It was the early hours of Saturday morning, and Tikay was busy wasting time before he had to leave for the airport messing about online in the lobby of the SAS Radisson Plaza, Helsinki. I was, as so often happens, it seems, following his esteemed example. The revolving doors slowly spewed forth tired poker player after poker player, as the final table of the €2,000 event wound down. It just so happened that the last one we saw return was a certain Ramzi Jelassi – member of the Swedish Team Hink and eventual chopper of the competition. He had somehow avoided a night on the town, and I thought that this would be a perfect opportunity to get a sort of profile for blonde on this highly aggressive, but intuitive and thoughtful young player. You see, I just never stop working, even though it might have looked to a casual observer like I was playing an Omaha comp online and drinking tea, for the most part.
Like his friend JP, Ramzi isn’t old enough for Vegas, but after taking first place and €56,200 in the 
€1,000 side event at Barcelona last month, his eventual second place in this tournament must calm him down somewhat – there’s plenty of time for crossing the Atlantic. Incidentally, he flew straight to Paris, where we may just catch up with him for the WPT…in fact, he said more than once, with an expression of sincerity, that he sort of “had a feeling I would win something big, so I have to travel and play them all.” Can’t argue with that.
In any case, having given myself what turned out to be one of the most entertaining sightseeing days in summery Helsinki by virtue of my phenomenally quick exit from the Midnight Sun tournament, I had left the skilled young Ramzi with around average chips to fly his Team Hink flag through the punishing Day Two. While Tikay and I were wandering around Helsinki, watching trains (his idea) and an outdoor rock concert (an accident) and some people smoking fish over wood fires (not sure what was going on there), he developed quite a chip lead, and in the early evening, with two tables left, had a commanding chip position with over 200k.
I’d first met Ramzi properly in Helsinki in the winter, since his expedition to Luton was, it seemed, enough to put him off the UK as a holiday destination, and with Flushy and JP we devised a ridiculous game whereby you played as a team, with one card of a hold’em hand each, betting solely by virtue of how convincingly you could table talk without revealing your card. Even sensibles like Tikay and Simon Trumper got sucked into this one, and I remember thinking how much he seemed to think about poker 24/7. That tournament (the €2,000 freezeout, not the TeamHold’em) was actually won by his Team Hink-mate Jonas Molander, who took just shy of €100k and, here’s the part which seemed to annoy Ramzi just a little bit, a little statuette of a Santa Claus gnome.
Although this tournament resulted in a chop (€51k to him, €56k to the first place Jukka Perala) the distribution of Santa-gnomes (Jonas: 1 Jukka:1 Ramzi:0) had him feeling a certain trophy wistfulness. Oh well, there’s that envelope stuffed with €500 notes to cheer him up, then.
He seemed content to sit around talking about poker and poker-related subjects, and I found out some interesting things. For example, an “English raise” is a too-large raise with AK, say, preferably after a half hour or so of weak-tight play and a lot of folding. You get the idea – he says, “you all think Scandies are maniacs, we think you’re rocky obvious bettors.” Well, there you have it, ladies and gents, they can negatively stereotype as well as we can, and it’s hard to argue with someone who has just demonstrated that they don’t just talk a good game. Well, actually, it’s not that hard to argue, and Ramzi says he just has a realistic opinion of a)his own ability and b)everyone else’s but is, like many other young players of the Scandinavian persuasion, very open to discussing the minutiae of analysis without putting on that “I know it all so just talk to the hand” attitude I’ve come across occasionally in this country. In fact, most of the young players I rate most highly are precisely those who aren’t giving themselves a glass ceiling by prematurely deciding not to listen to anyone else – natural ability can be augmented throughout life, and it can only make you better not to become an egomaniacal one-way radio.
So what’s Team Hink, then? Well, to quote their site: “Team Hink is a pokerteam that contains four pretty young pokerplayers specialized on tournament poker. Jonas Molander, Ramzi Jelassi, Sebastian Riviere and Simon Johansson. Each of the members are born in 1986, and been playing poker seriously for around two years.” They have done a neat job of turning a travelling bunch of (pretty successful) poker friends into a Team, with sponsorship just over the horizon, the website (www.teamhink.com) and some incomprehensible hoodies featuring the white bucket. Apparently, ‘hink’ is Swedish for ‘bucket’ and it’s just too long a story…so now you understand as much as I do. Ask JP – he was apparently part of the team in Barca.
His goals – presumably to win the WPT, then start again on the old EPT merry-go-round, while “starting a poker player soccer team, and getting some hobbies.” I condense for the sake of brevity. I think I managed to convince him that London was the second largest city in the world, so expect Team Hink to bring their own brand of tournament poker over, as soon as they find a good reason to stop avoiding the UK, and show the weak-tight English how the game’s played Up North.