Poker News

Phil Shaw

Anglo-American relations have hit an all time low in poker terms if Max Shapiro’s recent Card Player columns are anything to go by. These ‘humour’ columns under the title ‘Big Denny Goes to Oxford’ unfold the story of how “the students at Great Britain’s Oxford University, scholastically brilliant but a touch behind the times, were finally discovering poker. Their representative, Chauncey Crumblecake, had contacted me, requesting that I secure the services of Big Denny, whom they had heard about from my columns, to teach them the game and set up a poker tournament.

Notwithstanding the fact that its been pretty difficult to get even Cardplayer Europe over here at times (ho-ho), student poker has in fact been alive and well among the “snotty Brits’ for some time, and in Oxford particularly where the fourth Oxford Cup poker tournament recently took place, hosted by the swanky Randolph Hotel once more on the weekend of May 7th and 8th.

The poker extravaganza, organized by ex-Oxford student Joe Barnard with the help of the University Poker League, culminated in a main event on the Sunday where 244 runners were overseen by Roy Houghton of London’s Gutshot cardroom, with Neil Wright of Manchester taking home the Oxford Cup and L4,200 cash, and second place Mark Elliott from Durham University pocketing L2,400 (plus the L1,000 top student prize). Celebrity players included Dave ‘El Blondie’ Colclough, ‘Mad’ Marty Wilson, Jac Arama, and poker writers Al Alvarez and Anthony Holden.

Before this there was a talk from current World Series Of Poker champion Greg ‘Fossilman’ Raymer on the Saturday at Oxford’s Museum of Natural History (set amongst the fossils, where else?) and a freeroll tournament held in New College, where Raymer took part along with other invited guests, WPT winner John Gale and Euro pro Baard Dahl. This continued a tradition of World Champions patronising the event, which began with the Oxford Cup 2 in November 2003 where Phil Hellmuth flew in especially and spoke at the prestigious Oxford Union to a packed house.

The Oxford University Poker Society was founded by Joe Barnard in 2002 when there were just a handful of poker societies in the UK. From just a few students playing with the blanks from washers they eventually got sponsorship to buy equipment and saw a rapid increase in numbers as well as support from professionals. Poker is now largely accepted in the university, and this was for some time the largest event of its kind in the UK, beaten only recently by an event at St Andrews University in Scotland.

So far from being “the first poker tournament at Oxford, perhaps at any British college… da first annual Big Denny’s Oxford University World Poker Championship’ looks more like the half-assed invention of some inward looking thinking, a trait that fortunately seems to be dying out nowadays in the global poker community. “I had done some research before we left and discovered that Oxford University was the oldest English-speaking university in the world, with a heritage of nine centuries of distinguished scholastic excellence” says Mr Shapiro. Perhaps he might gain something from attending a summer school there then…

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