward to 1988 and 1989. Satellites are firmly a part of the World Series of Poker. Tony Holden, the only representative of England at the 1988 Main Event (think about that for a moment), won satellites into both Championships, as he explained in BIG DEAL. Nevertheless, the field is still small enough that Jack Binion introduced each competitor in the Main Event by name and background before play started.

Jack still knew most of the players and if he didn’t, he would give their hometown and add, “plenty tough, plenty tough.” Even if he didn’t know that in fact, it was frequently true.

From pictures I’ve seen of the period and accounts I’ve read and heard from the participants, it was an intimate event. In my mind’s eye, this inaugural World Series of Poker Europe fits nearly within that heritage, with its number of entries, camaraderie among participants, and pedigree of competitors.

I played the HORSE yesterday and that was the feeling I had, as though I was playing in a past Series transported in time and place. So much about the experience is different from the 2007 World Series of Poker – yet it felt strangely familiar, but to an experience I have never actually had.

The cigar has been extinguished and it’s time for me, at least temporarily, to exit my provisional headquarters. I shall explain in detail what the Series is like and my interaction with it, but that will be in another post. This place is not especially convenient for tournament coverage, being a thousand or two meters from the venue, and I’d like to check that out. There is no internet access here, but the fact that you are reading this is proof that this is not a limitation of consequence. And the cigars are remarkable.

It is possible to enjoy the present and progress into the future, while still maintaining a grip on the past. In fact, if you are resolute and a little lucky, you can even experience it.

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