Читать книгу For Richer, For Poorer - Victoria Coren - Страница 9

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PIRATE SHIPS AND CACTUSES

‘The lowest pool hustler in the business is four times more respectable than some of those humbugs in Washington.’

– Minnesota Fats

They talk about ‘love at first sight’, but who needs to wait so long? I am in love before first sight: the new world champion of poker is twenty-seven years old, six-foot-six, from Montana, and his name is Huckleberry Seed. Word has come back from Las Vegas of this lanky superman, who has beaten a field of 295 runners in the 1996 World Series and won $1,000,000. Huckleberry Seed? Can he really exist, or is this a daydream spread across the Atlantic by a fan of Damon Runyon?

I need to find out. I imagine a poker champion as an ageing Texan, body like a sack of sand, hands hairy and heavy with jewellery, voice like a waterfall of cigarettes. This isn’t conjured from the air; that’s what most poker champions are like. I’ve read about them. But I’ve never met any. I want this glamorous young pro to be my first.

I may have met some professional poker players without knowing it. Who are those people in the Vic? Shadowy, gravelly, never a smile. I daren’t speak to them. I have no idea what they do for a living, if anything.

♠

Ever since I came back from that first trip to America, five years ago, I’ve had an occasional recurrent dream that there is a magic walkway between my house and the Desert Inn card room. In the dream, I am lying asleep in bed at home, but I wake up. That is, I dream that I wake up. And in my dreaming-awake state, I remember about the bridge. I don’t need to save money, I don’t need an aeroplane, I don’t need fake ID. I just walk over the bridge and find myself in the card room. Even though it’s the middle of the night, the place is buzzing and lively. I sit at a candle-lit bar, sipping a Martini and kicking myself for forgetting the bridge was there. I don’t play poker. I just sit at the bar, excited to be there, anticipating action to come. It is a very, very happy dream.

And then my brother’s friend Matt, who knows Al Alvarez, tells me about the Victoria Sporting Club. It is just across London, with a real-life poker room.

Matt drives me down to the Edgware Road and parks outside McDonald’s. We walk into ‘the Vic’ and he signs me in as a guest. I feel sick and shifty at the desk, like you do walking through Customs – like I did going into those Vegas casinos, when I really was smuggling something. My underage self.

But this is perfectly legitimate. All I have to do is sign my name where Matt has written it in block capitals, and we are waved in with a smile. We check in our coats, because there is a dress code (no coats, no trainers, no jeans, no T-shirts, no hats, no carrier bags, no income tax, no VAT, no money back, no guarantee) and head upstairs to the card room.

It doesn’t look like my dream. It doesn’t look like the Desert Inn. It has a garish carpet and cheap fruit machines. The air is a soupy smog of B&H cigarette smoke, Middle Eastern aftershave and non-specific Man Smell. Everybody looks miserable. This is not a holiday casino at all.

We go into the card room. A gaggle of elderly men, dressed in collared Aertex shirts, slacks and nicotine-stained sports jackets, squint at me and look away again. Nobody says hello. I shrink a little closer to Matt.

We are here to play a £20 seven-card stud tournament. I sink into my allocated seat and don’t speak a word all night. But, sticking to my traditional strategy (wire-ups, pairs above jacks, three suited connectors; fold everything else), I end up coming second in the tournament. I win about £250. I reckon I’ve got the game licked. This place may not be Disneyland, but I’m going to come here all the time.

♠

My second trip to the Vic is by myself. I’ve joined the club, which turns out to involve nothing more than filling in a form and waiting 48 hours before I’m allowed to play. Then I drive my own car down to the Edgware Road and sign myself in.

I wend my way through the siren calls of the slots, as far as the card room. I peep through the glass partition wall. There, just about visible through the volcanic cloud of smoke, is the same cliquey gaggle of old men. A couple of them peer suspiciously at me. My stomach clenches with fear. I go back down the stairs, find my car, and go home.

♠

I drive to the Vic. I park my car, I sign in, I leave my coat at the desk, I climb the stairs. I walk quickly and purposefully between the slots, up to the card room. When I get there, my feet stop by themselves. I peer in. The old men peer out. I might just as well leap over the barrier to the lions’ enclosure at London Zoo.

I retreat to the roulette table. Roulette is different. The croupiers are chatty and friendly. There are women around the table, young Chinese women, elderly Arab women. They bet fast and furious, scribbling down the numbers in their little notebooks. I throw £30 onto the baize and receive a small stack of chips in return. I play for half an hour and win about £20. I leave, satisfied.

