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LATE NIGHT POKER

‘Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room.’

– Marshall McLuhan

My father says it is a red herring to call the Miss World contest sexist. Last year, the 1998 competition was on terrestrial TV – it had been shunted off onto cable for years – and there was a lot of fuss about it. People said it was wrong to encourage men to sit there drooling over girls in swimsuits.

‘They aren’t drooling,’ my father says.

He thinks that nobody is looking at the women’s bodies with lust, or even much interest. His theory is that people just love watching competitions. They want to see winners cheer and losers cry. Or, in the case of Miss World, winners cry and losers cheer insincerely. He thinks viewers enjoy rooting for their home countries against others, regardless of what they’re doing. We will get excited about curious Olympic sports we’ve never heard of, if Britain starts doing well at them. In the same spirit, my dad reckons, we are far more interested in the results of Miss World than the parading.

But my father is a very innocent fellow. He is gentlemanly towards women and he never underestimates them. He likes to hold doors open and stand up when women enter the room, but he admires their brains, enjoys their conversation and employed dozens of them as writers when he edited a magazine. He is proud that his wife is beautiful but prouder that she is a doctor. He doesn’t leer at dolly-birds in swimsuits, so he doesn’t believe that anyone else does either. He thinks the popularity of the show must have a different explanation.

I am not entirely sure that he is right about Miss World, but he is definitely right about Late Night Poker.

More than half a million people are tuning in to this cultish new programme, broadcast after midnight on Channel 4, and there is no way that more than half a million people in this country understand what they are looking at. Go into the Stakis or the Vic, or anywhere that poker is actually played, and you’ll never see more than fifty people. The same fifty people.

Presentable Productions, the first company ever to try putting serious poker on television, have made it as easy to follow as possible. It is a competition rather than a cash game, to satisfy that desire to see a sole winner and a lot of losers. The betting is No Limit, so nobody has to bother calculating the pot size. The variant is Texas Holdem, which means the players only get two cards each. And there is a Perspex strip round the table, so these secret cards are visible to the players at home. When a devious maestro trap-checks his aces so the poor innocent fool with the jacks comes out betting, viewers can watch the whole foul plot unfold.

But this is not commissioned as a game show or a sports show, so much as a window on shady underworld life. That’s why it is on at half past midnight: 98% of viewers don’t understand the rules. They just stare at it, drunk, transfixed by the money and the cheery quips of Barny Boatman, the villainous leer of Koresh, the sheer bulk of Dave Welch.

♠

Poker on television! Week after week, for a whole series! The Chimney Sweep is so excited, he can’t eat. He has always phoned me up if there is a glimpse of poker in the background of Roseanne or EastEnders (or, on one odd occasion, Star Trek) and these are shows where they play five-card draw, have stupidly unlikely hands and usually get the rules wrong. Even The Cincinnati Kid, which has a beautiful authentic spirit, has a preposterous final showdown.

This is real poker. Marginal hands against marginal hands. Real money: each player puts up £1,500, which is divvied up again as prizes. Nobody from the Tuesday game leaves his house when this is on. I curl up on my sofa each week, mesmerized, often with The Sweep at the other end of the phone, often without either of us speaking.

The average perplexed, intrigued, tipsy midnight viewer certainly won’t have appreciated what’s so funny about The Sweep’s favourite episode – the one featuring Mickey Dane. The man at the table, using that name, is in fact the obscure American novelist Jesse May. Mickey Dane is the hero of his poker novel, Shut Up And Deal. Why use the pseudonym to play? Because Jesse May is also the series commentator. There is no mention of that in the programme at all. When ‘Mickey Dane’ raises with a losing hand, Jesse May says, ‘What is that guy thinking? Maybe his hat’s too tight.’

I would never have known what was going on, but The Sweep hung out with Jesse May in Vegas last year and recognized him immediately. The word in the Vic is that a decision to add commentary was only made after the tournament was finished, and there were no ‘professional poker commentators’ to hire so they asked Jesse May because he was the funniest player. When he got to his own match, he just renamed himself and pretended it was somebody else.

