BY BRAD WILLIS

IT’S WINTERTIME IN LIMA, PERU, and fog is rolling in off the Pacific Coast. It drifts over the Larcomar Mall—a collection of chain restaurants and shops—such that the Chili’s and TGI Friday’s look like they are on a foggy London street corner instead of looking out over the cliffs of Miraflores. The winter fog here is hardly a surprise. It’s so common that many Peruvians fashion nets to capture the airborne moisture for clean drinking water. It’s a haze so beautiful and occasionally spooky that it’s one of the first things you notice when you stand on the street in front of Lima’s Atlantic City Casino.

The police presence on the streets of Miraflores is hard to miss. Revolver-strapped officers stand in bunches on every corner. Walk down an alley, and you’re bound to find a large panel van packed with riot police, although there’s never a hint of violence, which either means the police are superfluous or performing their duties perfectly.

This week, the local police are on edge. Their international counterparts are looking for Dutch playboy and suspected murderer Joran van der Sloot, a man alleged to have met his victim in the very casino where Peru’s biggest-ever poker tournament is taking place. Hundreds of thousands of American dollars have found their way to Lima. It’s more money than any poker tournament in the country has ever seen. Both events have drawn hordes of media from countless countries from around the globe.

It seems, at least for this week, that everything that matters is happening within a two-block radius of the Atlantic City Casino. As the tournament begins, Jose Barbero, a man most people call “Nacho,” is sitting at the end of a table with a wry smile on his face. It’s a look that gives away neither happiness nor bemusement. It is simply the way Nacho presents himself. It is the smile of a man who is singlehandedly claiming the Latin American Poker Tour (LAPT) for the people of Central and South America.

When the LAPT kicked off in 2008, it seemed to have everything. It boasted the biggest prize pools in the region, trips to fabulous locales, and some of the softer games the touring pros could hope to find. For a long time it lacked just one important thing: a Latin-American winner.
When Season One ended after three events, it claimed as its champions a Hungarian, a Spaniard, and a Dutchman. Of the four events in Season Two, only one could claim a champion from a Latin-American country, Argentina’s Fabian Ortiz, the first Latin-American player to win an LAPT main event. The fledgling tour had completed two seasons in Central and South America and had awarded more than 85 percent of its trophies to players from lands afar.

This in itself was no great tragedy, but neither was it an ideal situation. It was enough to encourage the newly minted president of the LAPT David Carrion to comment recently, “We would like to see an increasing number of local players participate in LAPTs.”

Carrion joined the LAPT at the beginning of Season Three, which promised both new luxury destinations and bigger fields. When the first event ended in Playa Conchal, Costa Rica, however, Carrion still had only Ortiz to claim as a true Latin-American champion. That would change a few months later when the man named Nacho traveled to Punta del Este, Uruguay.

Like many top modern poker pros, Nacho Barbero got his start in the card game Magic: The Gathering. In 2003, he was Argentina’s Magic champion. The following year, he moved to France, a trip that would forever change his life. There he met fellow Magic pro Gabriel Nassif, who had returned from the United States with an exciting discovery. Everyone Nassif encountered in his Magic circles was playing online poker. Nassif loaded up an online game of $5/$10 Limit Hold ’Em and showed Barbero how it worked. Barbero was smitten.
As Nassif was going to bed, Barbero asked him if he could borrow his account to see if it was possible to translate the skills of one card game to another. The result was disastrous. Barbero didn’t understand starting hand values. He didn’t understand position. He didn’t understand much of anything. By the time Nassif woke up, Barbero had lost $800.

“I was so depressed that I was almost crying,” Barbero said. “It was a lot of money for me.”

Losing that much money playing a simple card game was inconceivable to him. “I could not sleep at all that night,” he recalled. “I will remember this all my life.”

Like Ortiz, the only Latin-American LAPT champion through more than two seasons of the tour, Barbero hails from Argentina. He grew up in a city outside Buenos Aires and lived the life of a typical kid. High-stakes poker didn’t figure into his daily routine, and until he found Magic, the idea that he could make money playing cards didn’t compute.

Despite what seemed at the time a life-changing loss in France, Barbero persevered. He knew he was smart enough. He knew he had the talent. He knew he could translate his talents for one game to success in another.

