John has cancer. The diagnosis has encouraged him to embrace hedonism: he’s bought a motorbike, figured out how to inject champagne directly into his stomach, and had a royal diamond flush tattooed on his arm. John is young, in his mid-forties, with a wife and two small children that he adores. You’d think a terminal illness would cast an air of tragedy over him. In fact, he brings an air of life-affirming joy to every party he graces. And he’s gracing a lot of parties. He has also unveiled an impressively sick love of gambling; not just poker, but generous helpings of casino blackjack on the side.
He is both a good and bad influence. I’ve been adapting his newspaper columns into a play to take to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. I’m so obsessed with it, I spent Millennium Night at my desk and failed to notice the new century until it was several hours old. John is an inspiring person to know.
On the other hand, I am close enough to the line between ‘recreational gambling’ and ‘compulsive disorder’ to be better off without a friend who loves blackjack and knows he’s going to die. It is not a combination that spells caution.
Thank God, my old roulette habit has been channelled into poker, which offers the same adrenaline but can, slowly and gradually if I study the game, be controlled by skill and judgment. Poker still offers the masochist a tantalizing promise of tearing his or her money away at the whim of ill fortune, but there is a deeper pleasure in the opportunity to force chance under control: a good player will lose the minimum when fate puts on the black cap, win the maximum when it’s exchanged for an Easter bonnet. There is detective work, calculation, psychology. I have dismissed roulette as a mug’s game.
But there will always be an element of muggery in my soul. John and I have been meeting up in the afternoons to play blackjack for stakes I just can’t afford, especially if I’m going to devote this year to working in fringe theatre. The only reassurance is that I have managed to stay off roulette. Plan A was to avoid all table games, but I have decided that I’m allowed to have a spin on the blackjack as long as John keeps employing that evil twinkle and telling me it’s his last wish.
On Fridays, I’ve been organizing a semi-regular home poker game for mutual friends, all hacks with a natural attraction to louche hobbies. Most of them are new to the game. Roger, my editor at the Observer, has particular trouble grasping the principle of bluffing. He keeps flat calling on the river, then chuckling ‘I’ve got nothing at all!’
They all love poker but they turn up mainly for the opportunity to spend time with John, and because his wife Nigella, a beautiful journalist who has launched a new career as a cookery writer, occasionally sends him along with a home-made cake. Nigella comes to the Stakis blackjack sessions sometimes, which improves our edge because the goggling male croupiers are liable to pay us out by mistake. When the Dark Marilyn takes her seat, they start dropping cards on the floor and forgetting how to count. The boys are very disappointed that she doesn’t come to the poker game, but they settle happily enough for the cake.
♠
Finding myself opposite Martin Amis at a surreal celebrity poker table, I’m wondering whether my brain has been affected by all this social gambling, enough to make me dream about it. Where else but in a dream would I find myself sitting around an oversized baize oval in the middle of Wales with the author of The Rachel Papers? To my left sit Stephen Fry and the now celebrated playwright Patrick Marber. To my right are the comedian Ricky Gervais, the jetlagged royal biographer Anthony Holden, Amis the child prodigy turned fully-fledged Brit Lit star; and my hero, the pipe-chewing poet, critic and mountaineer Al Alvarez.
It is not a dream, it’s a miracle. I have been trying to save up £1,500 of my own money to buy into the new Late Night Poker series, but it’s like running up a down escalator. I win small sums at poker, lose bigger sums at blackjack. At the last minute, just when I was giving up on the hope of experiencing that magical week again, I was invited to play in a one-off ‘celebrity curtain-raiser’, with Channel 4 putting up £1,000 per player.
By July 2000, the series is widely known. I have only appeared in that one match, losing to Bambos with aces, yet already a policeman, ticking me off for a piece of illegal parking in Camden Town, has winked, ‘I suppose you’ll pay the fine with poker winnings . . .’
That does not make me a celebrity. But poker, although it is now popular viewing on TV, remains an unusual hobby. Many people are watching, nobody is actually playing. Asked to come up with a celebrity special, the production company had trouble finding seven people who write, or do the odd bit of television, and know the rules of the game. They weren’t expecting to get Madonna.
Al Alvarez and Anthony Holden can travel by bus without undue attention, too, but they’ve both written poker books. They are old cronies (Holden’s Big Deal is dedicated to Al) and I know they are danger at the table.
Ricky Gervais is a young comedian from Reading who appears on The Eleven O’Clock Show. I’ve met him a few times before, through friends who work on that programme, but I never heard that he played cards. I find this reassuring as I assess the opposition: truly devoted players can usually sense each other in a room and fall into poker chat. Like gaydar, they pick up the vibe and within minutes they’re onto the flops and bad beats. If I have met Gervais several times and poker has never come up in the conversation, I decide he must be the least serious threat.
Indeed, Gervais’s first words when we arrived in the lobby of the Cardiff Hilton were: ‘I’ve never played this Holdem game before.’ I smiled conspiratorially at Patrick Marber and murmured: ‘That’s what we like to hear.’ Gervais seemed genuinely annoyed, so I knew he wasn’t hustling, and we sat down in the bar for a quick whip through the rules just to be sporting.
I played with Patrick Marber in the old Archway game and a spin-off version at Chris Colson’s house. He was in that gang of sharks who gobbled all my college money. But Patrick finally finished that play he was going to write, and it went very well. These days he is back and forth from New York, acting, writing, winning awards and directing his own work on Broadway, so I reassure myself that I have more chance to beat him now. He is far too busy to spend his nights playing cards in a smoke-filled basement full of sick gamblers and stale egg sandwiches, which is where I have the advantage over Patrick Marber. If you don’t stop to think about it.
♠
The real celebrities at the table are the two that I have never met before, but deeply admire, Martin Amis and Stephen Fry. With nothing to go on but Amis’s public image, I decide to put him down as a loose-aggressive player. I am guessing he likes poker for the atmosphere and fellowship, so probably enjoys a gamble. I assume from newspaper stories about his book advances that he is probably comfortable with high stakes.
I know that Fry has played socially at the Groucho Club in London. My instinct is that he would take the game (and victory) less seriously than Amis, but his razor-sharp brain could be cause for concern. When I raise in middle position with A♦ 10♦ and Fry calls, I realize my problem immediately: having no idea what standard of player he is, I don’t know what he’d call with. Is he dazzled by weak aces? Would he slow-play a big pair? It’s a mystery.
The flop comes 5♣ 10♠ 3♥. This looks like a great flop for me. I bet my pair of tens strongly to protect them, but Fry calls. What on earth does he have? It could be anything. And I’m not exactly a Holdem tournament specialist myself. When the turn card pairs the three, I check nervously and so does Fry. The river is a blank; I check that, too, and Fry makes a small bet. I have to call, and he turns over a pair of fives. The Jeeves & Wooster star has a full house! If he had raised on the flop (when he hit his set), I might well have folded. In flat calling and betting small on the end, he squeezed another couple of hundred out of me. So either he undervalued his hand or he’s a much craftier player than I’ve given him credit for. Still, it’s funny how tight we both play with someone else’s money.
Ricky Gervais, meanwhile, clearly loves action and calls with almost anything. For a time, his confidence