♠

I drive to the Vic. I park in Harrowby Street, say hello to the receptionist, sign myself in, leave my coat, walk up the stairs, hurry to the card room, get to the threshold, swivel without stopping and walk back to the roulette table. I win £50. I go home.

♠

I drive to the Vic. I park outside the Marriott, wave at the doorman, greet the receptionist, sign myself in, leave my coat, walk up the stairs and over to the roulette table. I lose £100. I go home.

♠

I drive to the Vic. I park in the underground car park, leave my coat in the car, walk up to the desk, sign, say hi to Karen, take the lift to the first floor, walk to the roulette table. I lose £200. I go to the cashpoint, get another £100. I fight back to –£40 and stop.

Next time, I’ll win.

♠

I have started dreaming about roulette. At random moments during the day, I think I can hear the tiny ‘click’ which emanates from a croupier’s marker going down onto a winning chip. Wheels spin in my head. Money spins out of my bank account. I am playing, what, three or four afternoons a week now. I know that if I want to make a living as a self-employed writer, I need discipline. But I keep knocking off work at lunchtime and going down to gamble with the stake I have calculated from this week’s earnings, and next week’s and the week after’s. If I earn something once, I lose it three times. My bank statements are red. I have borrowed money from my brother, pretending it was for something else. This has got to stop.

♠

‘Try the Stakis in Russell Square,’ says The Chimney Sweep. ‘I’m in sometimes, if I’m not in the Vic. Roy Houghton runs the card room, he’s pretty friendly. We’ll be there on Wednesday night for a hi-lo tournament. Meet us there.’

And, finally, I start playing casino poker. Just once or twice a month, to supplement the weekly Tuesday game. For a while, I pop into the Stakis in the afternoons and play roulette there. But eventually it gets bad, and it really does have to stop, and it does stop, and it hurts, and I swear off roulette for ever.

But I get to know people in the Stakis card room. There are usually about thirty players in there, just enough for a tournament. I say hello to some of them, ask how they’re getting on. And I call Hugo and Kira sometimes, to find out if they are going to the Vic, and I go when they’re going. Turns out The Sweep was usually in there all along, tucked away behind a pillar or a Greek. I become one of a handful of semi-regular younger players, who are looked on by the old men with indulgent amusement. I recognize their faces now, know some of their names, but I never speak to them.

The Vic games are very tough. I’m a Stakis player, an amateur, an occasional and recreational visitor. Maybe I’ll graduate to the Vic properly one day, but not yet. That’s how it works: you play your home games, and you play for fun sometimes in the Stakis, and one day – if you don’t give up or go broke – you graduate to the Vic.

♠

Flying back into McCarran airport, this time ‘of age’ with a genuine driving licence and an adult’s right to play poker, I am determined to win more money and meet Huckleberry Seed. My friends have crushes on Robbie Williams. I have a crush on a poker player I’ve never even seen. But I have a good excuse to look for him: I can sell an interview with him to the newspaper back home.

I’m not a proper journalist. I have never whipped late copy from a typewriter and cried, ‘Hold the front page!’ I’ve never shouted information down a sat-phone over the roar of gunfire. I have once bruised my fist by thumping it angrily on a coffee table while trying to explain a joke to a bored copy-taker on a crackly mobile, but that doesn’t count. I write the light stuff, features and columns, more closely related to the crossword and horoscope family than hardline news. Certainly, I can sell an interview with a 27-year-old millionaire gambler. Poker is a tiny secret world that nobody on the outside knows about. It’s an investigative piece, like infiltrating the Bilderberg Group. Most people barely know that poker exists. If I ever mention that it’s my hobby, in a social situation, people are amazed and fascinated. Poker! Who knew that anybody plays that old game, any more?

♠

Being a rambling-gambling man, Huck Seed isn’t easy to track down. I launch my quest from a cheap room at the Las Vegas Hilton. A list of defunct telephone numbers leads eventually to an old flatmate, who is less than encouraging. ‘You know the movie Forrest Gump? You know the leaf that floats through the movie, never settling in one place? Well, that’s Huck. Last I heard, he was playing at the Crystal Park Casino in LA.’

