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In 1998, I spent most time in Monte Carlo.

Monte Carlo is a charming little place in the south of France (I mention this specially for my American friends who once asked me, "Any other interests there besides snowboarding?"), with only four main streets, or boulevards. I called it the "natural rehab" — indeed, it took me just one year to return to a healthy lifestyle. I stopped drinking and smoking, my nervous system, shattered by an incessant struggle for a place in the sun back in Moscow, was soon back to normal, even my sickly green complexion turned porcelain with a touch of golden suntan.

Basking in the sun on the fine beaches and visiting health centres went along with the pleasures of nightlife. Formal parties, cocktail parties, private parties came around in endless series, all amidst the opulent splendour of beautiful mansions. They gave me an opportunity to strike up an acquaintance with quite a few blue-bloods. As we talked all the barons, counts, princes, God knows who else, displayed keen interest in the Russian mafia and prostitution. I would meekly point out that there were other, equally exciting sides of Russian life, like history, science or literature (one would know it if can read), for example, but there my titled friends" enthusiasm seemed to be distinctly waning. Perhaps their knowledge of history was not as extensive as that of prostitution and criminal activities, where almost everyone had a story to tell, sometimes two or three. Listening to them, I came to think that everything in Russia — history, literature, prostitutes, you name it — was great!

After a year of that mode of life I felt extremely bored. I even hired a teacher of the French language, paying him his 3 month's fee in advance. The educational process did not last very long — on the very first day I showed him the door, when he claimed that Russians had won the war against the Nazi Germany thanks to the severe frosts. "All those Germans simply froze to death", said the man, whose country had signed a capitulation a month after the German invasion — in the same railway carriage where Germany had admitted defeat in the First World War some twenty years before!

So much for the French language lessons, but I was full of energy and needed to do something.

Visiting the Monte Carlo Beach, I often saw a group of 10-20 people playing backgammon. Every now and then I could hear them bursting into laughter, giving shouts of delight, anger or frustration, even cursing. There were no Russians amongst the players (they would appear later, typically stirring up quite a bit of trouble), so although I could play the game myself — or rather knew the rules — I was too shy to approach them.

Then suddenly I got a break. It turned out that one of the players, Mike Svobodny, had a Russian girlfriend named Marushka. I asked her to introduce me to Mike; the very next day I found myself sitting opposite that giant of a man (he is well over six feet tall), rolling dice. After the game Mike pointed out my mistakes. We started a new game; now I was commenting on my tactics as we played. And Mike said, "You have a flair for the game, but you've got to work hard if you want to play serious backgammon. Know what, I'll get you to meet my friend Paul, aka X-22. He wrote a lot of books on the game and he is a fantastic teacher. He's got an uncanny ability to pinpoint your current level of play, so he tells you exactly what you need to know, without stuffing your head with lots of unnecessary information." "Is there really such a lot of information to stuff your head with?" I asked.

The thing is that at first, second, even third glance, backgammon may seem a fairly easy game — you just learn the rules and go ahead, leaving the rest to luck. In contrast to chess, a mediocre backgammon player might occasionally beat a champion in a couple of games.

Mike smiled. "Take a few lessons and see for yourself", he said.

Next morning at 7 a.m. I was hurrying to my first meeting with Paul (people who know me well are likely to gulp when they hear this, as 7 a.m. is the time I normally go to bed). Paul, too, looked as if he hadn't slept a wink after a long night of gambling. Sitting in the lobby of the Hotel Ermitage, we played one game and Paul gave his verdict: "a beginner". Then regular lessons started. This involved working with Paul for two hours every day plus an occasional game or two on the beach with other partners (hardly anyone was too happy to waste his time on a beginner). After few weeks of such studies I began to suspect it would take no less than 10 years to master the "easy" game. Later, in Los Angeles, as I was trying for a chance to become a film actress, it suddenly occurred to me that actors and backgammon players have a lot in common: everyone thinks he is the best, attributing casual success to his own genius, while putting each and every failure down to bad luck. Only real professionals, the players in the Top 100, know that their job is much more difficult than it might seem to an outsider and that their successes come as a result of hard work.

Knowing that I easily forget things and tend to get bored doing the same thing for a long time, no matter how exciting it appeared to be at the beginning, I resolved to make a full-scale assault on the game. Every day, after studying with Paul for two or three hours, I practiced backgammon on a computer and then played on the Internet with beginners like myself. A month passed and Paul said I had made good progress, adding that he had not expected such rapid improvement. A month later Paul and Mike suggested I go with them to a tournament in Budapest. It was there that we became really good friends. Plunging into the world of professional gamblers and backgammon players was a truly amazing experience. As I see it now, one of the most peculiar things about those people is their frenzied passion for betting. Indeed, they are prepared to bet anyone, anywhere, any time. Perhaps the most notorious gambler is Brian, whom I met some time later at a tournament in Las Vegas. He is known to have placed a bet of $250,000 that he would get a B-cup breast implant inserted into his body; he has been carrying it for a few years now. The moment the implant is removed Brian will have to pay the money back. On two other occasions he spent a week in a toilet and walked backwards a distance of several kilometres, all on a bet, but I don't know what the stakes were.

Oddly enough, Mike's remarkable shrewdness in judging character (he has degree in psychology and used to work with juvenile delinquents and was even bitten by one of them) goes hand in hand with typically American naivety. He has never believed in conspiracies behind political events. In 2001, he wagered no less than $500,000 that Gore would win the presidential election. "You can kiss your money good-bye", Mike's girlfriend Marushka said to him, "Bush is the more stupid of the two so he's bound to win. Every nation gets the government it deserves."

