“Anything one man can imagine, other men can make real.”
– Jules Verne (Around the World in Eighty Days)
Fifty flags
In poker we tend to measure greatness with novelty checks and pewter tat. Money is the scoreboard, but bracelets, trophies, and rings are the currency of prestige. However, tucked away in the Hendon Mob database is a quieter form of achievement, one measured not in dollars, but in tiny virtual national flags. Each represents a tournament cash in a different country and, in the right hands, that clump of pixels can amount to something far bigger than a line on a résumé.
Roos’s version was about racing against the tournament schedule
Flying Dutchman Koen Roos understood this better than most as he spent 2025 turning poker into something that would have impressed Jules Verne himself. If Around the World in Eighty Days was about racing against the clock, Roos’s version was about racing against the tournament schedule. By the end of the year, he had collected 50 flags, each earned the hard way, by surviving long enough in a live event to reach the money.
It is easy to say the number out loud and miss the madness behind it. Fifty countries means 50 separate poker ecosystems, 50 journeys and 50 times that variance could have ruined your day. Sometimes the bubble burst in a packed poker room at a glamorous destination. Sometimes it was in a hotel function room that hosted a wedding the previous weekend. Through it all Roos kept showing up, buying in, grinding his stack and, when necessary, summoning his inner cockroach.
Wanderlustful
The raw number is impressive, but the real story lives in the logistics. Cashing tournaments in 50 countries inside a single calendar year requires more than good poker fundamentals. It requires stamina, flexibility and a tolerance for airplane food that borders on heroic. One week, you are trying to play game theory optimal versus seasoned regulars in Monte Carlo on the European Poker Tour. The next week you are making exploitative adjustments in a small local tournament in Reykjavik.
jetlag follows you from table to table, from continent to continent
Opponents come and go, but travel quickly becomes the primary antagonist in this story. Airports blur into one long corridor of departure gates and overpriced coffee. Hotel rooms become indistinguishable. Like the shark bum-hunting the whale, the jetlag follows you from table to table, from continent to continent. The march to 50 must have been, at times, a lonely journey with just an anthropomorphized map of the world for company.
Only one person on planet Earth could have truly understood his plight. In 2024, the wanderlustful Canadian, Dominick “Dino” French, cashed in tournaments in 48 different countries. On the road for 300 days, what started as a few back-to-back poker trips snowballed into an obsession. His flag count started creeping upward. Twenty countries became 30. Thirty became 40. By the end of the year, Dino had logged 80 cashes and made 46 final tables to go with his 48 flags.
A poker odyssey
It felt like one of those delightful records that would survive untouched for years, maybe decades. It was quirky, so much bigger than the previous record and ridiculous in the best possible way. However, Roos looked at the number and decided that it was assailable. With a carefully plotted expedition, he could optimize for flags.
Roos became poker’s version of Jules Verne, globe-trotting with a purpose. With chip stacks instead of steamships, he traversed the planet on the quirkiest of adventures. When he eventually received the Hendon Mob Award recognizing his 50-country achievement, it must have felt less like a victory ceremony and more like the final page of a poker odyssey.
There was no million-dollar payday waiting at the finish line, but there was a trophy acknowledging so much more than being the last person standing in a poker battle royale. Roos could finally stand still and celebrate all those small victories. It took him 11 months to go around the world, but he planted 50 flags as he went.