More phone research reveals that the leaf is indeed tossing around in the Crystal Park air, obstinately refusing to settle. I could drive to Los Angeles from here in about five hours, but what if he has moved on when I get there? Everybody knows him, everybody has just that minute seen him, nobody can find him. Surely, if he is any kind of gambler, he will be sucked back into Las Vegas sooner or later? I phone every day, until a sympathetic dealer advises that Huck has at last left LA and returned to the magical city where the hotels have theme parks inside them, restaurants do not offer ‘all you can eat’ but ‘all you can imagine’, and every gas station attendant would have been a millionaire if it weren’t for a bad out-draw in 1973.

From a sizzling phone booth opposite the Mirage, I finally reach Seed and gabble my journalistic credentials at him. In a deep voice, slower ’n molasses in January, he invites me to his rented house a few miles west of the Strip.

Through the cab windscreen, the desert landscape grows unexpectedly prettier. The giant neon lions, pyramids and pirate ships of the town centre are gradually replaced by cactuses and flowers. I’m slightly disappointed not to have found Huck chain-smoking and re-raising on the Strip itself, but still I’ve got it all worked out: he will be James Garner, he will be Steve McQueen, he will be a hard-drinking, loose-living card sharp with electric-blue eyes and a cruel mouth. He will be The Cincinnati Kid.

He is a man in Bermuda shorts and a baseball cap who has just been to the corner shop to buy a carton of milk for his girlfriend. He’s a boy who went to Caltech hoping to become a physicist, started playing poker with his friends, and dropped out of college when he started making money at it. He’s a kid whose competitive streak was at its highest ‘when I used to play Scrabble with my mom’. His family is respectable, educated; the kids’ names are all clever combinations of the rural and the literary. Huck’s sister’s name is Caraway Seed, which conjures images of a woman just as strapping and Aryan as he is, all cornfields and improving books. Meanwhile, having won a million dollars in a poker tournament, he doesn’t seem to have done anything with it. The apartment is sparse, spartan.

There are only two signs of Huck Seed’s card-earned windfall: his girlfriend’s son is cross-legged in front of a television eight times the size of himself, and the coffee table groans under a de luxe Scrabble set with gold-embossed tiles.

As we talk, Huck chews thoughtfully on a bowl of oatmeal and discusses his interest in exercise physiology and nutrition. His dad sends him books about it.

This is not quite the risky rebel I expected. He tells me about his love of running and mountain-biking. He explains that he wins at poker because he has a good understanding of game theory, probability and statistics. ‘Like if you were playing Scrabble, uh, you’ve just got to know which letters make more words, it’s kind of like a percentage thing.’

Game theory? Who is this guy? Poker is about intuition and sixth sense, bluff and bluster, psychology and gut. It is about dusty landscapes, saloon bars, riverboats, gunfights, saucy molls and crooked cowboys. Huck Seed seems to be treating it as some kind of soulless science project.

♠

In the autobiography of Amarillo Slim, 1972 world champion, Slim writes: ‘Women are meant to be loved and not to play poker. My wife Helen Elizabeth thinks that a king is the ruler of a country and a queen is his bedmate. A woman would have a better chance of putting a wild cat in a tobacco sack than she would of coming out to Vegas and beating me.’ Even in 1996, among the bullets and balls of high-stakes poker, this is very much the prevailing attitude.

I put it to Huck Seed, who is cagey but not impossible to read. ‘I guess I have my own ideas about that . . . I guess I won’t comment on that . . . I guess men run faster than women and . . . it’s an evolution thing.’

Evolution? Over the tree-swinging centuries, men somehow evolved a better ability to calculate their odds with the second nut flush draw and a gutshot? Take the maths away, and poker demands only an ability to know when you are being lied to; I say most women have plenty of experience. And what has running got to do with it? This is not a physical game. All you need is a fat butt and decent eyesight. I suppose men’s larger fingers would give them an edge in a game of ten-card Omaha, but we don’t play that even in the Tuesday game.

But I don’t say anything. I am a guest in this guy’s house. Besides, what have I ever won? Second place in a seven-card stud tournament, after a statistic-bucking deluge of wire-ups. Maybe he’s right. But I will be good one day, I swear to God. When Huck tells me that Las Vegas is a boom town for young couples, ‘where the guys play poker and the girls serve cocktails’, my resolve hardens like quick-dry cement.

Maybe Huck feels grudging about women because he thinks they look down on him? He doesn’t have a job. He plays an old-fashioned gambling game that offers no security and certainly no respect. He tells me, ‘Women want to know what you do for a living, and when I say I’m a poker player they think I’m some kind of bum.’

