Cigar Aficionado

David "Devilfish" Ulliott settles in at a dining table at the Aviation Club de in Paris and orders his usual -- vegetable soup, entrée of the day and two bottles of wine, one red and one white. Devilfish, a flamboyant, high-rolling guy with a larger-than-life personality, is notorious for winning three tables in a row on "Late Night Poker," United Kingdom's top-rated television show. Tall and broad-shouldered with swept-back hair and a goatee, the 48-year-old spends nine months of each year on the road, playing tournaments and cash games. He has established himself as arguably the most famous poker player in Europe: an Omaha specialist who has a touch for heads-up poker, claims a record of 15-0 and insists that nobody will challenge him. "I like the Aviation and I like Paris," says Devilfish. "I've gone broke in Paris, and it's a difficult place to get money if you don't speak French. A couple of times Bruno [Fitoussi, who started the poker operations at the Aviation Club de ] loaned me $20,000.

I like that. It shows respect. This is a gentleman's club where the games are 100 percent straight. Plus, the French play pretty open poker, which, for me, is a good reason to come here. But getting there may be difficult. If you're not careful, you can stroll up the Champs Elysees, looking hard for the Aviation Club, walk right by it, and never even realize it's there. Old-fashioned discretion -- whether you require it or not -- remains a hallmark of the gambling establishment.

The club is somewhat out of place on a tacky strip of the world-famous boulevard -- within blocks of McDonald's, near alleyways full of Irish pubs, and a dozen buildings up from a souvenir shop selling cheesy snow globes. Unlike its neighbors, the Aviation Club is an antiquated throwback to more elegant times on the Champs. Clearly, it's one of the world's few gambling establishments that does not do everything in its power to beckon suckers with outrageous come-ons. Slow down as you approach building number 104, and you will see fat but discreet neon letters that promise "backgammon, chemin de fer, pok 21," a variation on blackjack. Walk past the doormen, with their shaved heads and leather jackets, and you will enter a world that recalls an era when the highest-end gaming was done in private clubs; the wealthiest gamblers generally disdained casinos.

Never mind that the 85-year-old Aviation Club has become less snobby in order to survive in the twenty-first century; it still puts on a pretty good show. Once an unyieldingly private club with stiff hip fees, it's now a place where temporary hip is bequeathed to any reasonably well-dressed foreigner with a port. Show yours to the tuxedoed maître d' and he'll check your coat, call you by name, and lead you through a chandelier-lit, wood-ed anteroom that empties into posh gambling dens. In one space, a crowd surrounds blackjack and stud poker tables, both slightly modified from their American versions to suit French laws. Across the way, through a corridor of backgammon play, pot-limit poker action is hot and heavy. And in the biggest, least crowded room of all, older men in custom-tailored suits puff on Cuban Montecristos and play high-stakes baccarat.

The latter group, limping toward extinction, are the heart and soul of the Aviation Club, descendants (emotionally, if not literally) of the real-life aviators who launched the club just after the First World War. "It was initially started to help the widows and orphans of aviators from the war," says Marcel se, an elegant man in a bespoke suit who runs the club's gambling operations. "The original location was across the street and the gaming -- nothing but baccarat and chemin de fer -- probably came in simply because this club seemed like a nice place to play."

French gaming laws were wide open at the time, and the Aviation Club took advantage. "People wore tuxedos, it was very formal, and the place remained open around the clock," says se. "A guy who used to gamble at the old club told me that people would stay there for 48 hours at a clip." The stakes were staggering, limits were nonexistent, and the party seemed as if it would never end. Then the Second World War ignited, and gambling no longer seemed prudent. While se figures that the Aviation Club was open during the war, he acknowledges that things did not shift back into high gear till after the fall of the F¸hrer. "Like at the end of every war, once that one was over, people who stayed home, feeling afraid, wanted to go out and celebrate."

