Poker Game Tips

Two of the biggest video game nerds in online poker – Bertrand “ElkY” Grospellier and Lex Veldhuis – are planning a kickboxing match against each other that will take place some time before the WSOP. Both guys are friends going back to their days as top StarCraft players, so it’s not like this fight is over a girl or because Grospellier’s live tournament winnings ($6.5 million) dwarf Veldhuis’ ($560k). Instead, the two are arranging this fight over a prop bet as Veldhuis indicated in this tweet, “I’m fighting Elky in Las Vegas this summer. Last week of May right before WSOP probably. This all because of a side bet!”

Much of the poker community is putting their faith behind Veldhuis in this fight because he has actually been kickboxing for quite a while. A Dutch poster on TwoPlusTwo alluded to this when he wrote, “I’ll take Lex for sure. Don’t know about Elky, but I know Lex has been training for a long time in one of the best gyms in the Netherlands. And we have a lot of those here!”

I’d have to throw my support behind Veldhuis too seeing as how the Dutch have a history of beating on other countries in kickboxing (check out Ernesto Hoost). And if you’ve ever seen a K1 kickboxing event, it always seems like at least half of the fighters are from The Netherlands. You don’t, however, see too many pale, skinny Frenchmen like Grospellier running around the ring. But those close to ElkY say that he’s been hitting the gym a lot lately to pack on muscle in hopes of actually putting up a fight, so we’ll see what happens.

This is the first foray into kickboxing by the poker world, but not the first martial arts matchup between high-profile poker players. Gus Hansen was famously knocked around the ring by Theo Jorgensen when the two boxed before the EPT Scandinavian Open, while Liv Boeree and reporter Melissa Castro went the distance in a boxing match before Boeree won by decision.