During the two weeks' delay in counting the votes, which seemed to have shattered Mike's nervous system, I couldn't help chaffing him, "You Americans are really so slow! How much more time do you need to count up votes in a presidential election? Why, we in Russia know the results two months before an election has started!"

Mike, of course, lost the money, but to this very day he refuses to believe the election was rigged.

For the following two years Mike, Paul and I went on a tour of Europe, playing in tournaments in Italy, France, Monaco, Switzerland, Czech Republic, even Great Britain. At first I played in the "beginners", then in the "intermediaries", and finally moved on to the "professionals" category. The regulations allow you to play in any of the three categories, according to your own choice.

Once Paul invited me to play together with him in a doubles tournament that was held in Crockford Club in London. Doubles is a form of competition where two people play in partnership against two others. I liked doubles more than singles because there you and your partner act as a small team, discussing every move during and sharing joy or disappointment, depending on the outcome of the game. We came second in London, but in 2000 we won the first prize in the annual international championship in Lugano, sweeping through the knockouts and scoring a victory in the last, fifth round. The feat brought us the title of world champions in doubles.

The final was played in an isolated room, with just Paul and me sitting opposite our opponents at a table with a board and a clock on it (we played with a time limit). There was a television camera over the table to let the other 60 players, who had been eliminated in the previous rounds, watch the game on a large screen in another room. Paul said everyone would prefer to see my hands rather than his, so he suggested that I move the checkers. Only if he didn't agree with my decision he would make a move himself (in doubles, a team is allowed to keep on trying to choose the best move until one of the players picks up the dice). This, he added, would help the viewers to evaluate our individual plays.

We didn't have to argue much over our moves, however, as the match turned out to be one uninterrupted streak of good luck (but professionalism played its part too). The commentary for the audience would typically run like this, "Now Victoria rolls again just what they need, hitting an adverse blot with four and covering at the same time in her home board with one" — and so on and so forth for the whole two hours the match lasted.

When it was all over, we were given our prizes to the applause of the audience and were asked for an interview. Everyone roared with laughter when I complained that the match had been much more difficult than it looked, "because", I said, "you all know what a weak partner I've got".

The funny thing was that shortly before the championship I had had chemical peeling on my face. I hadn't been unduly worried that my red, scabby face might be a shock to the people at the tournament, as I knew very well that they would be too engrossed in the play and discussions to notice anything around them.

Now meeting reporters after the tournament was another matter. A large photograph of my red face you can find http://www.msoworld.com/mindzine/news/classic/bg/tournaments/dcwc00report.html), and I appeared on RTF, where they kept asking me if I really had been so nervous during the championship that I had scratched my face all over.

Interestingly, the night before that program appeared a short film had been telecast, where I was declared a member of the Russian mafia on the Riviera.

The story behind this is quite amusing.

About two weeks before the events described a girl had come up to me in Monte Carlo. She was attractive and in her early twenties. Introducing herself as Nastya, she said she was a Russian and that she was making her first film about that heavenly place Monaco. Could I help?

"Could you give me a ride in this Bentley? How about going to Jimmy's nightclub? Why don't we order some champagne?" Nastya kept on chattering like this, occasionally thanking me and my friends profusely for our invaluable assistance.

We had had no intention of going to a club that night, and I hadn't had a drop of champagne or, for that matter, any other alcoholic drink for quite a long time, but how can you possibly refuse to help a young, innocent-looking compatriot in a foreign country?

Two weeks later I was watching the news on M6, a major TV channel in France. The menacing-looking announcer, knitting his brows in indignation, declared they had a shocking report on Russian mafia on the Riviera. This was followed by a bird's eye view of Berezovsky's villa at Antibes, shown from every angle, to the accompaniment of an angry commentary revealing the cost of the building and its contents (I wondered if nobody had lived in the villa before Berezovsky). Suddenly the film flashed forward — and there was I in the driving seat of the Bentley, grinning cheerfully and showing a victory sign. Then, of course, came the inevitable imbibing of champagne — presumably in enormous quantities. The announcer's voice rang on, trembling with rage, spitting out the sums of money spent on all those luxuries (actually tripling them in the process). "Somebody's simply got to put an end to this outrage!" exclaimed the man pathetically, adding that Monaco was a heavenly place (cheers to Nastya!) for laundering illegally acquired money. He concluded by implying that when the French Government put their hands on Monaco order would be restored and it would become a much nicer place to live in.

I can just imagine what kind of life it would be under le regime nouveau. A notice pinned to the Casino door, notifying you of a month's strike, union meetings taking place in the Louis XV restaurant and expensive shiny cars covered all over with scratches.

On my return to Monte Carlo friends greeted me with good-natured amusement and I was immediately dubbed "The Russian Mafia Boss". The only person who was not amused was the owner of the Bentley — incidentally, one of the most decent men I've ever met.

Soon after I had become a world champion of backgammon my interest in the game began to wane — it is extremely uncharacteristic of me to pursue the same hobby for two years running (as far as men are concerned, even one year seems something quite unreal). Besides, to play backgammon seriously you have to give it a lot of attention and time.

So I'm just playing in nice tournaments like Monte Carlo or the Drones one in London, also I don't mind a few matches with friends in Aspinalls, Palm beach or Ambassador casinos.

Mike and Paul are still in the Top 10. Mike is generally believed to be the best when it comes to playing for money, while Paul excels in tournament backgammon. Do I hear you ask what constitutes the difference? Why, the cube, of course! But then did I not tell you that backgammon is not as easy as it seems?

May God bless you, Mike and Paul!
Thank you for such a great experience in my life!
Good luck!