Confessions of a Poker Writer: Interviewing Poker Players

When I told people that I was going to quit my highly successful job in the  rail industry, and instead earn my living through poker, it’s safe to say that I became a laughing stock of the herds that all blindly chew on the same cud.

I had a point to prove, and I like nothing better in life.

liv-boeree-dave-ulliott

I started like most people in the poker industry do, giving away my services for free, and I was soon the proud owner of a column in Poker Pro Europe called ‘From the Valleys to Vegas.’

Then one day I received an e-mail from the Editor of that magazine. A simple sentence but one that I knew was a game changer.

“Are you ready for a serious writing assignment?”

“Absolutely, what do you have?”

“Do you know the Devilfish?”

Do I know the Devilfish?

As a man who used to watch Late Night Poker the Devilfish was a relative legend in the game. The excitement started to kick in and it was soon tinged with that feeling of fear that comes over you when you are faced with an act that is destined to take you out of your comfort zone.

The fish had just released his autobiography ‘Devilfish: The Life and Times of a Poker Legend’ and I was to track him down and interview him. In return I would receive $250 (I actually never received it because the magazine ripped me off) and suddenly I was proving my point.

Although I had never interviewed anybody under these circumstances, I had plenty of experience when it came to taking the stand during my time in the rail industry. So talking came naturally to me – listening not so much – and so despite feeling a little worried, I still had this air of confidence about me.

I tapped the mobile number of the Devilfish into my phone and must confess that my ego made me show it to everyone in my local game. The lads were really pleased for me, as was my ex wife, who was as concerned as anyone about where the money for the bills was going to come from.

That happiness soon waned, however, when I ended up interviewing the Devilfish via mobile phone from my hotel room in Brighton during the night of my wedding anniversary. That’s how dedicated I was. Turning down a sure thing for a 60-minute phone conversation with a spiv from Hull.

When you ask an amateur poker player to interview The Devilfish, it’s akin to asking a tennis fan to interview Rafael Nadal. Most of you reading this will have been in the poker industry for quite some time. You might think this statement is over hyped, but I can assure you that this is how it felt at that time in my life.

“It’s a sad feeling when you are doing your bollocks in” – Devilfish.

So my first-ever interview and my first rookie mistake. Instead, of sending a copy of the draft to Devilfish to vet before I sent it to my Editor, I pushed it straight through into publication.

Devilfish wasn’t too happy and rang me to give me a piece of his mind. I used every trick in the book to calm him down, and told him that the piece would be all the better without his tampering and that the public would love it.

I have no idea if the public loved it, but I have just read it for the ten thousandth time and have to say, “They don’t make them like that anymore.”

It might have been my first interview, but my method has stayed true throughout each one of them. I like to talk about life. I like to peel underneath the fake fur and feel the temperature of that blood. People want to be pulled in to an interview, to feel like they have walked away, having learned a little bit more about the person they are reading about.

Fortunately, despite sharing cabs with him, plane rides and sitting next to him at the dinner table on numerous times, he still doesn’t know who I am, or that it was me who wrote that interview, and sent it out without him vetting it.

“I have known this kid for years…and I still don’t know his name?” Said the Devilfish during a recent dinner in Paris.

I don’t want him to now. It would kind of spoil the atmos.

“It was Christmas and I was sitting by the fire. My wife Mandy had about 14-guests in the house and I called her into the room and asked her to move my legs before they started burning.

“You need to make them aware that you are not going to move off that couch to grab that remote control unless you are f**king dying. However, you need to be good in bed or you won’t get away with it.” – Dave ‘Devilfish’ Ulliot.

The illusion of earning $250 for an interview got the grey matter whirring. I knew there were a load of players coming to Cardiff to film a Full Tilt Poker (FTP) show and I asked my Editor if he wanted me to interview anybody. He gave me two numbers, one was Liv Boeree and the other was Annette Obrestad.

The first time I had met Boeree was during a £1,000 side event at the World Series of Poker Europe (WSOPE) in the Empire Casino. I had qualified for my seat through Betfair and my starting table included Chris Ferguson, John Juanda, Davidi Kitai and Liv Boeree.

