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.
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