Meanwhile, I can follow the action but I’m baffled by the cards they play. Like T.S. Eliot on Margate Sands, I can connect nothing with nothing. I have played very little Texas Holdem myself. I’m playing hi-lo tournaments at the Stakis, seven-stud cash games (£25 buy-in, deal yourself) at the Vic and anything goes on Tuesdays.

Many Vic players have turned down invitations to Late Night Poker – Donnacha O’Dea, for example, the former Olympic swimmer, who thinks that poker on television will give too much away about the players’ styles, make it too easy for novices to improve at the game. Novices like me. He needn’t worry: I’m amused and impressed to see these guys raising with nothing, but I’d never dare do it.

Others are steering clear because they don’t want to ‘go public’. Poker is a shifty game played by shifty characters. Outside the two official card rooms in London, most games take place in illegal spielers with heavy rake money. Debts and revenges are rife, names are changed, multiple passports are not unheard of. The majority of regular players have no interest in advertising their lifestyle, their whereabouts or even their existence to tax inspectors, thieves, neighbours, creditors or old enemies. Television? You’d have to be a complete ice cream.

♠

There is very little bad behaviour in the Vic. There is a lot of complaining and ill-temper, the odd £5 chip scraped out of a pot by sleight of hand in the deal-yourself game, but that’s it. Any genuinely threatening language would get you barred. And the playing of the game is bound by rules, specifically English rules, of careful etiquette. ‘The moody rule’ forbids any conversation about the hand while it is in play. No discussing the cards you may or may not hold. No showing cards until the action is finished. No encouraging an opponent to call or fold. No thinking for a long time before raising; that is definitely moody. No pulling faces of anguish if you have the nuts.

The rules are strangely polite. They are also baffling for any American player who happens to drop in. Americans think that ‘anything goes’, that showing one misleading card or acting up or making tricky statements about a holding are ‘all part of the game’. Not here. We have these guidelines in place to keep it sporting.

I love it. The very essence of this game is trickery and deceit, yet the rules forbid particular kinds of trickery and deceit. This is a smoky, late-night, restricted-entry gambling cave, yet we adhere to a strict code of conduct as if it were the playing fields of Eton. There are people here who have done, or do, or would do, truly terrible things in the outside world; in here, they are horrified and shocked if a man says ‘I don’t think I’m ahead’ and then tries to raise. Every instinct must be reined in, reined in, reined in. We are demonstrably here to take each other’s money and we all know it, but we must not behave like it. The principles are as contradictory, quirky and illogical as the English language itself.

♠

So now I get to discover a little more about some of the Vic gaggle and what they do. According to the TV commentary, they are jewellers, businessmen, travelling salesmen. I am now brave enough to make smalltalk with the familiar faces in the card room, but I never ask about their jobs. It isn’t considered polite, somehow. Conversation at the table is almost always about poker, gossip about who’s winning and losing, debate about how particular hands have been played. Some jokes – topical stuff. Lots of talk about sport. And lots and lots of complaining: the food, the temperature, the dealers, the chairs, the state of the lists, the quality of the game. If there is ever an awkward silence (which there never is, and that’s why I love it), you could just say, ‘This sandwich is a bit stale,’ or ‘The air conditioning is faulty,’ and everyone will join in eagerly for hours. But they don’t seem to talk about their working lives, their private lives, their home lives.

I think they avoid these areas because knowing what the money means to somebody, how they earn it and why they need it can make you feel bad about taking it off them. Like Alice in Wonderland saying that when she has been formally introduced to a pudding, she feels rude eating it.

Or maybe it’s a London thing. Keep it impersonal, at arm’s length.

♠

The first series of Late Night Poker is such a surprising success that another is commissioned the very same year. This time, they are desperate to slot more female faces into the 42-player line-up. They manage to get six. There are three poker wives (Tina Jordan, Somkhuan Harwood and Debbie Welch, whose husbands appear on the series alongside them), and two other ladies called Vanessa Rogers and Andrea ‘Babydoll’ Sterling.

And me.

Obviously I accept the invitation. They must have got my name from asking around at the Vic. I am excited less by the tournament, which I have no idea how to play, than by the chance to get to know these other players properly.

