#206: “Something Is Rotten In The State of Denmark”

Something is rotten in the State of Denmark and it’s not the decomposing bag of apples I left in Rasmus Sibast’s kitchen nor the sock he is likely to find somewhere between his couch cushions weeks after I’ve left.

On Thursday night, I travelled to Copenhagen with Clayton Mooney, re-uniting the old gang of my SNG Mentors days from 2010. Rasmus lives in a very cool apartment about 4km from the centre of the city and he very kindly hosted us couch-surfers, as well as his old room-mate Mickey Peterson. On the first night, we drank lots of wine – not the ideal preparation for WPT Copenhagen Day 1A but the perfect way to while away the hours with Rasmus and his charming flatmates Emil and Sabille.

Unfortunately, Friday would not go as planned. Arriving to the casino early, we were charged €70 on top of the €1650 buy-in for what the cage cashier called a casino fee. Further scrutiny would have him explain how this fee was an annual subscription that entitled us to coffee and use of their wardrobe. I asked to see the manager who corrected his colleague, explaining that we were in fact paying an exchange fee for converting our euro to krone.

“A 4.5% exchange fee???”, I exclaimed, “Surely that can’t be right?” The manager shrugged, “If you want to change your money in a bank, I will cancel this transaction and give you the directions”. “Yes”, I said, “That would be much better”. He then gave Clayton and I directions to a bank that did not exchange money.

I made up my mind not to play but Clayton was still keen so we went in search of a bureau de change, eventually finding one that charged us an €8 fee between us rather than €70 each. Buoyed by our hourly, my mood improved and I unmade up my mind about not playing. I convinced Clay to join me in Day 1B and to play the satellite At 6pm. He agreed and in the interim, we took in some sights and dined at a scrumptious sushi-bar.

The satellite was, for the most part, an exercise in plain sailing, as Clay and I found ourselves chipped up on the same table for the home-run. That was until Clayton’s shove on the direct bubble was inexplicably called by a bloke for a third of his stack. Clayton had 10s but feared the worst versus his opponent’s Q10o. Fortunately he held and we were both able to fully turn around what had started off as a most tilting day.

Shaken by the many disturbing events and angered by Claudius’s mismanagement of the body politic, Marcellus utters one of the most famous lines in the most famous of all Shakespeare’s plays, believing that Denmark is festering with moral and political corruption. Now, so far, I have nothing but great things to say about Copenhagen and its friendly people but there was something rotten about that exchange rate shake-down at the casino.  Horatio assures Marcellus that “Heaven will direct it”. I do hope Heaven directs it to a WPT ‘one-two’ for the only Irishman and Yank in the field.