From the FasterSkier archive — posts syndicated from athletes’ and coaches’ own blogs between 2004 and 2012, kept online as published. Current coverage is at fasterskier.com.
Petter Northug during his first day of play at the 2010 World Series of Poker in Las Vegas
Winning at cards requires both luck and skill. On his fourth day of play at the 2010 World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, Petter Northug’s luck ran out–but not before he had survived long enough to win more than $20,000.
With fewer than 700 players remaining from an original pool of more than 7,000, Northug was eliminated, on a hand that he had less than a 20 percent chance of losing.
Late in the day on Tuesday, Northug bet all his chips on the two cards that he had been dealt: a pair of tens.
His opponent equaled the bet, and flipped over his cards to reveal a pair of nines—which gave Northug an 82 percent chance of winning the hand.
But in Texas Hold’em—the game played at the World Series of Poker—players also can use any of five communal cards as part of their hand. And when those were dealt, one was a nine, which left Northug’s opponent three-of-a-kind and the 400,000 chips in the pot.
Northug had suffered what poker aficionados call a “bad beat”—their term for when a player with the strongest cards gets unlucky and loses—but there was nothing he could do about it.
“Petter, of course, was very frustrated—it was a bad hand,” said Thorkild Gundersen, a journalist from Northug’s sponsor, Vi Menn Magazine, in an interview with the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet. “When you bust out in this way, it is bitter.”
Northug’s loss came with roughly 650 players left in the tournament, putting him in the money. For his efforts over four days and some 40 hours of poker at the World Series, Northug earned more than $21,000—an $11,000 return on his $10,000 entry fee.
After two weeks in Las Vegas, Northug is wasting no time in returning home—his flight from McCarren International Airport departs this morning.
Petter Northug playing poker in Las Vegas last week.
Petter Northug continued his run at the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas on Monday, upping his chip count by 50 percent and advancing to the fourth day of competition.
“During the three days he has played, he has not made a single mistake,” said Thorkild Gundersen, a journalist from Northug’s sponsor, Vi Menn Magazine, in an interview with the Norwegian website Nettavisen.
After his third day of play at the tournament, Northug checked out with 180,700 in chips, while the average player sits at 177,000, according to Vi Menn. Northug began Monday’s round with some 130,000 chips, quickly ran up his count to 200,000, and then lost a few hands later on in the day.
Roughly 1,200 players remain in the tournament, with the top 747 receiving prize money, and the field will likely be reduced below that number on Tuesday. Payouts start at $19,263 for places 676 through 747.
Coverage of the tournament has reached a boil in Norway, and a number of publications have raised concern over the fact that Northug will have to miss the World Cup opener if he qualifies for the final table of nine. (World Series organizers postpone the last table until November to allow players time to attract sponsors, and for media to hype the event.)
In an interview with the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet, Norwegian Head Coach Age Skinstaad played down the concerns.
“If [Northug qualifies], there is no problem…Everyone needs to relax and think of other things,” Skinstaad said. “I think it’s very, very positive that he’s involved with such things.”
Petter Northug in the middle of a game of poker against Marcus Hellner in Las Vegas.
It’s not oil, fish, or aquavit that’s behind the Norwegian sports machine, which delivered the most medals per capita of any nation at the 2010 Olympic Games—at least not entirely.
Instead, a healthy portion of the funding for Norway’s sports organizations comes from Norsk-Tipping, the state-owned gambling company. Norsk-Tipping dedicates 45.5 percent of its annual profits to sports—more than $241 million U.S. dollars in 2009 alone.
That’s one of the reasons that quadruple Olympic-medalist Petter Northug, currently competing in the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, has been criticized by Norwegian officials for his enthusiasm for the game, according to Tormod Brenna, a reporter for the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet.
Poker isn’t offered by Norsk-Tipping, and it’s illegal in Norway to play the game for money.
However, residents can play online poker on foreign websites, an indirect result of which could be the diversion of funds away from Norwegian sports—assuming those players would otherwise be gambling with Norsk-Tipping.
In April, Norwegian Ski Federation General Secretary Inge Andersen spoke out against Northug’s hobby in an interview with the website Nettavisen, telling a reporter that “it is important to be aware that most sports in Norway are built on profits from the Norwegian national lottery.”
“The surplus in the Norwegian National Lottery goes back to community purposes in Norway,” Andersen said.
