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Laila, aka "Lady," "Blondie," "Kiddo," and "Coffeepot" ("Playing her is like playing a coffeepot!" Ralf Boettger, noted similist) was born a Dane, but relocated a few years ago to Chicago, for the climate.
 During her (to date) short but eventful life,
Laila has been a: waitress, bartender, billiard hustler, photographer, microphone juggler in an amusement park (as opposed to all the microphone jugglers NOT in amusement parks), jazz singer, photo teacher, gardener in a cemetery, language magician in a tourist office (as opposed to…never mind), director of an electronics company, chef/restaurateur, online director of Games Grid, online director of NetGammon, backgammon teacher, private investigator, web designer, and aspiring bridge bum.
 Laila started out as a student of languages (she speaks seven, often simultaneously), but dropped out to become a photographer. From there, she drifted into the dual career of billiard hustler/jazz singer. This led her to frequent the sort of low dives in which backgammon is played, and that is how she was first exposed. Qualifying through examination in Math and in Physics, she returned for three years to the University of Copenhagen. She was now prepared to explain, should one of her shots fail to sink, why it should have. No matter, by now she had all but given up billiards for backgammon, and had to make a choice. Backgammon versus Physics - on the one hand, she was involved in a game whose connection with the real world was at best metaphorical, peopled by peculiar misfits; on the other hand, there was backgammon. While God might not "play dice with the universe" (A. Einstein, non-gambler), Laila was willing to give it a shake.
Pulling her head out of a cloud of sub-atomic particles, she found herself in a restaurant, arguing with the cook about whether the bowl of curry she was served was an acceptable substitute for split pea soup. The argument raged for eight weeks, at the end of which she and Sammy (the cook) found themselves married.
 Juggling marriage, restaurant ( working alone in the kitchen, she once fed 80 customers from a 9-page menu), and backgammon (but no microphones!) proved too much, and she separated, and moved to the US. Laila is the first (and so far only) backgammon player to receive an O1 visa, a status given to those with special talents.
Over the years she has accumulated a box full of trophies (her favorite was for winning the Pittsburgh Masters). She wrote for the Danish Backgammon Federation's Gammon for seven years, has written for Chicago Point for the past three, and also contributes to Flint Area BackgammoNews.
 Among her singular achievements, in and out of backgammon…Laila has traveled 40,000 miles in each of several years, once visiting 14 states in 10 days, and another time visiting 5 countries in 24 hours, spending time in each, using 7 trains or cars. She also spent three days in Paris, with bombs going off in four different locations she either had just visited, or was en  route to. As a player, Laila once won 30 out of 33 matches at a single tournament, and at another tourney played the semi-finals, and the finals, of two events, simultaneously on adjacent boards. She has also won awards as a competitive runner, shaken hands with Bob Marley, and once read all of Shakespeare in one 8-day marathon.
Laila's motto is:
"If all else fails, I can always go into politics."
Her deepest, darkest secret is: she once spammed a spammer by sending him loads of 1MB files, but they came back "return to sender," and her own ISP closed her account.
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