EPT Dublin: It’s all in the name

A player's name is spelled wrong , it causes confusion, irritation and no one knows who any one is anymore.

Thousands of players around the world now come to live tournaments like the EPT thanks to companies such as PokerStars.com offering the chance for ordinary players to qualify for events they might not have had the financial means to enter.

Blogs, reports, official tournament lists - it makes for thousands of names written down by hurried staff processing hundreds of players in quick time –from America to Australia, Sweden to South Africa; from countries that rely less on consonants than some and more on letters absent from a standard keyboard than others. Sometimes the consonants get missed. Sometimes they're written in the wrong order.

The text book case of mistaken identity occurred at the World Series of Poker this year when a Swedish player handed over his driving license as identification, trusting that this would do for I.D. It did, and he was duly registered, only it was under the name ‘Sverige Korkort’ –the name he then went by for the duration of the Series. It was the equivalent of being called ‘Department of Motor Vehicles’ in the US or ‘Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency’ in the UK. I suppose you’d add Mr or Miss in there somewhere but we may never know his real name. But we know he can drive.

That’s an extreme case but it’s something that crops up at event after event. Someone mishears a name or a player’s handwriting looks like he slipped and his name disappears forever, or reappears when you least expect it. It’s not deliberate, just the price of bigger fields, bigger prize pools and a higher profile for poker. We’ve come a long way since the days when you kept your name to yourself. I not sure we should go back to that, but at least I could have spelled it.

Tournament update:

Luca Pagano: “I doubled up with aces against kings – I had aces, so was up to 110k.Then I got moved next to Annette and she’s the reincarnation of... I don’t know... I’m down to 70k now.”