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 he Guardian Poker Column |
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| Elkan Allan in Las
Vegas writes for the Guardian News Group |
| Sunday July 10, 2005
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| Email :
TheEditor on any
subject. |
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| Another young Scot for Britain to cheer on
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The 5,700 poker-players who each paid $10,000 to enter
the No Limit Texas Hold'em World Championship have already been reduced to
around 1,800, and on Sunday played another round to cut them down to to
500.
Most of the online qualifiers who paid a few dollars or pounds to
win an online tournament to get here have already been eliminated, leaving the
proportion of professionals to amateurs more or less even.
But it was
online amateurs who won the title and millions of dollars last year and the
year before.
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Today, a young Scot who qualified online is
among the highest-stacked chip-holders, and looks certain to reach the next
round - and hopefully even the one before the final table.
Graeme
Harrison finished the first three-day round with $142,700's worth of chips,
putting him among the top five chip counts. He has almost five times the amount
of the next Brit, Joe Beevers of the Hendon Mob, and 20 times the stack of the
2003 winner, Chris Moneymaker.
It was the aptly-named Moneymaker who
transformed the image of poker when he showed that amateurs could successfully
compete with the poker pros and reap millions of dollars and the coveted
diamond and gold winner's bracelet. He was followed onto the winner's throne
last year by patent attorney Greg Raymer who won a $5m prize. This year, with
even more entries, the prize will be even bigger.
Both Moneymaker and
Raymer qualified via the online poker room, PokerStars. This year, that company
paid for an amazing 1,100 entries into The Big One. Thousands more qualified
through other online websites like PokerRoom and PokerParty.
Harrison is
among PokerStars' qualifiers, as he was last year when he was knocked out in a
heads-up with British pro, Dave "Devilfish" Ulliott. This year he is among the
leaders and Devilfish has already crashed out in the first
round.
Harrison is a soft-spoken 36-year-old from Peniciuk near
Edinburgh. He is not quite an amateur as he earns his living spread-betting on
the internet, having been deprived of his main source of income, blackjack,
after being barred by 30 casinos for card-counting.
Casinos regard
counting cards at blackjack as cheating, although there is nothing underhand
about it. Counters simply remember how many high cards have been revealed and
bet when mostly low cards are left. But the casinos naturally don't like losing
money to people with prodigious memories, and they ban players with near-total
recall.
So today Harrison is using his superior memory at the poker
table. Sitting hunched up over his cards and his huge stack of chips, wearing a
baseball cap with the word SCOTLAND emblazoned on it along with a cross of St
Andrews, he is another young Scot for Britain to cheer for.
How
succesful he is depends partly on luck, but, as John Gale, currently Britain's
biggest poker winner - and still in the hunt here - says: "While poker in
general is probably more skill than luck, in major tournaments the proportion
of skill goes up to 80% because of the quality of the opposing players."
There is a galaxy of big poker names left in the tournament - but so is
Harrison. |
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