To accommodate them, the Aviation Club moved to its current, larger headquarters, and the club's true heyday began. Actor Omar Sharif and his entourage frequented the club to test the upper altitudes of no-limit play. Chauffeured Rolls-Royces and Bentleys lined the streets. And the in-house restaurant turned out 150 classic French dinners per night. But by the time se's father, Roland, was hired to run the gambling here in 1974, things had cooled off considerably. It wasn't due to a war, but to changing tastes. Gambling didn't exactly seem groovy, and the place had the fusty air of an out-of-it men's club. "But the didn't care," re the younger se. "They liked that you didn't know what it was from the outside. They didn't want people coming in here with 70,000 francs to gamble with. The only thing was that when you received a check [to pay off a gambling debt] from somebody who was 80 years old, you wanted to make sure it cleared before he died."

By 1995, the club seemed as if it might have been heading for extinction. That was when Marcel se (who had since ed the establishment) and his father decided to add poker, blackjack and stud. While longtime raised cane about the need to relax the Aviation's rules, the new games brought in fresh players who abandoned the high-stakes action of home-poker games, scattered throughout Parisian apartments at the time, to play in the Aviation's plush environment. The club, now crowded seven nights a week, is rocking with a half-dozen different poker games and occasional tournaments.

While ties and tuxes are no longer de rigueur, you definitely don't feel as if you are in supercasual Las Vegas, either. The Aviation possesses a level of intimacy that still leaves it resembling a high-stakes men's club -- and patrons act in kind. The doorman follows you to the ATM around the corner (to make sure you don't get jumped after retrieving your euros), the bartenders mix cocktails with old-fashioned aplomb, and the restaurant turns out terrific Frenchified steaks, chops and fish that go far beyond typical poker club grub. In the poker room, Gitane cigarette smoke intermingles with Cuban scents, players double-kiss one another's cheeks, and Gaelic arguments sometimes seem so intense that you're not sure whether they are discussing poker or Sartre. The action is rich enough that the Aviation Club has been established as a stop on the World Poker Tour (a 10,000-euro buy-in tournament was slated to take place here this February), and players from around the globe continually run through town, trying to take off the well-monied enthusiastic amateurs who seem to populate Paris's gaming scene.

"French players are likely to win and leave the table," Devilfish observes. "They like to hit and run. Then they come back and buy in again." He acknowledges that this is no way to build up a bankroll: "You're supposed to maximize wins and minimize losses. But if they lose they can go down for any amount, and if they win they can only win so much. In the 5,000-euro buy-in it's a little different; players stick around because they don't want to lose their seats. But in the 1,000- or 2,000-euro games, they win a few thousand and leave. Then you get somebody else sitting down and buying in for the bare minimum, and you have to break them four times instead of breaking the guy once to get your money back."

Devilfish (who got his moniker when a player by the name of Stevie Young likened him to a fish that can wound you) rebounded at the Aviation Club from a $40,000 deficit to finish slightly in the black -- a fairly remarkable achievement. "Unless you are very strong inside, after you get a few bad beats and lose a good bit of money, your game slips down a few notches," he says, leaving it unclear as to whether this applies to him or not. "But that can actually be a good thing -- since the only way you get out of trouble is by gambling. No one will give you your money back, and it's hard to play exact poker to win $40,000. So here are your choices: you can go to bed 40,000 down or you can liven up the game a bit, start swinging, gamble more than you normally would, and try to get your money back. That's what I did last night. There was a bit of steam in there, but I needed to put some bad beats on these people and try to get them hot -- just as they had gotten me a little hot."

While poker now seems to attract a well-heeled college-educated crowd of players, Devilfish got into the game the old-fashioned way. A working-class lad from the blue-collar town of Hull, in northern England, he began playing poker with his parents as a young boy. By age 15, he was in the local casinos, beating grown men at a three-card game called brag. Devilfish found his edge by watching the cards, which were not properly shuffled between hands, and gauging who'd be getting what. "I used to make a fortune." he re. "My father was working hard for 60 or 70 pounds a week, and I'd earn three times that through card playing. When you make that kind of money, it's very hard to get a straight job."