“The majority of the situations in poker come heads-up, and you have to try to get into your opponent’s mind and get a good read,” he said.
Within a year, Barbero had figured it out. He won a World Poker Tour side event in Paris, then an Omaha tournament at the European Poker Tour’s stop in Barcelona. For those wins alone, he banked approximately $60,000. The $800 he lost on Nassif’s account? That was now just a plane ticket to wherever Barbero might decide to go next.

Within a few years, Barbero favored no tour. He went where the money was. Whether it was making a final table at the World Series of Poker, winning a PokerStars Caribbean Adventure side tournament, or final-tabling a stop on the LAPT, Barbero seemed content to go anywhere and capable of winning anything.

The tournament in Punta del Este accelerated his rapid ascent. He won the big Season Three LAPT event there for nearly $280,000. That stop this past February gave him his first main event title. It also gave the LAPT another Latin-American champion.
What could be better?

Barbero and the LAPT only had to wait a few months for the answer.

The LAPT is still a growing tour. Like the EPT and WPT in their early days, the organizers and tournament reporting staff are still a small group of tight-knit observers who know most people on the tour.

As the event in Lima wound its way through the first day and into the second, people began to whisper about a very intriguing possibility: There was a chance that both previous Season Three champions would end up at the final table of LAPT Lima.
There had been two events in the third season thus far. Canadian Amer Sulaiman had won the tournament in Playa Conchal. Barbero took the title in Punta del Este. At the end of the second day, with only 24 players remaining in the field, Sulaiman and Barbero were at the top of the leaderboard.

The EPT has gone though six seasons and never had a repeat winner, but after only 10 events on the LAPT, there was a good chance of that happening. Magnifying the drama of the possibility, it had the potential to occur in the second-biggest LAPT main event in its three-season history. Both Sulaiman and Barbero had navigated though a minefield of 384 players to make it to Day Three.
Sulaiman couldn’t hold on, finishing in 13th place. Barbero, however, made the final table, then stormed through the remaining seven players like he’d been winning championships his entire life. After just a few hours of play, the man known as Nacho stood from his chair with a new nickname: “Back-To-Back Barbero.”

Even two weeks after his win, he was still overcome by the magnitude of his achievement. “It feels almost like a dream. I know it is going to change my career as a poker player.”

Within just a few months, Barbero had pocketed more than half a million dollars in LAPT money. In all, his live tournament winnings are pushing ever closer to a million bucks. All of a sudden, the guy who not so long ago couldn’t afford to lose $800 didn’t really have to worry about money. Instead, he could focus on what his back-to-back wins meant for the game and his people.
“It puts South America on the map,” he said. “There are many good players down there that people are not aware of. It is a big deal for the region.”

Barbero isn’t overstating it. While many good players have come from Latin America, until recently, few have been very well-known. Outside of Costa Rican godfather Humberto Brenes, most North Americans would be hard-pressed to name a single Latin-American poker pro.
“The majority of Latin Americans haven’t played as much as the Americans or the Europeans have,” Barbero conceded. “It will take some years until the average gets as good as the rest of the world.”

Nacho Barbero could be the one who changes that. With back-to-back wins on an ever-expanding tour, Barbero has proven that the LAPT isn’t simply a circuit for kids from the USA or Europe to vacation and claim a title. It’s a region with a growing collection of tough pros who take a certain amount of pride in claiming the tour championships for their country. For the time being, Barbero will carry the flag for Argentina, Latin America, and the LAPT.

“He will certainly be our flagship player until someone overcomes his feat,” David Carrion said. “I feel that this is just the beginning of a bright future for Nacho.”

By the time the final river card had fallen in Peru, the police had captured Joran van der Sloot and the fog had lifted some from the Miraflores coast. Every camera was now focused directly on Back-To-Back Barbero, and everyone seemed to have a question for him. The reporters shouted in Spanish and English. They all wanted to know what Barbero planned to do after winning his second LAPT title.

The wry grin appeared on Barbero’s face again. With a trademark twinkle in his eye, he said, “The best thing that could happen? I would win my third.”

Brad Willis is a freelance writer and tournament reporter based in Greenville, South Carolina.