WPT Boot Camp Battle for the Season Pass III
David’s Journal
December 6th – Day 7.
Bavaro Princess Resort: Suite 3124 - 11.50pm
My relaxation consultant and I are enjoying our final night. We have just returned from the resort’s Piano Bar where, according to the extremely flexible dance troupe, ‘Everything’s good in America’. As Brits we are not the ideal punters to verify those lyrics but, right now, we both feel well disposed to everything, particularly as the Yanks have elected Barack Obama and we have had such a fantastic trip.
Earlier in the evening most of Team Eurolinx, including online qualifier Jeff Lamont, witnessed the WPT Boot Camp’s gong show and applauded those recruits that had earned honours over the seven days. The players deserved the plaudits. I must confess that I was particularly pleased to see that three occupants from my Day One table made the top fifteen of the main event. Not only did confirm my suspicion that it was a tough table, I had felt the strongest bond with those players, particularly after flopping quad nines.
It was also gratifying to see that the player who won the main event, netting himself ten entrance tickets for WPT events, each worth $10k, was also the guy who knocked me out by beating my threes with AQ. You may recall that we were both close to the wire and so his triumph provided me with some ‘What if....’ scenarios with which I can bore members of the English speaking population.
After the successful recruits were awarded their medals, the poker community swaggered into the casino’s main hall where there was a palpable sense of camaraderie and it felt like we had arrived at our own Fiddler’s Green. People, who been awkward strangers a week earlier, were now swapping bad beat stories of questionable veracity and ordering each other free drinks.
It was good to see. Often, successful poker players are not the most clubbable of people – respect for an established hierarchy is not a profitable attitude at the table – and they can be quite independently minded. It is a mental attitude not without its cost. As novelist Mark Twain put it, ‘the price of independent thinking is loneliness’.
When most people gather to form a group, they usually benefit from a sense of team belonging but lose some degree of independent thought. When people gather at the poker table, the primary task is to annihilate the other members of the group and that is best achieved by a focused, independent mind. However, the desire to bond does not disappear and it is partly that conflict - social need versus personal gain - that provokes the intense physiological reaction that players experience at live poker tournaments.
I took a moment to look around the Bavaro Princess Tower Casino. I saw a feast of faces that had gained so much more from the experience than the pleasure of poker tournaments and a seven day supply of free food. Now, liberated from the competition, they were able to wholeheartedly enjoy the social side of the boot camp. Given that most had been exposed to the same stress, there was shared respect everywhere: competitive, independently minded people were now enjoying some healthy back-slapping.
For me, that was the biggest benefit of the boot camp. I met so many friendly faces and the event fostered a sense of group belonging, but one without any of the deceits of the boardroom. The poker table’s naked ferocity is inescapable and intimidating, but at the same time it is refreshing. Apart from in the tournament itself, its hierarchy is meaningless so when you meet people away from the table, there are hardly any hidden grievances. Poker players are out to get you –but it is nothing personal and it is only during the game: tournaments can mix business with pleasure.
With that thought, I joined bottles with my relaxation consultant and we toasted the boot camp. It had been tough, it had been emotionally hazardous and we had witnessed the collapse of many a recruit along the way but, somehow, we had survived our stay in the Caribbean. I had emerged stronger, wiser and with two sun-burned shins. I felt like I had revitalised my poker game: I was now ready to meet and beat anybody. My future would now be defined by opportunity, aggression and after-sun.
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