After one too many altercations with his father, Devilfish was tossed out of his home at 16. He traveled around the United Kingdom, playing strip-deck stud (the same 32-card game played in The Cincinnati Kid), then returned to Hull where he quickly found himself deemed too good for the local home games. So he went off to Leeds, where he was unknown, and learned to play Texas Hold'em and Omaha. Between winning streaks, he worked as a bouncer and, in his late 20s, spent a year in jail for brawling. Though Devilfish likes to say that he "hasn't gotten so much as a parking ticket in 18 years," he also acknowledges that the rough-and-tumble life shaped him into the poker player he is today. "There's no use in being a mommy's boy if you want to play poker," he says. "You meet a lot of tough characters out here."

Following his stint in jail, Devilfish met his wife, Amanda, and decided to live life on the (relatively) straight and narrow. They opened a pawnshop together in Hull and earned a good living buying and selling jewelry. These days he likes to talk about the large home he has in Hull, the Lexus in his driveway, and the sponsorship deal he's worked out with UltimateBet.com. Back then, however, Devilfish occasionally had to play poker to supplement the shop's cash flow, and it wasn't until 1996 that he made a name for himself on the international poker circuit. That year he wound up on a rush, winning a series of tournaments in the United Kingdom and going to the 4 Queens in Las Vegas for an Omaha event where he beat Men "The Master" Nguyen to snag a first prize of $65,000. In case anyone doubted his sense of self, he bought a pair of diamond-encrusted, knuckle-dusting rings that spell "Devil" on one hand and "Fish" on the other.

He also established himself as a guy who's fast with the nasty but clever quip. During a $20,000 buy-in game at the Horseshoe in Las Vegas, world-class player and Super/System author Doyle Brunson made a particularly careless move against Devilfish. Devilfish responded by saying, "Do me a favor, Doyle. Next time you write a book, don't put a plastic cover on it, because it's very hard for me to wipe my ass with it." Asked how Brunson replied, Devilfish says, "He probably didn't understand me. I speak too quickly for Doyle. I guess I need to speak Texan."

Devilfish gets up from the dinner table and heads back to the Aviation Club's poker room, leading the way through a wood-ed library, where the walls are covered with portraits of young aviators and the leather sofas and club chairs perfectly suit the environment. He's playing a tournament here and is struggling to keep afloat. A couple hours later, after getting blown out, he hops from his seat and asks only a single question: "Where's the cash game?"

He finds his game in an adjacent room. But it's shorthanded and presenting limited opportunities for profits. While waiting for an opening at the adjacent table -- where every seat is taken and the action is hot -- Devilfish bides his time and tries to liven things up, playing with a fast, aggressive style and pulling bluffs whenever he can (and even sometimes when he can't). He wears sunglasses that ride low on his nose, uses his thumb to flick up the edges of his cards, decisively slides his chips to the center of the table, and habitually refers to himself in the third person. After winning a big pot, he rakes in the chips and needles the loser: "Double the Fish up."

Defeated, the guy looks back at him and grumbles, "If I had your luck, I could fly."

Sitting alongside Devilfish is the suave French pop star Patrick Bruel, a talented poker player and an Aviation Club fixture. The two guys banter. "If you beat me this hand, I'll slice off my nuts on the Champs Elysees," says Devilfish. "Get a dull knife," Bruel replies as he turns over the winning cards -- while slowly taking apart a too-tight player at the opposite end of the table.

Dawn is a few hours away and Bruel says that he's tired and thinking of going home and getting some sleep. What keeps him here is that he's next up at the busier table. Devilfish, a place or two behind Bruel on the wait list, wants nothing more than to sit down there, and he offers a proposition: "Let me take the seat and you go home to get your beauty rest. Then you invest 5,000 euros in me, I'll put up 5,000, and we'll split the winnings."

Considering the hour, Bruel's not sure how much table time the 5,000 will buy him. Clearly he doesn't want to give Devilfish the money, have him play superaggressively for an hour, then leave after it's blown. "You'll play till 9 a.m.?" asks Bruel.

Eyeing the lustier game, Devilfish says what could be his poker-career motto: "I'll play till I'm too Goddamned tired to play anymore." Bruel laughs, then raises his future partner.

Michael Kaplan is Cigar Aficionado's gambling columnist.