I didn’t know who she was back then, but must confess I was a little smitten by her. A pretty girl who looked she would pull a whip out of her purse and sort you out. I was an instant Boeree fan and so she was the first one I e-mailed.

She responded immediately and before you knew it I had a date with Liv Boeree in the Celtic Manor Hotel for my second-ever interview. Well it was a date in my eyes.

It was at this time that Liv had done a photo shoot for Loaded magazine, and I thought I would keep it low key when I told the ex-wife I was just popping to the Celtic Manor to interview ‘some girl’ about a poker tournament.

Well it was low-key, until my friend Neil Farm walked into the house holding a copy of that Loaded photo shoot.

“I don’t even know who she is.” Said my ex-wife.

“You don’t know who she is…take a look at that.” Said Farm as he pushed a copy of Boeree lying in a series of provocative poses underneath her nose.

My ex wife doesn’t know many poker players, but she certainly remembers Liv Boeree.

When I arrived at the Celtic Manor I was a right mess. Cool and calm had been replaced by crap and crap. Doing the interview face to face was completely different from over the phone with the Devilfish, and the interview itself was different also.

Whereas Devilfish would have given you the lurid details of how he lost his virginity, Boeree was much more aware of her words and even refused to answer one or two questions that I posed. She was also adamant that I send her the final draft before going live and this time I learned from my mistakes.

The draft was returned with just one word removed from the content – hymen. Yea, I somehow managed to get that word into a bog standard interview about poker where all we talked about was the game and astro-physics.

It’s strange when you interview people. They welcome you into their personal space and answer some personal, and often intimate, questions about their lives. This attracts me to them, not in a sexual way, but in an emotional way.

This is probably why, after I had interviewed Boeree, I considered her one of my best friends. I remember seeing her at an European Poker Tour (EPT) event a little while later and gave her a kiss. She must have thought I was nuts.

I never got paid for any of those interviews, despite the promise of the $500, but it did open the doorway for something that I have always enjoyed, and that’s to just sit down and peel away the layers from these people.

I have made a lot of mistakes – and still do – most notably talking too much. Jesse May has given me some great advice recently, and I have been learning to make my questions short and sweet, and cut myself out of the action. It’s that ego again.

The people I love interviewing are those that wear their hearts on their sleeves. Neil Channing, Nolan Dalla and Athanasios Polychronopoulos are three people who immediately spring to mind.

The best interviews are always the ones where you are more relaxed, and so it helps if you have a previous relationship with the people you are interviewing. It allows you to extend your range of questions and dig a little deeper, and their trust of you allows for a more emotional experience, which is hopefully conveyed to the reader.

The worst people to interview are the youngsters and the sponsored pros. The youngsters who come into poker, don’t have a lot of experience of life. There are no layers to peel. So these interviews can become robotic, and even with the best use of open questioning can be very boring.

If I’m bored then the reader will be bored.

The sponsored players, or the players who want to be celebrities, are always difficult to interview because they always wear their sponsorship patch like a pair of shackles. So it’s a paradox that the people that the poker public really want to hear about, are not really going to tell you a lot about themselves.

But there are exceptions to this rule and Leo Margets is a player who really stands out in this regard, as a sponsored player who trusts her own words enough to relay a very interesting and personal story.

My favorite interview has to be the one I did with Nolan Dalla at this years World Series of Poker (WSOP) when we got so deep he started crying. I love him for that.

People I haven’t interviewed, but would love to, include Daniel Negreanu and Doyle Brunson, who incidentally is the only player I have ever asked for an interview who turned me down in the worst way possible.

“No.”

Only one word…but it made me feel like shit nonetheless, but that’s the ego once again. The one thing I will say about interviews, is sometimes I feel like I’m a beggar, like I am beneath the person I am interviewing and I don’t like that about my ego.

I guess it’s because I want to be the star, and not the person interviewing the star.

One day…one day.