Make The Deal


2008-03-25 22:18:51
By: Gene Bromberg

Allow me to brag a bit--I'm a trivia savant. Know those games they have in sports bars where you press buttons on an infrared console? Yeah, I never, ever lose when I play. Once I had the top score in the country, out of like 15,000 teams. Formidable.

In high school there were a series of trivia bowls that were very hotly contested. My school played in three of them, and we were 3-0. Thanks, in large part, to me. My brain is like a sponge--it may have some huge, gaping holes in it, but it absorbs a whole lotta information. It is a joke among my friends that any sort of trivia contest should be me against everyone else in the room. Given those odds, I'd still bet on myself every time.

The first year I covered the Aruba Poker Classic I heard about some high-stakes Trivial Pursuit Games. Annie Duke took on a team that included Mark "P0ker H0" Kroon and beat them in a game worth $500 a widget. Now, I know that Annie's smart and all, but I got to lickin' my chops. I mentioned this to John Vorhaus, himself possessed of a hefty cerebrum, and he looked at me and said, "Dude, you don't want any part of Annie".

I'm ashamed to say that I turtled--I didn't want to play for stakes that big. But I longed to pit myself against the Annie. I'm sure she's good. I know she's good. But...does she know how good I am?

While I brooded over such trivial matters Annie was girding for battle. She went on NBC's hit show 1 vs. 100 and ended up answering every (expletive) question correctly. This was a goad to me, especially as I've been spending too much time thinking/playing/writing about poker and not enough reading the New Yorker and the Atlantic and exploring this great world of ours.

Anyway, last night Annie appeared on NBC's megahit show Deal or No Deal. The contestant was a poker player who was negotiating her way through that minefield of extremely-alluring suitcase models when Annie popped up out of nowhere. She offered the contestant $133,000 in cash and a poker package that included 4 private lessons and a spot in Annie's WSOP Ladies' Academy. Though I might look out of place in the Academy (I have an outfit for it, believe me) the poker player in me would've taken the deal in a New York minute. Over a hundred grand PLUS 4 lessons from a professional poker player? Uh, how fast can I say DEAL?? As a poker player, those insights might pay off over the course of a lifetime.

Or, maybe as the mighty UB blogger I should ask for lessons from Annie (or, to make her jealous, from Phil Hellmuth). Or, maybe I need to start picking up backers for a trivia THROWDOWN with Annie in Aruba this year. 'Cause I can take her. Take her down.

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