One great thing about being a sponsored player on VictoryPoker is the travel. Officially, I crisscross the globe to represent at online poker conferences – which, of course, I do; but these are conferences where most of the booths have open bars and the attending affiliates can handily out-drink your average degenerate poker pro. Inevitably, though, whenever the guys and I go on a trip for the site, we wind up hitting some of the most outrageous parties imaginable.

Such was the situation in Prague. The conference there ended with an exclusive party thrown by Calvin Ayre, best known for being the founder of Bodog. The Victory team managed to score 8 out of 200 tickets that were being distributed – and that, right there, should tell you how much fun we are. The party was pretty cool – flamethrowers outside, costumed acrobats walking around on stilts, an absinthe bar – but the only problem was that guys there outnumbered the girls by a pretty sick margin.

Lesson learned for the next Victory party: Make sure that there are at least twice as many girls in the house.

Sara Underwood was a victim of this terrible ratio. While it should be noted that Sara is very cool and didn’t really care, I did not like seeing her continually getting hit on by dudes who were blackout drunk! I remember seeing one guy come up from behind and start petting her hair. I had to swoop in and save her by convincing the guy to have a drink with me. Even Calvin wasn’t too crazy about the lack of females. When somebody introduced me to him, he didn’t look very thrilled. I think he was trying to figure out where all the girls are and wondering why he was talking to a male poker player.

After the party I went out for drinks with Ilari “Ziigmund” Sahamies and his friend Jasper Paakkonen. They met up with a whole posse of czech girls, a nice change from conditions at Calvin’s party, and I ended up getting pretty drunk. But not so drunk that I couldn’t stack some of the affiliates who were playing in a little $5/$10 no limit hold’em game at the casino where we were all staying.

A funny moment came after I busted one of the biggest affiliates in the business. He asked me to loan him $1,000. I had no idea who he was, and I had no interest in loaning him that kind of money. He swore he’d be good for it and gave me a wallet full of IDs and credit cards for collateral. I fronted him the cash and later found out that he’s a multimillionaire! Obviously, he paid me back pretty quickly.

I had such a good time hanging with Jasper and Ilari that I am going to meet them at the end of next month on their home turf.  Victory is going to do a charity event in Finland, and my understanding is that those guys are so plugged in there that going out it with them is like bar-hopping with Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt.

Can’t wait!