A 7 had come on the river and poker pro Dave Colclough had just been check-raised for all of his chips. Considering how large the bet was that Dave had popped out on the end and how early in the tournament it was, you had to consider he had a very good hand. There were no straights on the board and no flushes available, and Dave stared and stared at his cards and his opponent for what seemed like ages before sighing, calling, and flipping over his pocket pair of fives to reveal a set, three of a kind. But it wasn’t good enough, because his opponent, staring from the No. 8 seat impassively with dark shades and straight black hair, flipped over her pocket sevens and raked a pot large enough to knock Colclough straight out of the Copenhagen EPT tournament only 10 minutes after it had begun. Score another one for “Bad Girl,” poker champion Xuyen Pham.
“I DON’T KNOW HOW MANY TIMES I FOLDED STRAIGHTS AND FLUSHES RIGHT AWAY.”
I caught up with Xuyen (pronounced S-Wen) later that month by telephone, but even that was a tough call, as my first few attempts had found her on a heavy schedule of multiple Internet tournaments and live poker action. Xuyen likes to play, and with the way things have been going, who can blame her? Xuyen has been gathering tournament results in the UK for a few years now, but it was at the World Poker Championships in Dublin last year that she announced her power in a big way, tearing through a field of the top players in the world to pick up first place and a quarter of a million Euros. That’s not bad for someone who had never played poker before leaving her native …