Lex Live is coming soon! The fourth iteration of Lex Live returns to Bratislava, Slovakia from the 23-29th of June.
Hosted by Lex Veldhuis himself, he, and his team work to organise a poker series like no other. It’s a festival that focusses on the community he has built over the years and provides a fun filled live poker experience that is as accessible as possible for everyone who might consider themselves a part of the Veld-Army.
I had the opportunity to ask Lex a couple questions and about the series, what it takes to organise an event like this, his motivations for hosting a series and the priorities he has for the event.
What were the motivations for starting your own live event series?
It was just the next logical step for me. One of the things that I value most about my stream is the sense of community we have.
There are lots of regulars in the chat; they talk to each other in the stream, they are talking to each other offline, they have created study groups through it or play video games together so I feel like if you hang out in the chat all day, the next logical step is to meet each other in real life.
For me it is very much about meeting the people and seeing the faces behind the nicknames. Now the series has gotten a lot busier and the poker is getting bigger it looks like a typical lower/mid-stakes tournament series.
It’s really cool to see how this event has grown and how the poker has evolved along with it too.
What are the priorities for you when organising an event such as this?
I generally just want to think, ‘how do I make this event give people the same feeling that I would have during tennis or football camp back in the day?,’ where you get there on Monday, you leave on Sunday and then you sit on the train home and think wow what an insane week that was!
That’s the feeling I want; I really want to make it a full experience. I think what we do well at Lex Live is the activities, where we plan a wide variety of things to do every day.
We really know how to pull people together and do stuff, whether its games, card games, sports, pub quizzes; where people can have a great time and it doesn’t really cut much into the poker playing time. It really gives the event more depth and it makes people not want to miss it!
The priorities for poker, is that it should be fun, it should be loose and I just want there to be enough poker. This event is going to have more poker than other Lex Lives had because the demand is there for it.
Overall I think the top priority for me is that I want the event to feel like being in my chat; very tight knit, lots of fun and variety, and open to anybody.
What are the biggest difficulties you encounter when planning an event like this?
Well, it’s not my forte to organise live events, it’s not where I have a lot of experience or where I have a lot of skills but luckily I have Nadia and she runs point on the whole operation.
She is amazing at organising and she takes care of all the things that I am really bad at, while also having a great eye for the community feel of the event.
The difficulties are in that it’s not necessarily just a poker stop; it’s a bit different when people are travelling to go to Lex Live just because of the community events and you know it might be their vacation for that year for some people, so that makes planning it a bit difficult.
I am pretty excited to go to Bratislava and to Banco Casino because it’s a really nice city, there’s really good food, there’s a great atmosphere in the town, all whilst still being very affordable.
It’s very close to some big airports, so its relatively easy to get to, and I think that’s sort of where our biggest challenges are; trying to check all the boxes in this way.
What makes Lex Live so special for you?
I just feel so much support when I’m there. I have it when I’m streaming as well and it’s just really special.
It sounds so wholesome in a way where people throw up in their mouth a little when they hear stuff like that, but it’s just the way it is.
It’s the way I see people are talking to each other, the way people are hanging out and just looking around the room there it makes me so happy.
You see people forming real friendships and you know people that have met each other through the stream that now talk daily and its really nice for me to meet everyone, too.
I know a lot of little things about a lot of people that visit the chat a lot but now I really get to sit down and speak to them. It gives me the community feeling but it also gives me the feeling of what poker tournaments and series used to feel like.
I really feel that this event represents just tonnes of people sitting in a room that love poker and also have like to have a drink or play a game together. It just it feels very warm to me, it’s hard to explain.
The Community Speaks
As Lex Live is all about the community it is only fitting to include some comments from the community members themselves on what makes Lex Live so special and why it’s a must attend series for them.
Lex Live 3 was my first Lex Live. I had been to a couple of poker events before, but Lex Lives are designed to be more community oriented than your average poker events; you’d have opportunities to hang out with people like sightseeing, trivia quiz, card games, communal eating, you name it.
Lex Live is by far the most fun I’ve had in a poker tournament. I quite frankly made friends for life and I can’t wait to both meet them again and make a bunch of new ones in Bratislava.
~ Pekka Rantala, Long time community member
What makes it special for me it’s meeting the community putting faces to nicknames, why I come, the love of the community and Lex.
~ Gardar ‘Vitne’ Svavarsson, Long-time community member
Well it’s more than just a poker stop, you get to meet people you talk to on a regular basis online! You get to put a name to the face. It’s a friends’ catch up with poker, drinking, lots of food and cool sightseeing. It’s arguably the best poker stop every year if you’re looking for more than just poker on the trip.
I have been a Lex sub for almost 9 years! So I feel engrained in the community, I feel like I can call a lot of the old time regular subs good friends so it’s the perfect excuse to see them and catch up.
~ Damiano Aloi, 2024 main event champ
Final Thoughts from Lex
If people haven’t ever been to Lex Live, its super low threshold, even if you’ve never watched the stream and you just like to play some poker, you can just walk into the hangout and say hello.
It’s open to everybody and everybody is very welcoming; come to the event and I swear you wouldn’t want to miss another one!