Others pointed out further contradictions, such as the fact that youth sports organizations in Northug’s hometown, Mosvik, receive funding from Norsk-Tipping—some through a special program called the “Grassroots Share.” Grassroots Share allows gamblers to dedicate five percent of their stake towards a specific sports club or organization of their choice, and a number of ski clubs are participants.
By most accounts, the Norwegian public rallied around Northug after the criticism by Andersen and others. But there’s no question that his trip to Las Vegas has driven up interest in poker in Norway—Northug’s face has been on the front page of sports and newspaper websites for the past few days.
In an interview with FasterSkier, Northug said that he doesn’t concern himself with the impact that poker might have on other people, or on politics.
“I love to play it and I love the game. For me, it’s important to have other interests than just cross-country skiing,” he said. “I have a vocation, and then I also love to be able to do other things.”
It was too much of a stretch, Northug continued, to draw a thread between his poker hobby and the cash flow to Norsk-Tipping.
“That’s too far—I can’t go and think about something like that,” he said.
Petter Northug playing in the 2010 World Series of Poker
As one of his sponsors, the Norwegian men’s magazine Vi Menn paid for Northug’s visit to Las Vegas and his entry into the World Series. But according to Thorkild Gundersen, a reporter for the publication, Vi Menn’s relationship with Northug stems from his appeal as a cross-country skier, not as a poker player. The magazine, Gundersen said, had no intention of influencing attitudes towards the game through its support of Northug.
“We don’t try to change politics,” he said.
But intentions aside, Gundersen argued emphatically that Northug’s participation in the tournament—and the hype it generated—would have a real impact on the public’s acceptance of poker in Norway.
“In Norway, there’s a lot of fantasy about poker as games with guns. This is helping the image of poker,” Gundersen said. “The debate…will come because of this.”
In recent years, many of Norway’s neighbors have made changes to their laws governing poker.
In Sweden, for example, poker’s popularity has grown quickly over the past decade. State companies allow the game in their casinos, and also launched an online poker website in 2006 in response to growing demand. Government gambling firms in Denmark and Finland have also taken steps towards introducing online poker.
Vi Menn has never shied away from politically sensitive issues like this one, according to Alex Oysta, its editor—the magazine is “politically un-correct in some ways,” he said.
There’s also no question that the criticism of Northug and the accompanying media coverage has been good for Vi Menn. According to Gundersen, the magazine’s web traffic is up, and its logo—crisply rendered on Northug’s poker shirt—is splashed all over newspapers and sports sites in Norway.
“Our brand has never had such visibility—we are all over the place these days,” Gundersen said.
Despite Gundersen’s enthusiasm, though, it remains to be seen whether any significant changes will result from Northug’s Vegas trip. While acknowledging that the hype would be a boon to foreign gambling sites, Brenna, the Norwegian newspaper correspondent, said that he doubted it would make much of a difference to the country’s politicians.
Meanwhile, Northug plays on, uncowed—his second day at the World Series comes later this week. The man, Gundersen said, has an uncanny ability to maintain his equanimity amidst a media frenzy.
“His ability to not give a damn what people say—he’s extremely good at not reading websites, not reading newspapers,” Gundersen said. “He doesn’t want everyone in Norway to like him—that’s not a goal.”
Marcus Hellner leads Petter Northug in the first heat of their rollerski race in Las Vegas.
In Las Vegas, the house always wins. And in Tuesday’s head-to-head rollerski race between Marcus Hellner and Petter Northug, Northug was the house.
On a course laid out by his Norwegian magazine sponsor—and modified at the last minute to give him a better shot at the win—Northug took the last two heats of a best-of-three series in the parking lot of the Palms Casino, evening the score with Hellner after losing to the Swede in a poker match earlier this week.
Marcus Hellner (L) and Petter Northug (R) at the start of the first heat of their rollerski race in Las Vegas.
After attracting some attention from poker websites and even ESPN broadcasters at their appearance at the World Series of Poker tournament yesterday, it seemed like the race between Northug and Hellner had the potential to draw a decent crowd.
But at 8:30 on a Tuesday morning, at a resort two miles from the strip, all Las Vegas could muster was a thirty-strong rabble of predominantly Norwegian fans, a few of whom waved 8.5 by 11 inch printouts of the country’s flag. They gave Northug a rousing cheer when he skied by on his warm up, while Hellner was met with a chorus of boos.
On the tight, twisting figure-eight loop around two traffic islands, the start made all the difference, as the first athlete to the first corner took the victory every time.
