Poker in the land of Robin Hood

Here we are in Nottingham, England – home of mythic hero Robin Hood. [1] The English Poker Open starts tomorrow, and Cake has a dozen representatives in the $1,000,000 guaranteed main event, thanks to our live event satellites. It’s always wonderful coming to interesting places with the Cake players, and Nottingham definitely quaifies. I mean, they’ve got your basic right-out-of-the-movies castle:

Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to get over to the castle until after dark, so you’ll have to wait a day to get a picture of the full castle. But while you’re waiting for that, contemplate this: you see a cross-shaped indentation in the wall to the right of the door. What’s it for, and why the shape? First person to email blog@cakepoker.com with the correct answer gets five gold sovereigns dollars put into his leather purse Cake account. Hint: nothing religious about it.

Of course, there is a poker tournament getting underway tomorrow so we had the welcome party tonight. It was like most poker welcome paries, except that there were bad impersonators of Tony Blair and HM Queen Elizabeth II. The Tony Blair impersonator actually got up and spoke, which sort of alternated between surreal and embarrassing. Then I saw HM the Q checking into the hotel, which completed the surreality. I couldn’t even bring myself to take any pictures of that – it was just too weird.

Oh, and Doyle Brunson and Phil Hellmuth were there. The real ones, mind you. I didn’t take any pictures of them – there’s enough pictures of those guys around.

On the other hand, here’s one of the Cake qualifiers, Fiji250, and his lovely girlfriend, Alicia. Fiji250 is a chess master, along with being a serious poker player. He got a chess scholarship to college, which I couldn’t have even told you existed:

You guys that were in the high school chess club? Take a look at that woman on the right. There’s hope yet!

Finally, we present a magic trick. Usually to get two great poker players and two beautiful women into the same picture, you need four people in the picture. Here we kill four birds with two stones: Annette “Annette_15″ Obrestad and Liv “Liv” Bouree.

There will be more tomorrow here in Sherwood Forest the Dusk ‘Til Dawn club in Nottingham.

[1] And by “Robin Hood”, I mean the real mythical figure Robin Hood, not Barry Greenstein.