Anyway, Chad Brown is mostly known in America now as the presenter of Ultimate Poker Challenge. So he’s a bit like me, maybe – working a lot in televised poker, presenting or commentating or interviewing the professionals, quite keen to prove that he’s a proper player, too. Except he’s got less to prove than me, since he’s had quite a few cashes in the World Series of Poker and other circuit events, and he’s been playing seriously since 1993. He’s dating Vanessa Rousso, a professional player from Canada. The organizers of the EPT will be delighted that he’s bringing some star quality to this final.
Chad’s been a bit quiet at this table lately. He came in as chip leader with 759,000, but he’s lost a few chips since then and has been on the back foot. Ordinarily, I might re-raise with KQ of clubs, but I’m aware that Chad hasn’t raised for ages and might have a big hand. Or he might feel obliged to show strength, whatever he is holding. I don’t want him to get stubborn and four-bet all in. I have got a big draw, and would really like to see the flop. So I just call.
The flop comes 8♣ 10♠ A♥. There’s a middle pin straight draw for me; if I were in position, I could bluff-raise with that, but it’s silly to bet out first when Chad is supposed to raise me whether he’s got an ace or not.
I check. Chad, surprisingly, checks behind. So he either hates the ace (maybe he’s got some kind of pair like JJ or 99?), or loves this flop so much (AK? AT? A set, even?) that he’s scared to lose me.
The turn comes Q♦. Well, now I don’t need to bet. If Chad has a better hand than a pair of queens, he will certainly call; and if he’s got a worse hand, he won’t. I’m better off checking and calling, give him a chance to bluff it.
I check again, and so, obligingly, does Chad. Now I know he doesn’t have two pair or a set, because only a basket case would check that twice.
The river is 9♠, and I check for the same reason I checked the turn. Now Chad bets 35,000. This seems a little curious. I guess he could have hit the nine, or he could just figure that I’ve shown weakness throughout the pot and be trying to pick it up on the end with nothing much. I’m only being asked to call 35,000 to win a pot already containing 119,000 – more than three-to-one my money, and it’s a lot shorter than 3/1 that Chad’s bluffing. I don’t even need to think before calling.
Oh! He’s got A♦ 5♦. That’s unexpected. I wonder why he didn’t bet the flop or the turn? I’m now especially glad I didn’t bet the turn myself, because I would have lost more money. But I doubt that Chad would have called a big re-raise before the flop with A5, so hindsight tells me a more aggressive play was in order. The flat call . . . as that strange man from the bridge club used to say whenever someone lost a trick after playing a finesse the wrong way round: ‘Not best.’
5
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