In League With The Devilfish
The scene is the Ladbrokes Poker Million final table
in old London Town. A plucky, shaven-headed online qualifier,
who had spent the afternoon confidently explaining to
the UK TV audience that he is the greatest poker player
alive and how he is going to eat his opponents for breakfast,
recoils from a head to head encounter with the Devilfish.
Visibly shaking, his nerves shot to bits, he throws
down his cards. “What’s the matter?”
inquires a stone-faced Devilfish, peering down at the
broken man’s trousers, “Ye sh*t yerself?”
Six months later, as we nervously dial his number, Bluff is praying that we find the UK’s most fearsome poker pro in a mellower mood. Somewhere in Hull, a town in England’s industrial north, a telephone rings and a Devilfish answers.
pussycat today; a slightly impatient and surly pussycat perhaps, but having just got home from a non-stop poker marathon from Tunica to Copenhagen, he’s probably exhausted, so we’ll forgive him.
Dave’s story is similar to that of many of the
older generation of players: “I’ve been
gambling since I was fifteen: playing snooker, pool,
you name it. I started playing Stud when I about sixteen.
By the time I
was in my mid-twenties, I couldn’t get a game,
so I had to move in bigger circles and learn more and
more games.“
Then, in October 1996 (his memory for dates is striking), he was at a private game when a recently demolished Chinese player named Stevie Yeung likened him to a devilfish, the giant manta ray of fearsome legend. “I was with my driver at the time, a kid called Gary Whitaker,” recalls Dave. “We just laughed and never mentioned it again. About four months later I was in the Four Queens in Vegas, a newcomer, heads up with Men the Master. The crowd was shouting: “Go on, the Master!” and Gary suddenly chimed in: “Go on the Devilfish!” The headlines on the flyers the next day were ‘Devilfish Devours the Master’ and that was that.”
The notorious fish is, in reality, a much maligned, relatively harmless beast. Is this the case with the man, we wonder?
Do you have a cuddly side?
“I’m a pretty soft-hearted guy, especially with my kids.”
What’s it like being seen as a ‘bad guy of poker’ then?
"I don't know about bad guy, but I'm a straight talking guy. If someone steps out of line, I’ll tell them. If I don’t like some rules in a tournament, I tell ‘em what I think. I speak my mind. And if I see a good poker player who’s been around the circuit and he’s doing something stupid, I might make fun of him. But if I see some novice guy, who’s just starting, I won’t pick on him. If he puts a bad beat on me, I accept it. Poker needs his money.”
Dave was born and bred in a part of the world where the locals are renowned for their no-nonsense straight-talk. An earthy sense of humor and natural lack of tolerance for fools means that if folk get to big for their boots, you knock ‘em down. This is Devilfish through and through, but perhaps in America, where we often like to think in terms of good guys and bad guys, it puts him firmly in the latter category.
In poker, however, a fearsome reputation is useful and I sense that, to some extent, it’s an image that he relishes and, as a natural performer, likes to cultivate. It suits his style of play too: all that harassing and raising, muscling the odds in his favor through sheer wit and brute strength. He plays far more hands than your average pro; in fact, you could say he made a career out of turning ‘rags’ into riches. It’s a risky, skillful, ruthless style of poker that’s scintillating to watch. It’s a style of play that made his triumph in the 2003 Jack Binion World Poker Open appear effortless.
You get the feeling that risk is a big part of the thrill for Devilfish and, in this sense, he’s the consummate master gambler who thrives on risk and takes his inevitable bad beats on the chin. In his youth he lost his friend’s car in a poker game (on a ‘bad beat’). More recently, he says, he lost $400,000 in a cash game in Tunica on a single hand.
This is a small change to the guy with the sharp black suits and intimidating gold jewelry. A jeweller himself (he still owns a jeweller’s shop in Hull), Dave is never happier than when talking shop. What does he think about the WSOP bracelets?
"They used to be a lot nicer," he enthuses, "They used to do them a rose gold and now they do them in that bright yellow gold. With rose gold, they put copper in instead of zinc – it’s no more expensive but, in my opinion, it looks much better.
His prize possession, apart from his (rose gold variety) WSOP bracelet is his Vacheron Contantin watch, with 13-carat diamond on the bezel and full diamond face. It cost him about around $90,000 - and that was twenty years ago.
Would you ever throw that into the pot?
“Everything’s negotiable,” he says, in dead seriousness. “Everything.”
You can dance with the Devilfish, if you dare, at UltimateBet.com. The scourge of Hull also has a new range of Devilfish chip sets and tables about to hit the market.
