The Magician, the Unabomber and the Guy Who Never Wins
Hold the Front Page! Look what Bluff’s paparazzi photographers inadvertently spotted while camping in the forest outside Donald Trump’s honeymoon retreat - poker star Lee Watkinson cavorting shamelessly with chimpanzees. What a scoop!
We all know that Lee has been one of the hottest players in poker over the past 12 months with runner- up finishes at both the 2004 Mirage Poker Showdown and the 2004 Legends of Poker. Could it be that this strange ritual unfolding before our eyes holds, in some dark way, the secret of his powers? Was this just a friendly encounter, or was the chimp helping Lee with his game?
Just kidding around, of course. Lee recently went down to The Cortland Brandenburg Foundation, a charity he supports that rescues chimps from cruelty and, knowing how excited we get about monkeys, he asked us to come along.
The chimpanzees at the foundation have been discarded by Hollywood movies or rescued from medical research laboratories. Lee tells us: “The chimps you see in the movies are just babies. When they reach the age of seven or eight, they become unmanageable and unruly; their captors suddenly realize they’re six times stronger than humans and consign them to cages.”
Captive chimps can live to sixty, which means these
poor creatures, our
closest cousins on this planet, are forced to spend
their adult lives in 4x4 cages. That’s no way
to treat your cousin, folks. It costs over $500,000
to retire one chimpanzee properly. To build an environment
for a family of chimps costs over a million dollars,
so our friend Lee is doing all he can to help.
The foundation is devoted to ensuring that the chimps have a habitat and an enriched quality of life. Chimpanzees have complex dietary, physical, and social needs, including the need for interaction to prevent depression.
When we caught up with him, Lee was having a wonderful time with his new friends until they played poker together. “One chimp, Angel, kept outdrawing me, filling up her inside straights on the river,” he fumed. “What can you do? You play your hand perfectly and you still lose.”
That’s poker, Lee.
Timi Kershenbaum, who runs the foundation, was amazed at the response Lee got from the chimps:
“Chimps, particularly the adult alpha males,
don’t generally accept other males. But in no
time they’ve accepted Lee as the alpha male in
their group. They look to him as the leader. They know
he’s going to
treat them kind. It must be something to do with poker
because I’ve never seen anyone bond with these
chimps so quickly.”
“There’s a chimp that was abused and isolated for years. He’s in his teens now and he’s never been able to bond with anybody until he met Lee. He’s given this chimp hope. Lee can read him and figure him out. This is a really dangerous chimpanzee and Lee puts his fingers in his mouth. It’s amazing!”
As you can see, keeping chimps happy means playing poker with them. And every donation helps with the poor furry fellas next buy-in. The foundation needs money to survive. Please help our hairy cousins, as we’re thinking of unleashing Angel at the World Series.
To learn more about the Cortland Brandenberg Foundation, visit www.cortlandbrandenberg.com or call them at 818-783-4600.