♠

It is only when we talk about his winning hand of the World Series, when Huck beat a doctor from New Orleans called Bruce Van Horn to the title, that the music of poker language begins to trickle from his lips. ‘He was on the button with king-eight suited. The flop comes nine-eight-four and I’ve got top two pair. I made a pretty good-size bet, he raised, I put him all-in and he doesn’t catch his king.’

Oh, that music. Whatever my friends feel when Robbie Williams sings Everything Changes But You, I feel when I hear that unique mixture of past and present tenses, the suspense of the turn card, the narrative of a hand.

Not that I can make head or tail of the hand Huck’s describing. Holdem isn’t really my game, and I’ve never played a Holdem tournament. And I’m a rock. What are these people doing in a pot with 89 and K8? These aren’t hands! But I am seduced by the hypnotic sound of the story. I want to talk like that myself, one day.

♠

When I have switched off my tape recorder, ordered a taxi and started daydreaming about Bruce Van Horn, the poker-playing New Orleans doctor, Huck Seed stands on his head. He explains that he has bet a couple of guys $10,000 that he can stand on his head for 52 minutes during the upcoming 1997 World Series and must keep practising.

A prop bet? I love prop bets. They always make the best stories. Amarillo Slim once won a lot of money claiming that he could beat a champion racehorse over 100 yards. People fell over themselves to take the bet, but cunning old Slim chose the course: it had a turn in it, 50 yards one way, 50 yards back. Of course, there was no way of explaining this to the horse, which was still running straight in the other direction while Slim was collecting his winnings.

People are always getting suckered by Amarillo Slim’s prop bets. Another time, he took on a professional golfer over the question of who could hit the ball furthest. Slim let the golfer go first. When he took his own turn, he explained that he would be choosing his own course here, too: a frozen lake. The ball kept bouncing and skittering for miles.

With that kind of history, you’d think a champion ping-pong player would know better than to accept Slim’s expensive challenge to a match, along with a generous offer to provide the bats. But no, the pigeon seized this opportunity, certain he could trash any amateur and make a small fortune. Going to his car for ‘the bats’, Slim whipped out two Coke bottles, with which he had been secretly practising for months.

But it turns out there is no twist in Huck Seed’s bet. He just thinks he can stand on his head for a long time. He explains, ‘I’m training to run a 4.5-minute mile anyway, and it’s good to let the lactic acid and blood drain into your head.’

I ask him about other prop bets he has made, and they are all very healthy. He has won money by floating in the sea for 24 hours, by halting a card game to run an immediate marathon, and (potentially) by staking $100,000 that his weight will not reach 250 pounds in the next 35 years. I expect he’ll win that.

This is no Cincinnati Kid, with dark yellowish circles under his eyes that rested on his cheekbones where the skin was drawn tight, as if he might have liver trouble from too much drinking. Maybe poker is changing in America? Maybe the old romance is dying, and there’s going to be a new spirit of living right, sleeping well, eating carefully, taking exercise, thinking about ‘strength and focus’ at the table? Or maybe it’s just Huck.

Hell, he doesn’t care about The Cincinnati Kid anyway. ‘People have made the connection, but I haven’t read it,’ says Huck. ‘I like books about chess.’

♠

I don’t know if Huck Seed wins his $10,000 upside-down bet, but he doesn’t win the 1997 World Series. The title goes instead to a screwed-up, debt-riddled drug addict.

It is a miracle. Stuey ‘The Kid’ Ungar won the World Series in 1980 and 1981 (back to back, just like Johnny Chan), then dissolved into a swamp of cocaine and hookers. In his first victories, he was a beautiful Jewish boy with rock star looks and a blazing poker talent. By 1997 he is broke, skeletal, mashed up with jaundiced skin and a disintegrating nose. His old friend Billy Baxter buys him into the World Series main event – one of 312 runners – and, incredibly, Stuey tears through the field to win it for a third time and collect $1,000,000. This is like a film. The old racehorse, the old athlete, washed up and crippled in early middle age, giving it one last shot and making it first past the post as the fireworks explode in the sky.

By Christmas, Stuey’s done his share of the money on drugs and sports betting. A year later, he refuses to let Billy Baxter put him in the 1998 World Series, because he can’t bear to show up in his state of collapse. He spends a few months wandering around the card rooms, begging for money from anyone running good. If he gets any, he spends it on crack. In November ’98, he’s found dead in a cheap motel room, aged 45.

I buy an old picture of Stuey, from the glory days of 1980, and put it on my bedroom wall.

A PAIR OF SIXES

So, with jacks, you are more likely to see an overcard on the flop than not to see one. With nines and below, it’s pretty much a certainty. Your opponents might not necessarily have hit these overcards, but your own hand becomes much trickier to play.