But I’m not paying the £1,500. It’s an insane amount of money. I wouldn’t pay £1,500 to enter a poker tournament and I wouldn’t pay £500 – I’ve never paid more than £50. So I persuade the Sunday Times to take an article about the experience, in return for the buy-in money. I tell them it will be a great story if I win it, and I have every chance.

I am lying.

♠

Arriving nervously at the studio, I immediately recognize a handful of Vic players I’ve never spoken to. One of them I remember in particular, because I’ve been told a story about the time he fell out with someone during a poker game in Amsterdam. After a nasty series of accusations, the riled opponent followed him back to his hotel and shot him in the nuts.

He turns out to be very friendly, striding over to shake hands and say hello. He has only a slight limp. He’s a lot more relaxed than I am – which is to his credit, because I’ve never been shot in the groin by an angry Dutchman.

These people, who seem so unapproachable in the Vic, are much more open here. It must be the adventure and adrenaline of being on TV. Each player is only required to show up for a single heat (and potentially the final) but most of them are here all week to watch the other games and lark about. They are simultaneously excited and nervous about the cameras. Their faces turn ashen when they’re asked to go into make-up. For the poor make-up lady, it’s like trying to give 42 cats a bath. They literally run away and hide.

♠

I am lurking in the corner of the studio with a list of the other players in my heat, trying to work out which is which.

1) Bambos Xanthos

He must be a Greek Cypriot. Half the Vic players seem to be. You often see two or three players gabbling away to each other in Greek, to which a passing cockney usually mutters, ‘Easy for you to say . . .’

2) Jan Lundberg

I know which one he is because he strolled over to introduce himself, looking like a friendly walrus. But walruses can be dangerous if you get too close, and I suspect the same may apply to Jan.

3) John Kabbaj

So that’s his name! I’ve seen this guy often in the Omaha game at the Vic – a bigger game than I’d ever play in – and people refer to him as ‘Cabbage’. I get the joke now. Sophisticated. In the absence of any further information, I assume that he’s the best player at the table. He’s unlikely to get in a pickle.

4) ‘Big’ Badar Islam

An even simpler nickname; he must be that guy over there, who can barely fit himself onto the sofa. But he looks rather impressive, in his flowing robes.

5) Peter ‘The Bandit’ Evans

I ask Rhiannon, a reassuring lady who works for the production company, and she points to a fellow whose face is almost entirely obscured by a baseball cap. He’s been drinking all afternoon. He seems like too much of an old-timer to have any tells, so I wonder if the low-brimmed hat is intended to hide his bloodshot eyes from the cameras.

6) Howard Plant

That’s the chap from Blackpool I met last night. I like him. He’s extremely friendly and very flirtatious, but I think he’s just teasing. He wears a Hawaiian shirt and makes terrible jokes. He reminds me faintly of Ted Bovis from Hi-de-Hi!. He told me that he booked two rooms at his hotel: he sleeps in one, and the other is the venue for a secret round-the-clock cash game, staffed by two dealers Howard brought with him from Blackpool. There are 42 enthusiastic poker players in town, why waste it? Howard invited me to play. I went along and watched for a while. But I didn’t play, not with my tiny bankroll and a heat to worry about in the morning. I just watched the money change hands, and laughed at the furtive way they tried to disguise what was happening when a waiter came up with room service. Then they tipped him £50, just in case.

♠

Jesse May, now firmly installed as commentator and not playing, is running a book and offering me at 10/1 to win the heat. I’m deeply offended, and tell him so. I should be 66/1.

‘Don’t worry,’ drawls Jesse, pocketing another wad of money bet on Cabbage, ‘you’ll go right out by post time.’

I am awestruck by Jesse May. He’s such a Damon Runyon character: a handsome, giggly, gambling-crazy New Yorker in ridiculous shoes. I am also a little shy because Shut Up And Deal is one of the greatest things I’ve ever read. It’s so intense, so enthusiastic and bitter and real. In person, he crackles with love of poker and excitement about the forthcoming games, but I know from the book that there are no stars in his eyes. This is an honest, unconditional love.

