The Devil In Disguise
Dave “Devilfish” Ulliott
With his distinctive Northern English twang, trademark knuckleduster rings and a penchant for spontaneously bursting into Elvis tunes, Dave “Devilfish” Ulliott is one of poker’s most endearing characters.
Sporting a black DevilfishPoker.com T-shirt, baggy Evisu jeans and a black eye, one might think Dave “Devilfish” Ulliott out of place in the deluxe suite of The Palms - the most exclusive resort in the Turks & Caicos Islands. However, after spending only a few moments in the presence of the charismatic Englishman, you are left with no doubts about his rights to claim such a piece of hotel real estate. (The fact that he also lost a $19,000 pot just prior to our interview without so much as flinching is also a good indication).
The first order of business was to find out about his black eye. With his ‘colourful’ past in the world of underground poker and mafia home games, I was expecting a typical Devilfish yarn involving gun-totting gangsters, but he purports that it came from friendly fire. “I went to see my nine-year-old son the night before I came here, and he caught me with his elbow while we were wrestling on the bed,” Dave said coyly. Normally, I’d find that sort of response evasive, but as is always the Devilfish’s case, if there really is a story to tell, it will be told – and embellished with his razor sharp wit.
Dave’s street-smarts were honed during his youth in Hull, Yorkshire, during a period when the North of England was blanketed by a dark cloud of crime and financial hardship. Leaving school at 15, Dave took up a job making trophies with G K Beaulah’s, and it was there that his interest of poker was first sparked.
“I watched a movie called the Cincinnati Kid, and saw myself as a Steve McQueen. So we used to play in the canteen during the dinner break, and I wasn’t very good at it, but I used to like it, I had this gambling in me; I had it in my blood,” he said. “There was an old guy called Jack Gardiner, a member of the only casino in Hull – the 51 Club. Even though I was only 15-years-old, I was a tall guy and they never used to worry about ID or nothing in them days, just if you had some money in your pocket – which I soon got rid of.”
In the early years of playing 5-card stud, Dave admits that he “had a little too much gamble for the game, and for the first couple of years used to rock n’ roll too much”. However, after eventually honing his gambling skill, Devilfish proceeded to “take a lot of money out of Hull and its surrounding areas”.
The main game in Hull was run by ‘Mustafa’, in his small flat. As Dave so eloquently puts it, “We played in a smoke-filled room, where if you couldn’t be bothered to use to the toilet, you’d go and have a piss in the backyard rather than walk up the stairs. It was a pretty rough game.” Then in his typically frenetic one-liner-a-minute style, he goes on to talk about other games in the area. “I used to play in games where people weren’t walking. I’ve played in places where the sawdust on the floor was last night’s furniture, and there was a hog’s head on the bar for an air freshener, and if you didn’t have a knife they used to search you and give you one.”
After fleecing Hull of most of its bankroll, Dave decided to chase the bigger games up the motorway in Birmingham, Leeds, Bradford and Nottingham. By his own accounts, his home town of Hull was a rough place, but once he started hitting these new cities, he quickly felt the need to pack a gun. To elucidate on the dangers of these games, Dave smugly told me about a particular night in Bradford.
“I was in Bradford with Gary Whittaker, who used to drive me around, playing with some Pakistanis at a place called Papa’s when I won all the money. As I was leaving, I turned all the lights out before I walked out onto the fire escape. I was a dingy morning, I could hear them whispering in the alleyway below, so I fired a couple of shots in the air and they scattered like rats... Gary Whittaker had a heart attack behind me.”
Dave’s persona and talent found its way to London in 1996, and into the revered Victoria Casino. “To be fair, when I got down to London, there were better poker players and they weren’t playing on ‘scared money’. So I couldn’t bully them down there, and most of them had more money than me,” Dave said.
With this in mind, I quizzed Dave about the identity of these so-called bullies. Put more bluntly, who was to fear? Without hesitation and with a smug grin, he nonchalantly replied, “Me. I wasn’t really scared of anybody. I remember walking by myself into a place on Edgware Road in London, which was crowded with people who looked like they were straight off ‘Crime Watch’. There was a pool table in there and I started winning a few quid. Next thing, they got on the phone and this guy came walking in, and he asked me if I wanted to play, and I looked at him and I realised that it was the World Champion of Pool – Maltese Joe.”
By 1997, Dave had claims to being one of the world’s premiere Omaha players. To prove himself on the world stage however, meant one thing and one thing only: Las Vegas. Dave recalled for me with great fondess his first moments in a Las Vegas casino. “I’ll never forget. I walked into the Four Queens in my suit – boiling hot – I was the only guy with a suit on in Vegas apart from the FBI,” he said.
He came across the Atlantic with several other European players, who in Dave’s opinion were “head and shoulders above most [American players].” His point was proven during the 1997 Four Queens Poker Classic when famously defeated Men “The Master’ Nguyen heads-up in the $500 pot-limit Omaha event. The event remains part of poker folklore, for this was the moment that the ‘Devilfish’ moniker was galvanised.
The 1997 trip, which also featured Dave’s first WSOP bracelet win in the $2,000 pot-limit Hold’em event, was the beginning of a affinity with Vegas that he still holds dear. “There is nowhere in the world like Vegas. I’ve just done seven weeks in Vegas, I could not do seven weeks anywhere else in the world. You get amazingly beautiful women, so many it’s unbelievable. I’m not talking about Vegas girls... I’m talking about the girls coming to Vegas – on a weekend, for a party, always really nice girls. I need action. I’m that sort of guy.”
In keeping with this mantra, Dave has recently launched DevilfishPoker.com in the hope that players will always be able to find good action. “We started about ten months ago, and now have 3200 registered players; 700 of which are cash players,” he boasted. “Compared to the European sites, DevilfishPoker.com has 24-hour action. Anytime you want play in the day, there’s people to play and tables to go on. If you play on a lot of the European sites, obviously at 2am you’re not going to get a game, but that’s the peak time in America. And as a bonus, I’m on at least 20-30 hours a week... Good luck trying and take my money though!”
2 comments
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Posted by georgestam – 20 Oct 2007, 1:12 PM
Seems like a really nice guy, not what i expected
Posted by MVP2008 – 13 May 2008, 3:18 AM
People look at Devilfish and they think he must be some tough guy or jerk, but they are just going by what they see on the exterior. Sometimes the toughest looking people turn out to be some of the nicest, and he is definitely one of the most recognizable and interesting figures in poker.