Poker player searching for the dream in Vegas

Jamie Gold won more than $12 million at last year's WSOP, but he's still on a mission to become the world's best poker player. Ethan Miller/Getty Images

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LAS VEGAS -- Traveling with Jamie Gold has its perks. A flight to Las Vegas, for example, isn't simply a one-hour trip from San Francisco to Sin City; it's a theatrical production worthy of a casino showroom.

That's what happens when Sir Richard Branson invites you to host a celebrity poker tournament to commemorate Virgin America's first ever flight to Vegas. You get a terminal full of showgirls, lounge singers, silicone enhanced beauties and professional poker players, sort of.

"It seems like everyone's a professional poker player these days," says Gold, scanning the gate area. "You could say you're a professional poker player if you wanted to." I'm not, but Gold has invited me to play in tonight's charity poker game, and I'm in good company in the faux poker player department. I'm sitting next to Carmen Electra and Kyla Ebbert, a busty Hooters waitress that was kicked off a Southwest flight recently for dressing like, well a Hooters waitress.

One person who will never profess to be a professional poker player is Branson. He is dressed as an ordained minister the moment after being pre-ordained online the night before so he could wed a couple of Virgin employees mid-air with all the tackiness of a Vegas wedding chapel, sans the Elvis impersonator serving as a witness. "There's a hell of a difference between being an amateur poker player and a professional poker player," Branson says. "I haven't got the best poker face. I begin to smile once I get an Ace, Jack, Queen, King, but don't tell anyone."

Considering Branson is always smiling, he may have a shot after all. The smile on his face widens as he sips on a coffee while sitting in first class and tells me stories of his younger days. You know, before he was Father Richard.

"I remember one occasion when Keith Richards was misbehaving outrageously with somebody else's wife and I opened the door and there's this enormous angry husband with a gun in his hand, standing on the doorstep asking for his wife," he says. "I had to talk to him for about three minutes to try and give Keith and this guy's wife time to escape. The next thing I see is a naked Keith Richards and this man's naked wife running across the lawn behind him. I think they ended up in a prickly rose bush but they got away."

Sitting behind us is Electra, who has plenty of crazy stories of her own, although she isn't as willing to divulge them as she slips on her headphones and pretends to watch CNN on the flat screen in front of her. "You know I can't kiss and tell," she says softly. Fortunately the man seated a couple rows behind her, dozing off underneath a black Buzznation hat, has a pretty good story to tell, and it all started a little more than a year ago in the city we've just landed in.

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