Organizers from Vi Menn, the Norwegian magazine, had Northug and Hellner throw dice for starting position. Hellner won, giving him the advantage in two out of the three heats.
After the first two rounds, it appeared that it would be the dice, not fitness, that would decide the outcome, because the man with the inside line to the first corner took each heat—Hellner the first and Northug the second.
But for the final heat, Vi Menn staff moved back the start line a few yards, giving Northug more time to overcome his unfavorable start spot on the outside. Using his trademark explosive speed, he won what was essentially a 50-meter drag race to the sharp, righthand turn around a traffic island housing a handful of palm trees and some forlorn desert shrubs, and never looked back. The whole thing was over in less than 45 seconds.
“They are all Norwegian guys in the jury—so they did something,” Hellner said, laughing. “It’s still fair, because I got the best start [position]. He’s a quicker
Northug showing Hellner who's boss.
starter than me—that made all the difference.”
As the pair warmed up for the race, Northug seemed unhappy about the course, with all its tight corners, and after defeating Hellner, he looked more relieved than anything else.
“With the tough course, you had to be first out there,” he said. “In the first heat, Marcus was first out, and it’s difficult to pass him. But in the two last ones I was waking up, and was hearing the home crowd here…I took the start in the last heat, and that was important.”
After Northug’s win in the race and Hellner’s victory in their card game on Sunday, the battle between the two comes down to their placings in the World Series of Poker, which continues this coming weekend. Both Northug and Hellner have said that they will stay in town as long as they remain in the tournament, which could mean another full week in the city if the athletes play their cards right. (And if either makes it into the final nine, another visit to Las Vegas will be necessary in November.)
But the race was the highest-profile portion of the trip, and with it over, many of the dozen Scandinavian journalists that have been chronicling the athletes’ every move will now head back to their home countries. With the highest-profile part of the trip concluded, the Northug and Hellner will have a little more time to relax—as will Alex Oysta, the Vi Menn editor who orchestrated the trip.
More than anything, Oysta said he was thankful that no one got hurt. If one of the athletes had been injured in the race, he said, it would have been his own face on the pages of the newspapers—not Northug’s.
Petter Northug late in the first day of the 2010 World Series of Poker
11:28 PM: With ten minutes to go in the first day of the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, it appears that both Petter Northug and Marcus Hellner have survived, and will head into a second round of play later this week. The two each have comfortable stacks of chips, and will be in decent position as the tournament continues on.
4:50: For once, it looked like Petter Northug was faced with a comeback that was too tough.
Marcus Hellner
With his chips dwindling at the 2010 World Series of Poker, Northug had gone “all in,” and was met with the prospect of being eliminated just three hours into the tournament.
Stone-faced, eyes concealed behind a pair of Oakley sunglasses, Northug sat calmly and waited to see if the one player left in the hand would match his bet.
When he did, Northug flipped over his cards and walked away from the table, his tournament hinging on the next few cards dealt. Ultimately, he lucked out with a pair of aces to stay in the game.
Marcus Hellner’s second two-hour stint at the table was much less dramatic, but the result was the same, as both men appear to have roughly 20,000 in chips remaining.
The two Scandinavians have completely assimilated themselves into the poker world, adopting the typical mannerisms and disinterested appearances of many of the players here. In addition to Northug’s designer shades, both athletes have also spent much of the tournament listening to music through headphones.
The two players' chips after four hours of play. Northug's stack is on the left, Hellner's is on the right.
2:48 PM:
Just over a quarter of the way into the 2010 World Series of Poker, Marcus Hellner holds the edge over Petter Northug.
Hellner appears to be steady at around 30,000 chips—the same number he started with—while Northug has dropped to roughly 20,000.
While his body language spoke differently, Northug was still optimistic about his chances during the first half-hour break from play. The most threatening competitor at Northug’s table, 2004 tournament champion Greg Raymer, was bounced out after just an hour, and Northug said that he was starting to get a good sense of his competitors’ playing styles.
“The thing is just to be patient and wait for my spot,” he said. “I have plenty of time yet…I think it’s a good table for me—it’s pretty aggressive players, so if I just hit the big hand, I think I can win a lot.”
Fifteen tables down, Hellner said that he was enjoying the benefits of wearing a jacket with his sponsor PokerStars’s logo.
“I think they have a little bit of respect for me because I have this,” he said. “They think I’m good at it—I tried to bluff them some times, and they take it.”
