Bigger Deal

For me it all starts with a hand of good old five-card draw. My dad taught me the game and we used to bet with pennies. An early memory I have is of raising and re-raising him in one pot we played on holiday. He gleefully turned over four sixes but I had four sevens! After I raked in that monster pot of 70 pence I was hooked.

I still played only draw poker when I started university in 2000 and was pleased to see that my college mates where keen on starting a weekly game. At the same time, much sleep was exchanged for the viewing pleasures of C4’s Late Night Poker (aired at some ungodly hour) and draw poker soon turned into Texas Hold’em.

A badly run ‘Poker Night’ at the Oxford Union, together with the coaxing of my friends, forced me to try some poker organization myself. My sister Riva even had some gold and silver poker chips made for us from the blanks of metal washers.

After three or four larger-scale poker nights (one per term), the washers were replaced by chips and the tablecloths by green baize… Next it was time for the underground poker scene at Oxford’s individual colleges to become more united and well known. So, in the summer of 2002 ‘The Oxford University Poker Society’ was born. We even managed to convince the university authorities to contribute £50 in start-up funds! There was barely a handful of university poker societies in operation when we started up, but the number has just skyrocketed to well over 50 today, in the UK alone.

I certainly owe a big thank-you to Jon Sullivan for the help he gave me in the early days. Jon secured sponsorship for our very first Oxford Cup tournament in March 2003, back in the famous Victorian debating chamber of the Oxford Union, and we set up the University Poker League shortly afterwards. My role here, in the fast and furious world of student poker, has since enabled me to organise and run two poker tours across the UK’s universities. The first, in the autumn of 2005, culminated in a fantastic heads-up team match, between the ten student champions of the tour and ten poker professionals (captained by Dave Colclough). It is with great pleasure that I report a victory for the students (11-9), which you can also read about in Anthony Holden’s ‘Bigger Deal’.

The second and most recent tour concluded with the biggest student poker event in history. In February of this year, 150 student qualifiers representing over 40 different universities battled it out at Dusk Till Dawn, Nottingham, in a Four Nations $50,000 Grand Final (including 2 EPT packages and 6 GUKPT packages awarded to the top six at the final table). Phillip Papadopoulos won the championship title and Scotland were victors in the Four Nations side challenge.

To date I have also run six Oxford Cup events, with continued support from poker celebrities and professionals.  In addition to European-based poker personalities, Phil Hellmuth flew over from America to be a part of the Oxford Cup II (I have some great memories and stories from this) and Greg Raymer (then WSOP champion) was involved in the Oxford Cup IV. The tournament is traditionally a £20 rebuy affair (and so a chance for students to mix it up with the pros relatively cheaply), yet the huge fields we’ve attracted have helped to generate some very exciting prize pools.  The Oxford Cup V, for example, broke the record for the number of participants of a single-day live poker tournament (335 players) and generated over £19,000.

The Oxford Cup VII is fast approaching on Saturday 20th September 2008. For further details please e-mail me (joebarnard72@yahoo.co.uk) and/or see our Facebook group.