The main reason to play small pocket pairs in a cash game is the chance of hitting a set: the economics of cash-game play mean that you can afford to see a lot of flops with the occasional big pay-off in mind.

In tournament poker, you can rarely afford to leave chips behind. You can’t just throw a pair away because the flop brings nothing but overcards. If you’ve raised pre-flop, you can bet out when anything comes – but, if the flop is unsuitable, you are now bluffing. You may be bluffing with the best hand, but it’s still a bluff: pretending you like the flop, or that it’s no threat because you started with a huge hand anyway.

Six-handed at a tournament table, a pair of sixes pretty much IS a huge hand. Before the flop, you’re certainly entitled to believe that your hand is winning against the other five hands out there, at least until an opponent tries to tell you different.

So, what to do with these two sixes under the gun? It’s annoying to be out of position. If I get a caller behind me, I’ll have to act first on the flop.

Let’s make a small raise, try to make my hand seem bigger than it is. If I’m forced to bet out later on a king-high flop, I don’t want to have made this cripplingly expensive for myself.

Blinds still 8,000–16,000; I make it 35,000 to go. Just a little over the minimum. Emad Tahtouh calls in the cut-off, and the others pass.

Flop comes: 9♠ Q♣ Q♥.

Short of seeing an actual six, or some cute little 3 4 5 draw, this is as good a flop as I can hope for. There are only two cards for Emad to have hit – I’m going to assume that he’d have re-raised before the flop if he had a pair himself. The problem is, he could easily have called with something like TJ, KJ, KT, and decide to get busy with a straight draw. A clever little check-raise will keep him in line, if he has that in mind. I check.

Emad bets 50,000.

I make it 200,000.

He calls.

Hmm. I would have preferred him to fold there. His total chip stack is about 900,000 to my 750,000: he could afford to flat call with a straight draw to knock me out on a later street, but he might also flat call with a queen in his hand.

Turn card brings 10♦.

Now I hate it. With KJ, this card makes Emad a straight. With TJ or KT, he’s made a bigger pair than sixes. Or he could have had a queen all along, or 9T, or K9, and has had me since the flop.

If I check now, that’s giving up the pot without a fight. Aggressive Emad will bet with anything if I show weakness, and I’d have to pass.

If I make a small bet, he’ll come over the top for the exact same reason.

If I move all-in, he can’t call with only a nine or a ten in his hand. But he can call immediately with a queen, or a straight, so it could be a suicidal move.

I think I have to check and pass.

I check.

Emad moves all-in.

All-in! That’s an unexpectedly big move. Now I start to consider calling. If he’s got a full house, a straight, or three queens, why does he make such a huge bet to scare me away? I ask him this question out loud. He replies, with seeming frankness, that he’s nervous of what I might be holding. I think that’s actually true. He looks unsettled and twitchy. He is moving and talking a lot.

So maybe this is a total bluff? It’s certainly sized like one. But then . . . bluffing with what? He’s got to have SOMETHING. There’s no flush draw there for me to beat, and with a straight draw he’s probably paired the ten.

Now I’m onto my third thought . . . this all-in move is DESIGNED to look like a bluff. That must be it. He doesn’t have a full house, but he knows that I don’t either, and he thinks he’s winning. Emad’s got a straight, or at least three queens, and he’s trying to do basic ‘reverse psychology’: an oversized bet to suggest weakness, hoping to find me with aces or kings and unable to pass them. I mustn’t fall for that old trick.

I pass, with a flirtatious little sigh of defeat, intended to seduce him into showing me his hand. That works surprisingly often: if I smile enough, sometimes people feel sorry for me and flash their hole cards as they muck them.

It works! Emad flashes a KQ, saving me a gruesome half hour of wondering whether I missed a chance to double up. I don’t really know why he showed the hand – maybe it was in a spirit of friendliness, or maybe a more calculated attempt to set me up for later bluffs – but either way, I’m grateful. Makes it easier to clear my head and concentrate on the next case. If my girly sigh was a factor in flipping the cards over, so much the better.

The following year, Australian Penthouse (in an article about Joe Hachem and the Aussie poker crew) reports that I wanted to sleep with Emad more than I wanted to win the tournament. Goodness, who would have expected such sexism from an antipodean soft-porn mag? But I make a note to be more careful, in future, about my flirtatious tactical sighing. Sometimes I forget that there are people watching. And some of those people are idiots.