He writes, ‘People always want to know what’s going on, and what’s going on is people are going broke. There are no guys and there is no peer group, just a bunch of desperate lonely souls trying to make a few bucks for themselves by fucking over others.’

I have ventured out of the Tuesday game and into the card rooms just enough to get a sense of what he means. I also know that my own game is flawed by the weakness of compassion. If somebody comes into the card room drunk, or loses a big pot and goes on tilt, I can see my opponents’ eyes light up. I see them offering to buy more drinks, or talking about the fatal hand to keep it in the atmosphere. But if I see a player sliding helplessly down the greasy ladder of uncontrolled loss, I don’t really want to win his money. The situation is supposed to spell opportunity, but it just makes me sad.

The other commentator, Nic Szeremeta, editor of Poker Europa magazine and one of the Late Night Poker founders, gives me some kindly advice about tournaments. He tells me to play tight at the beginning, and start gambling or getting aggressive later on. I smile and make a note, knowing perfectly well that I’ll be playing tight from start to finish. I’ve never done anything else. But I appreciate Nic’s advice and I’ll try, I’ll try.

Nic also points out that I don’t have a nickname and I need one. He suggests ‘Sticky Vicky’, on the grounds that he once knew a Thai stripper with that name. I decided to soldier on without.

♠

I play pretty horrible in my heat. I’m super-tight anyway, and the whole situation is so terrifying that I feel sick whenever I consider playing a hand. I can’t think about entering a pot with anything less than a pair of nines or I might actually throw up on the table. So, helpfully confirming every prejudice the guys have about female players, ignoring the advice they all gallantly gave me before the match, I allow myself to get quietly blinded down – taking an absurd and pointless pleasure in not being the first one out, after Cabbage gets boiled within half an hour.

Part of me knows it is a classic novice’s mistake, being glad not to go out first. Who cares? The winner of this heat will go through to the final, the runner-up will go to the semi-final; every other place is meaningless. Of course it’s better to go down in a blaze of glory than pass your way to an ignoble third or fourth. But my fingers are frozen, I’m like Eric Bristow with dartitis. I just cannot move my chips without a huge hand. I’m soon down to only five £50 chips, and I’m desperate to avoid putting them in the pot.

Two hundred and fifty quid! It’s half my mortgage payment for the month! But here, it means I’m nearly skint.

You can’t cash in your chips during a tournament. It’s a knockout. In cash poker, you can get up and walk away whenever you want. In a tournament, you must remain at the table until you have every chip in the room, or none of them.

When I am obliged to put in nearly half of my precious remaining chips on the big blind, and look down to find 10♥ J♥, I sit worrying about what to do if anybody raises. I know I am not supposed to pass. But I have no ace and no pair! Thank God, I get a walk. Thanks only to this particular line-up of players overestimating my ability to grasp pot odds, and therefore failing to raise my big blind, there is no footage out there of me passing 10♥ J♥ with half of my entire stack in the pot already. Because I would’ve done.

And then – what do you know! – I find aces. Well, hello, little fellers. What a beautiful, calming sight. This is the premium starting hand in Texas Holdem, and your odds against finding it are 220/1. That means, in a Holdem tournament, I am always 220/1 to find a hand I am actually happy to play. So I am suffused with relief to see them: my twin saviours have finally arrived. I stick it all in and get called by Bambos with Q♣ 9♣.

Bang, bang, bang, three clubs come down on the flop, and that’s the end of my first experience with televised poker.

♠

Deep down, I know I must blame myself for getting so low on chips that Bambos was happy to call and gamble with his hand. But I still complain about the ‘bad beat’.

I am comforted in the kitchen of the TV studio by Jonas, a Slovenian talk-show host who’s playing tomorrow. He is wearing a vicar’s outfit.

‘I have bad boy image in Slovenia,’ he tells me. ‘I play cards, ride Harley and have lots of women.’

So the vicar’s outfit is presumably a joke about his reputation. It would be perfect, if only the show were going out in Slovenia. I suspect a UK audience is going to be puzzled. Then again, this programme goes out at midnight and the viewers are all drunk. Half of them are sitting in their underpants, wondering what happened to the ice hockey. They might not even notice.

