It was early March, 2005.
NWP was less than a year old.
I had just moved to Las Vegas. My poker year was off to a mediocre start after a very nice 2004.
I played 80-160 all night at Bellagio. The game broke down to 3-handed. My two opponents were a young kid from Idaho, and a girl from the east coast.
The game stayed 3-handed for a long time. I got to talk to the girl for awhile, and she seemed a lot different than the typical girl I had encountered playing high limit poker. Up until that point, just about every girl I played with was super-high-maintenance, bitchy, and full of herself. This girl, while having a sort of brash, Philly-type attitude, was nice and down to earth. She was also a good player, and between that and running super-well, was the clear winner that night. She introduced herself as Mariealena.
I came back to Bellagio the next day to try and turn things around. The girl from the night before wasn't there, and there was only one game running, and it was full.
I waited around for awhile, glancing over at the next table that featured Tobey Maguire and his friend Leo DiCaprio birding it. Suddenly, the floorman approached me and asked if I wanted to play 3-handed. I said yes, and a new table started with me, some amateur, and David Williams.
I had never played with David Williams before, aside from a few sessions of 30-60 on Pokerstars in 2003 (before he was famous). At this point, Williams was just coming off of his runner-up WSOP Main Event finish, and he was not yet infamous for his appearance in porn.
I was a complete unknown in poker at this point. Some people knew me from Pokerstars, but very few people could put my face or real name to "Dan Druff". I had not yet appeared on ESPN, not yet won a bracelet, and in fact never played a tournament in my life.
The third guy at the table was embarrassing. He whipped out a dollar bill and had David Williams autograph it. Seriously? You're having a guy at your own poker game sign autographs for you? Anyway, David obliged, and he seemed like a nice enough guy. The third dude eventually left, and David and I played heads up. I didn't have much time to assess David's heads-up skill, because we were quickly informed that two seats were available in the main game, and we both had to move.
The two seats were right next to each other, which meant I was sitting next to David. He had been sitting with a girl the whole time, but I was too busy paying attention to our 3-handed (and then heads-up) game to really look much at her. Now that I was at the much slower-paced full ring game, I gave her a better glance. It was the girl who played the daughter of "The Matador" from the TV show "TILT"!
This would be much less interesting today, as the girl has done just about nothing ever since, and in fact hasn't acted in any TV show or movie (not even a bit part) since 2007. However, at the time, TILT was still on the air, having just wrapped filming for its first (and what was going to be its last) season.
She was wearing some sort of designer jeans which she bragged to David that she stole from the set of TILT. Her name was Amelia Cooke.
Anyway, she was clearly more than just friends with David, as the two were kissing and whispering to each other the entire time. Amelia was going on and on to David about some girl in poker (never figured out who) that was jealous of her and had been giving her dirty looks earlier. She said some other then-interesting stuff which I now forget. Anyway, I was the only one who could hear this stuff, and decided to keep quiet and eavesdrop, pretending to be paying attention elsewhere. David didn't seem concerned about me hearing it, because he had no idea who I was. He was also drinking a lot. I remembered as much as I could, and as soon as the game was over, I went home and posted the whole story on NWP.
Within less than an hour of posting the story, I got a PM.
It was from a new account named "Silence". This person sent me a long letter, asking me to delete the post I made about David Williams. Apparently this "Silence" was a friend of David's, and told me that he had a girlfriend back home in Texas. If I were to leave my story up, it would likely get back to the girl, and David's relationship would be in big trouble.
I had to make a quick judgment call. Few people had seen the post yet, especially because NWP wasn't all that active in early 2005, and because the post was made in the middle of the night. I could probably take it down without much hoopla, but I had to act quickly if I was going to. I just had to decide if I wanted to.
After all, why was it my problem that David Williams was cheating on his girlfriend with the girl from TILT? My post had a lot of good stuff in it (again, a lot of which I no longer remember), and I really didn't want to remove it. The fact that David still had a girlfriend made it even better!
But after a few minutes of thinking, my conscience got to me. Even if David was cheating on his girl, I didn't feel right being the guy to out it. He seemed like a nice enough guy when I played with him, and I also didn't like the idea of making enemies with an influential and well-known player in poker, just to post some gossip. I also felt a little sleazy for eavesdropping on what was supposed to be a private conversation and then reporting it on the internet.
For that reason, I deleted the post, and told Silence to pass the message to David that I had done so.
Silence thanked me, and said that David would be very happy to hear that I removed it. The person then identified themselves as one of the people at the table the night before when I played 3-handed. "And I wasn't the guy," she said.
It turned out that she had been a lurker on NWP since near the beginning. She said that she did not realize that I was "DanDruff" from NWP when we played 3-handed, which made sense because I never said it, and almost nobody knew who I was at that point.
Mariealena and I became friends after that. When she and boyfriend John D'Agostino came out to Vegas for the 2005 WSOP, she invited me over for dinner in early June. Unlike her later WSOP dinner parties which would feature up to 30 guests, I was the only one invited that night. At one point, John asked me if I was going to play "on Friday".
"What's Friday?", I asked. I paid so little attention to the WSOP at the time that I actually forgot for a moment that it was going on.
"You know, the limit hold 'em event," said John.
"Oh, really? I've never played a tournament before," I responded. "How much is the buyin?"
"It's $1500. Not that much money."
"$1500, huh? Well, maybe I'll play. I don't know. Yeah... maybe I'll do it."
So Friday came, and I decided to give it a shot. I would never have known about the event if it wasn't for that night's dinner, which I wouldn't have had if I hadn't made that post back in March about David Williams.
Friday's $1500 event ended up being the one where I finished 3rd, got on ESPN, and spun a seat cover.
My success there inspired me to e-mail Interpoker, where I had been playing a lot, and ask them for a WSOP sponsorship. They said that they couldn't give me a sponsorship, but agreed to buy me into the $3000 limit event in July.
That was the event where I won the bracelet.
I would not have played either event had it not been for that one post I made about David Williams in March, which subsequently allowed me to start communicating with Mariealena, which subsequently led to a dinner where her boyfriend suggested I play a WSOP limit event.
She was right about David Williams. He was very happy that I deleted that post. After my 2005 WSOP publicity, he knew who "Dan Druff" was, and he was extremely nice to me every time we saw each other for the next 9 months or so. We never discussed the deleted post, but I assumed that was the main reason he was always so friendly with me. That ended in April, 2006, when DCal_Zone made the "David Williams appeared in a porn" post on NWP, and I was guilty by association. David was still pleasant with me, but the friendliness was gone after that. I suppose I understand.
Anyway, I kept this story to myself for 4 years, mainly because I still didn't want David Williams getting in trouble with his girlfriend -- especially since NWP already did enough damage with the foot porn story. Now that the '05 girlfriend is long, long gone, I figured I'd share.
Also, this whole incident was what made Mariealena sign up an account here. If this didn't happen, there's a good chance she would have just remained a lurker, and most of you wouldn't have gotten to know her. Obviously I can't say this for sure, but that's what I'm guessing would have happened.