While Hellner hopes to last as long as he can in the tournament, he was realistic about his chances.
“My first goal is to beat Petter,” he said. “I think it will be very hard for me as it goes on.”
Both Hellner and Northug will have to grind through nearly twelve hours of poker—from noon to midnight—in order to make it through to the next round of competition. Neither was concerned about the long hours, though—nor the early wake-up call tomorrow morning for a 9 a.m. rollerski race at the Palms.
In fact, Northug said he was far more concerned about the poker than about the skiing—at least during his Vegas vacation.
“Tomorrow is just fun—this is competition,” he said. “It’s a big dream to play in the main event—it’s one of my biggest interests…I have to enjoy it, and I also have to play good.”
None of the players at either Northug or Hellner’s table seemed to realize that they were playing with multiple Olympic medalists—and Northug said he’d rather have it that way. If anyone found out who he was, “then they’d think I’m a big fish,” he said.
1:28: One hour into the World Series of Poker and not much has changed here in Las Vegas–neither Petter Northug nor Marcus Hellner have budged from their seats at the card table, although Northug did just fold out of a large hand just moments ago.
Perhaps the most notable aspect of this afternoon’s play is that Northug is stuck at a table with Greg Raymer, the 2004 World Series of Poker Champion, who provides a stark contrast between the world of poker and the world of cross-country skiing.
Raymer is nicknamed “Fossilman,” apparently because of his hobby of collecting prehistoric remnants, although it also appears to be an apt physical description. Wearing a bizarre pair of holographic sunglasses, Raymer was nearly eliminated in the first hour when he lost a hand to another player at the table, but is holding on with a small fraction of his chips remaining.
Hellner appears to be playing more conservatively than Northug–the Swede has been folding the vast majority of his hands, which is typical for this early in the tournament. Northug has played a few more, and appeared to lose at least 10 percent of his chips when he called a large pot (in non-poker speak, that means that he matched another players bet), then folded when the cards did not turn his way later in the hand.
Northug is playing at a featured table on a platform in a corner of one of the rooms here at the Rio–he apparently was unhappy about being moved.
More to come.
Marcus Hellner (arms folded) at his first round table.
Petter Northug (L) and Marcus Hellner (center) playing a one-on-one game of Texas Hold'em at the Palms Casino in Las Vegas.
Marcus Hellner one, Petter Northug zero.
In an hour-long production worthy of two A-list celebrities, Hellner outlasted Northug in a one-on-one game of Texas Hold’em at the Palms Casino in Las Vegas on Sunday evening.
Orchestrated by the Norwegian men’s magazine Vi Menn and the online gambling company PokerStars, the event showcased the kind of status that the two athletes enjoy in Europe.
Clad in a crisp white button-down shirt emblazoned with a Norwegian flag and a Vi Menn logo, Northug spent the first portion of the evening playing a casual game of cards and hobnobbing with media and Scandinavian poker professionals. The event was held in a private room at the Palms, complete with an open bar, although neither Northug nor Hellner appeared to drink any alcohol.
Marcus Hellner sizes up a hand early on in the game.
With half of his attention on his cards, Northug gave interviews to television stations and poked fun at Thor Hansen, the man considered the “godfather” of poker in Norway, who was sitting at Northug’s table.
After the athletes relaxed for half an hour, it was time for business. Thorkild Gundersen, who coordinated the event for Vi Menn, introduced the match-up as the first in a best-of-three contest that would also include the World Series of Poker tournament, and a rollerski race on Tuesday.
The first hands were then dealt by a professional dealer enlisted by PokerStars, this being not just any basement game.
Displaying the same steely focus and drive that he does on the race course, Northug got out to an early lead, reducing Hellner’s pile of chips to what seemed to be dire levels. But Hellner never panicked, slowly working his way back into the game and ultimately forcing Northug into betting all of his chips on an ace-five hand. Since Hellner held ace-ten, he was all but guaranteed of victory—which was ensured when another ten was dealt, giving Hellner a pair, and the win.
Given Northug’s reputation as a cutthroat poker player, Hellner’s victory should probably be considered an upset—even though the Swede didn’t look at it that way.
“I thought that he maybe would be afraid of me—I think he saw me as a very tight player,” Hellner said. “I got some good cards.”
The extravaganza continues at noon western time on Monday, when Northug and Hellner compete in the first day of the World Series of Poker tournament at the Rio. Despite Northug’s loss, Hansen, the Norwegian poker legend, said that he thought that that the quadrupleOlympic medalist was a skilled player.
