Other articles by Barny Boatman

Stars and Bars

The Aussie Millions, Melbourne
A$2,000 Limit Omaha Hi/Lo
by Barny on Sunday, 11 January 2004 at 11:32 am

You’ve got to hand it to Bendigo and the Crown; they know how to sell the game of poker. Every day there is some kind of media event lined up and we are usually involved. As Ram mentioned, we did a shoot in a wine bar the other night for ‘Snaperazzi’ the society page of a Melbourne paper. The journalist assured me that it is not the kind of celeb page which mainly features starlets getting awkwardly out of cars, anyway it must have been a quiet night for movie premiers and snazzy weddings as they were happy to spend the evening with four semi-photogenic Mobsters. The writer was very nice and seemed particularly interested to hear whether we knew any real celebrities. So we obliged by explaining that Ram regularly plays snooker with Justin Timberlake, Ross split up with his former wife Gerri Haliwell because he was always off playing footie in the park with David Beckham, and I dated all three of Bananerama and wrote all their hits – including the cover versions-. It was only when Ram inferred that he had had an affair with The Queen that she stopped taking notes. It should as Ram says, be an interesting article.
Yesterday, as well as the head’s up event, we had the pro-celebrity poker tournament. Ten of us were teamed up with an Aussie celeb each for a hilarious game of tag hold-em with Keith making up the rules as we went along. It took place in the final table arena with press, TV and a couple of hundred friends family and players looking on. We were introduced one by one and when I came in someone mentioned that it was my birthday. No-one has ever sent me a singing telegram or any kind of ‘o-gram’ thank God, but I can tell you there is no experience quite the same as being handed a glass of champagne and having ‘Happy Birthday to You’ sung to you by an assortment of Olympic Gold medallists stand up comedians and Neighbours stars alongside the likes of Marcel Luske, Billy the Croc, Dog Meat George and Mad Marty Wilson. Surreal is too mundane a word to cover it.

The drinks kept flowing and we moved on to Heat night club. There was a big crowd including some of the Sydney Mob and Layne Flack who had started celebrating long before anyone had told him there was anything to celebrate, and had boozed bamboozled and bludgeoned his way to today’s head-up final taking out most of North London’s finest on the way. He is definitely a classy player, as of course is his lesser known buddy Phil Helmuth who I had such fun playing in the first round.

I wound up back in my room early this morning and was just dozing off when I got a phone call reminding me that I had agreed to do a radio interview for ABC. I rushed downstairs, jumped into a taxi and fifteen minutes later was playing no-limit hold-em live on the air! Well, if you can have cricket on the radio why not poker?
I got back to the Crown just in time to sit down in the $2,000 high-lo Omaha comp. Ram made it to the final and I just watched him getting a bit unlucky to be knocked out in six place. I’m planning an early night tonight but first I’m off to meet Holly Valance and discuss the custody of our four children. I hope Snapperazzi don’t get to hear about it!

$5200 Heads-Up Result 10th-11th January 2003
Final
PerWerner Svenson ($64,000) beat Layne Flack ($32,000)

Semi Finals
Layne Flack beat Joe Beevers ($16,000)
PerWerner Svenson beat Harry Demetriou ($16,000)

Full Result $2100 Limit Omaha Hi-Lo Sunday 11th January 2003
46 Entries
1st Mike Guttman $33440
2nd Peter Costa $25080
3rd Mick Stanton $12540
4th Howard Plant $8360
5th Larry Jones $4180
6th Ram Vaswani $2100
7th Gary Benson $2100
8th Sherkhan Farnood $2100
9th Hal Klein $2100

Post comments about this article in our forum