GG Novotný

Pavel Novotný architected banking systems in Prague until the game quietly became the second career. His analysis channel teaches half of central Europe how to think, in a voice one subscriber described as a professor who has just missed a train.

His problem is not the opponent. He is brilliant for seven points, ordinary after eleven, and it is always the clock that gets him rather than the man across the table. He talks throughout, has a superstition for most situations, and the circuit is fond of him precisely because the brilliance and the self-sabotage turn up in the same package. He is one of the few players here whose profile properly belongs at the cash tables, where a session has no eleventh point to reach.