Jonas tells me about PlanetPoker.com. It is a website launched by Mad Mike Caro, which offers people the opportunity to play poker on the internet.

It won’t catch on, Jonas explains. Poker is all about face-to-face interaction. Banter, cash moving back and forth, handling chips and cards, the narrowed stares and the reading of body language. Mike Caro of all people, author of the famous Book Of Tells, should know that. It can’t work as a computer game. Besides, very few people would ever be prepared to type their credit card details into the internet. What are they, straight off the onion boat? Poker players deal in cash, and suspicion.

But where the internet can be useful, Jonas advises, is to discuss the game with other players around the world. You can already do this on ‘forums’, and Jonas visits these regularly on his home computer in Slovenia to argue hands through with his peers.

‘But you don’t want everyone to know how you play,’ he tells me. ‘I, personally, choose to pose as an Albanian.’

♠

By Sunday, Cardiff is getting hot. The local Stakis casino has never seen such big action, Howard’s secret cash game is thriving, the £1,500 tournament buy-in is starting to look like loose change for the Coke machine. Players who have been knocked out are hanging around to soak up the fun of the TV cameras, funk for their friends and play extra poker on the side.

Stepping into the hotel lift, en route to the studio for the morning match, I see it is already occupied by an elderly couple and a tall, faintly sinister man in a long black leather coat and rose-tinted sunglasses. He winks at me.

I recognize that wink. It was played in slow motion over the closing credits of the first Late Night Poker series. It was the wink of the winner – a man who, I discovered from the white letters on the screen under his name, was a professional jeweller. From the gossip this week, I now know that he is not a jeweller, he just bought a pawnbroker’s shop after leaving prison. I have learned that this notorious character started from a rough background in Hull, spent a few years as a criminal, did his jail time, was ‘a star’ (i.e. a regular loser) in cash poker games around the UK but is now reborn as a tournament hero. He calls himself a jeweller on TV because it doesn’t sound very respectable to say he plays poker all the time.

But what’s to be ashamed of? He has not only won Late Night Poker, he has won a bracelet at the World Series of Poker.

‘You’re the Devilfish,’ I stammer.

‘Yes I am,’ says the Devilfish.

The elderly couple must think we’re both insane.

We share a cab to the studio and Dave ‘Devilfish’ Ulliott lets me hold his WSOP bracelet. It is a heavy, chunky, golden circlet of triumph. In return, I spend the evening making him cups of tea. The Devilfish tells me about the terrible occasion when he once had to make his own tea.

‘I rang my wife to ask where I’d find the spoons. She said they’d be in the dishwasher. I said, “What fucking dishwasher?”’

But that’s fine with me. There is a time and a place for feminist statements, and midnight in the kitchen of a television studio with a poker champion is neither.

♠

I can’t bear the week to end. I have been so desperate to know these people better, and now I do. I’ve had seven days of total immersion: watching poker, discussing poker, even briefly playing poker, with the best in Britain. I love the way the games end in the studio and everybody moves to the Stakis casino until it closes, and then to Howard’s private cash game until the morning, and then back to the studio. I love eating room service hamburgers at 3 a.m. I love the salty talk and stupid nicknames.

The players don’t feel like strangers any more. I know who they remind me of. They remind me of the lost family, the cousins I used to see at weddings or funerals, and the ones I never met: Fat Sam and Ginger Phil, violent Great-Grandpa Dave, Dunkirk Uncle Sid.

When the waiter arrived at Howard’s door with room service and they all hurried to hide the money, it was just like Grandpa Sam when my parents got home.

♠

Back in London, I finally find the courage to start going to the Vic on my own, whether The Sweep and Mrs Sweep are there or not. I start greeting players by their actual names and they seem to know mine. Like spiders in the bath, maybe they were as nervous of me as I was of them? Not of my poker skills, obviously. But I must have looked unusual.

I get to know Mr Chu, the ancient Chinese man with one very long fingernail. There’s Terry, the meticulous Bulgarian who is always asking questions like ‘What means this . . . pie in the sky?’ There’s Michael Arnold, the grand duke of the card room, who snoozes through every hand like another dormouse at another Mad Hatter’s tea party.

