1) Another woman’s story ?
After the Backgammon World Championship in 1985, I had moved to Paris by chance. I was successful in the tournament in Monte Carlo and even in Black Jack, which I played almost every evening. And I also knew that there was a gambling club in Paris. Just where you could play backgammon. So that’s where the devastating story of the proposition against Vladimir happened. I spent the next day playing, but not with games. In the evening I came to our hotel. Vladimir came to meet me. A woman at his side. A very pretty one. We talked. She was from San Francisco.
The three of us stood in front of the hotel for a while. I’ll leave you to speculate (wildly) about the reasons why Vladimir had left us so soon. Anyway, at some point we were alone.
We may have talked about many things but definitely not about my job. I had to cleverly conceal it, at least for one day, also as self-protection.
She told me that he had hit on her the day before. She talked about “this show-off, supposedly he’s a backgammon pro or something”. He had just won a large sum of money and so on. And did he think he could get a woman into bed with money?
I acted ignorant, amazed and surprised. Professional gambler? Backgammon? What’s that supposed to be? A strange profession. And one can earn money with it?
And whether she nevertheless felt my sadness and despair over my committed stupidity and only out of pity…. well, anyway, we ended up in my hotel room.
She stayed with me all night. And it was truly a night to remember. Even the morning…
I never found out about his night’s rest, but I guess he would have loved to swap.
Excuse me, Vlad, I got lucky that time!
And if you now want to tell me something about “Yes, yes, bad luck at play…”, then I can only reply: “the dumbest pawns…”. Because this loss of money had nothing to do with bad luck…
