Sometimes you reach a catastrophe in your life and you need something to shake you out of whatever malaise you find yourself drowning in. Maybe a safari in Africa or a new haircut. Some people curl up and die, resigning themselves to the slings and arrows of fate. But for adrenaline junkies the normal solutions to emotional crises won't do. For them the response to tragedy needs to be as dramatic as the tragedy itself, and as thrilling: a rush of blood, a gulp of rarefied air, life or death, celebration or calamity. It's the only way to deal with the collapses of a life lived at a fevered pitch.Not long ago professional poker player Olivier Busquet found himself at just such a collapse. In his early 30s and newly divorced, the New York City native decided he needed to forge himself a new identity to deal with what he called his "traumatic personal experience." The problem is, when you're a high-stakes professional poker player famous for taking enormous risks, your options for identity-forging are limited. Busquet could have gone back to the quieter delights of his high school years, when he played on the chess team and sang in the school choir, or gotten reacquainted with the life of the mind he'd lived while a philosophy major at Cornell University. But after nearly a decade as a professional poker player, with all those manic ups and downs, the bankroll collapses and earnings in excess of $6 million, I'm guessing the monastic life and its subtle pleasures no longer had any pull on him, and he knew it.So, what's a broken-hearted, adrenaline-addicted, card-playing thrill junkie to do? Well, if you're Olivier Busquet you go on Twitter some September morning and tell the world that you're interested in setting up a fight against another member of the poker community. Not eight hours later he had a bite. JC Alvarado, a Mexican poker player with career winnings of more than $3 million and a blue belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, told Busquet that he was interested in the MMA fight despite not having trained "seriously all year," and negotiations between the two men commenced, thrilling a poker community still reeling from the collapse of a rumored $500,000 fight between professionals David "Doc" Sands and Doug "WCGRider" Polk a month earlier.Well, it looks like this fight might actually happen. Last week Alvarado tweeted the "big news" that he and Busquet had agreed to terms. To make up for the disparity in fighting experience (Busquet has zero), Alvarado will put up $150,000 against Busquet's $120,000. For some reason that handicap doesn't take into account Busquet's considerable size advantage: Busquet may lack experience but his cut-off weight for the fight will be 187.5 pounds, more than 20 pounds over that of Alvarado, who will have to make 165. Maybe too much jiu-jitsu (a discipline famous for valuing technique over size and strength) has melted Alvarado's brain and he's forgotten than in the ring, size is usually still destiny. Or maybe both men have spent too many years sitting at tables to remember just how much advantage there is to being 20 pounds heavier than your opponent when competing in a venue where moving and sweating are in play, and where force still equals mass times acceleration.Then there's the size of the stakes themselves. Whoever wins the fight will walk away with a purse far larger than the average mixed martial artist fighting in the UFC could ever hope to make off one fight, or even in a year, more even than many of the promotion's biggest stars. At UFC 192, main event fighter Alexander Gustafsson walked away with $124,000 for the night, and that included his Fight of the Night bonus and his Reebok sponsorship payout. Longtime UFC star Rashad Evans pocketed $140,000, and UFC rookie/superstar-in-the-making Sage Northcutt made a mere $24,900, a full $125,000 less than professional poker player/hero of his own romantic tragedy Olivier Busquet will make if he can find a way to win his first-ever fight next April.Read 'em and weep, you fighters of the world.
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