Mr Arnold wakes up occasionally to grab his cards, shout ‘Pot!’ and go back to sleep again. If he is neither snoozing nor raising, he likes to beckon people over, imperiously, for a chat. When I line up to pay court, I am six years old again, going to visit Great-Grandpa Harry, Sam’s father, at his house in Lordship Lane in the wilds of North London. Harry expected to be visited by the family on weekends. He was a big fat fellow who didn’t get up out of his chair; we walked over to kiss his whiskery old cheek, then sat quietly while the elders talked about fish prices and old times.

I don’t kiss Mr Arnold’s whiskery old cheek. But I go to shake his hand, when he peeks sleepily over the lid of his teapot.

Then there’s Scottish Pedro, who always carries a selection of miniature fans and bottles of essential oils. He is a giggly, affectionate little fellow. He’s always trying to diagnose me with something – anaemia, a cold – and dispensing immediate herbal remedies. Sometimes, Pedro gets himself some fish and chips on the way to the Vic, wraps them tightly in paper and hides them in the bushes outside. That way, when the casino’s closing and all the takeaways are shut, he knows he can still collect a tasty supper to take home.

I might look at that bunch and think that they are all a little peculiar, but God alone knows what they must think of me.

I’m a woman. I’m an unmarried woman, who seems happy to go out and play cards on her own without a care for the important job of husband-seeking. I have no children. And I’ve got a posh voice. Professor Higgins might spot the tell-tale North London twang, but compared to most of the Vic regulars I speak like Princess Margaret.

Mr Chu might have one inexplicably long fingernail, Terry might mangle the language to a bizarre degree, Mr Arnold might snore and Pedro might wave Oil Of Midnight Snowdrop at anyone who comes near him, but – to them – I am probably the weirdest person in there.

ACE KING

If you are a newcomer to poker, let me give you some advice: AK is a very big hand. It’s even-money to beat almost any pair, and a good favourite against every other hand. You must play it strongly.

If you have been playing poker for a couple of years, contesting a lot of tournaments, watching the game on television, wondering whether to start calling yourself ‘a professional’, let me give you some advice: AK is not that big a hand. It’s no pair! Stop moving all-in as soon as you see it! Play it with some finesse, for heaven’s sake!

I’m down to about 500,000 in chips when I find A♦ K♠ on the button. Everyone passes round to Jules Kuusik, the shaven-haired Swedish pro in the cut-off. He makes it 45,000 to go from a stack of about 250,000. What to do? I could flat call, encouraging Kuusik to move in on the flop. But there are two problems with this move. One is that I would be allowing the blinds to enter the pot with random hands; I don’t want to give Emad Tahtouh (in the big blind) any excuse to get clever on me. The other is that I might miss the flop, and feel reluctant to put in 200,000 more with no pair.

I have no idea what Kuusik is holding, but he can’t knock me out because he has fewer chips. I’m happy to let my hand play against his over five cards, at a total cost of 250,000. But if I miss the flop and he bets again, when I only have two cards to come and my odds against a pair are drastically reduced, 200,000 might feel too expensive.

I’d rather put the whole 250,000 in now. No need to raise any more than that: betting Kuusik’s total stack will signal to the blinds that I am attempting to knock him out by myself. They oughtn’t then to get involved without a really big hand, so there’s no point betting all my chips when one of them might actually have aces or kings.

I make it 250,000 to go. The blinds pass, and so does Kuusik. There are cheers from the crowd at this display of ‘power poker’. God bless them, my fellow Vic players, who have gathered in the seats around the TV table and are rooting for me to do well. They know that any money I win at this event will stay in the room. But they are also genuinely behind the local player, and some of them are good friends of mine. Seeing their familiar faces, and hearing them make an encouraging noise, helps me to be brave.

Of course, in this case I had a real hand. They can’t see the cards. They are cheering the strong play, and the possibility that Kuusik was stealing from the cut-off (which he must have been, to put in a fifth of his stack before passing) and that I was re-stealing from the button. Actually, I wasn’t. Maybe it would have been better to play my hand slower, and invite Kuusik to knock himself out?