“All the Norwegian kids [young poker players]…tell me he’s good,” Hansen said. “He wants to be good—that’s the competition in him.”
While playing live poker for money is illegal in Norway, Hansen said that Northug enjoys the support of the country’s people in his card-playing habits, even though he was criticized by the general secretary of the Norwegian ski federation for setting a bad example for children.
In the same vein, Hellner’s appearance in Vegas is part of a strategy by PokerStars, his sponsor, to push poker into the mainstream in Sweden, according to
Northug, as his chips began to dwindle
Murat Sahan, the editor of a poker magazine in the country. Sahan said that PokerStars has recruited athletes like Hellner, hockey star Mats Sundin, and former tennis great Boris Becker to its team of players because they make the game seem more accessible.
“This is, of course, a way of making poker more accepted in the general public,” he said.
Not Just Fun and Games
Northug and Hellner were so focused on poker on Sunday night that one could almost have forgotten the two were professional athletes.
Scandinavian fans can rest assured that they haven’t. After a three-hour bike ride on Saturday, Hellner, Northug, and Northug’s younger brother Thomas—a world junior champion who is here watching—all drove out of Las Vegas to the scenic Red Rock Canyon for rollerski intervals Sunday morning, while the rest of the town was probably still nursing their hangovers. (Click here for photos.)
More details also emerged about Tuesday’s rollerski race between Hellner and the elder Northug.
According to Vi Menn Editor Alex Oysta, the event will be held in one of the Palms’s parking lots, the course being a lap and a half of a short, figure-eight loop around two traffic islands. Because the loop is so brief, Hellner and Northug will race a best-of-three-heats series.
Vi Menn and PokerStars had to wrestle with Las Vegas’s dearth of nordic knowledge in order to line up the race. It was originally scheduled for Monday, but Oysta said that the date had to be changed because the Palms wouldn’t be able to clear the lot the day after the Fourth of July.
And according to the PokerStars manager who coordinated the event, the Palms’s staff was flummoxed by the idea of a rollerski race—making it difficult to insure, which the casino required. The insurance wasn’t even for the athletes, the manager said—instead, it was in case Northug or Hellner crashed and injured a spectator or damaged a vehicle.
Northug and Hellner pose for photos after the end of the game.
From strippers to Cirque Du Soleil, there’s a lot to see in Las Vegas. But one spectacle setting up for this July is strange even by Sin City’s standards: a rollerski race between Olympic gold medalists Petter Northug (NOR) and Marcus Hellner (SWE).
“Hopefully this will be something new in Las Vegas,” said Alex Øystå, editor-in-chief of the Norwegian magazine Vi Menn. “I don’t know how many people use skis there, but I guess not so many.”
The duel between two of the world’s best athletes is an exciting prospect, but it’s not even the main event. That will come when the pair takes to the tables for the 2010 World Series of Poker.
An avid card player, Northug is sponsored by Vi Menn, which organized the promotion and is footing the bill for the Norwegian champion’s $10,000 entry fee. To earn it, Northug had to win a short cross-country ski race last winter against one of Vi Menn’s journalists. (Despite a handicap, Northug eked out the victory with a lunge at the line.)
In an interview with FasterSkier, Øystå said that Hellner has his own sponsor in Sweden that’s paying for his Las Vegas. There’s a good chance that the pair will also play a head-to-head game of poker, outside of the tournament.
The Scandinavian press makes a living from the trumped-up rivalry between the two, so the rollerski race was a no-brainer. Øystå wants to pit Northug and Hellner against some American skiers as well, like Andy Newell or Billy Demong—he said his staff was looking into it.
The exact details of the race haven’t been sorted out, but it should be brutal—highs in Las Vegas in July average 104 degrees.
Though it seems impossible after the attention he drew at the Olympics, Northug-mania appears to be still on the rise. After bouncing out of a warm-up poker tournament in Monte Carlo on Tuesday, Northug was front-page news on the websites of Norway’s largest newspapers. Vi Menn was live-blogging Northug’s bets.
Reporters from Norwegian TV and newspapers will be on hand in Las Vegas, Øystå said, and his magazine—which has a readership of 520,000 in a country of less than 5 million—has been promoting the event relentlessly.
“It’s kind of exotic,” Øystå said. “People coming from the North Pole and using skis in Vegas—I think you can actually have a pretty good story on that.”
