Dinner’s ready. Pasta for everyone, but a defrosted meat pie for Trouts. I bring in the plates. Conrad says thank you; the others remain silent. I carry the plates out again immediately. They jump up and rush into the kitchen with compliments. They remember the time I was so irritated by the lack of thanks, I scraped everybody’s dinner into the bin. They had to order a pizza.
But Conrad always says thank you. Conrad is awfully polite, very pukka. I think he might be related to an earl. He is easy-going and smiley, possessed of a genuinely optimistic temperament. God knows what he’s doing playing poker. Must have taken a wrong turn one day. He runs a charity tournament every Christmas, to raise money for a cancer hospital. He’s the nicest guy that ever comes here.
♠
Joe is teaching us a new variant. ‘It’s seven stud hi-lo, pairs wild for the low, leaners for the high, wheel’s the low.’
The Sweep gets excited. ‘We needed a new variant.’
It’s the last thing we needed. As if split pots, multiple flops, wild cards and draws weren’t enough, J.Q. has been keeping busy inventing new variants entirely; for weeks, we have been trying to get our heads around ‘Middles For Diddles’ and ‘Poker Baccarat’. I’d like to see Huck Seed apply his Game Theory to those.
Joe cleans up, wins the lot. Who allowed a professional into this game?
♠
Ashley’s a professional too, different sort of professional. He grinds it out, night after night in the Vic. Except Tuesdays, when he comes here. He plays online at home all day. I try to make a home-cooked meal every week, because Ashley is one of the people I worry would never get one otherwise.
Ashley always has a story to tell about someone in the Vic who annoyed him. Most people annoy him. He is a fiftysomething teenager. He wears a leather jacket and plays online under ‘Iconoclast’. He’s sarcastic, cynical and funny. He and The Sweep get along very well. They talk a lot about music. Ashley’s off the drugs these days, but he needs a cup of coffee every twenty minutes.
♠
‘My deal,’ says James. ‘How about regular seven stud, but if you manage to burp as you receive your up card, it’s wild?’
‘Banned,’ I say. ‘It’s on the list with baseball, fiery cross and burning ring. No burping wild cards.’
‘Oh,’ says Robert, disappointed. ‘I was just gearing one up.’
But he’s soon distracted by a race with Kira to see whose Jaffa Cake can melt faster.
♠
Robert’s asleep. J.Q. insists that we deal him in anyway, as he might wake up at any moment and want to bet the pot blind.
Val is watching sadly as Ashley felts Warren with two pair. Warren buys another stack of chips.
‘I would have flopped a straight,’ murmurs Val.
‘All right,’ says Hugo. ‘No need to tell us your life story.’
Val is a journalist, a reporter of the old school. He is dressed like James Stewart playing a journalist in a film. Proper shirt, knitted tie, brown waistcoat and jacket. But his trousers are taped at the bottom, for safety on his bicycle ride home. He is nearly as patrician as Conrad, and hasn’t belched or sworn in ten years at this game. But he always laughs at the others.
Val is feeling a little down because he has just published a book about his allotment, called One Man And His Dig, and The Sweep has told him it should have been called Sunday Muddy Sunday. His spirits are further lowered by spending three hours building up an impressive stack over a series of strategic Omaha coups, then blowing the lot in a single, terrible hand of Shifting Sands.
♠
J.Q. hasn’t said much tonight. That’s because he is trying to think of knock-knock jokes based on the choruses of popular songs. Last week, The Sweep turned up with
Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Warrior.
Warrior who?
Warrior wanna make those eyes at me for . . .
And he sang the punchline. Ever since then, J.Q. has been obsessed with creating the longest possible sung punchline to a knock-knock joke. He is currently working on Matchstick Men And Matchstick Cats And Dogs.
He’s got as far as
Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Andy, Payne, Ted, Matt, Chip, May, Nan, Matt, Chip, Cass, Anne . . .
But he’s not happy with it. He thinks ‘Chip’ isn’t quite right. He’s too stubborn to use the obvious Polish name Maçek. He thinks that would be cheating. And Val is insisting that it’s not ‘matchstick’ in the song anyway, it’s ‘matchstalk’. This is very problematic.
♠
It is last week, this week, next week. It is at Robert’s place, in James’s office, at The Sweep’s temporary home in Waterloo, at my flat, in all the future flats and houses we might inhabit. Within a year of my first visit, whatever else happens on Tuesday nights – birthdays, book launches, first nights, fire sales – the game is where I am. Always Tuesdays, in tribute to the old Alvarez/Holden/Spanier school of the 1980s.
Some of these players drop out of the game, some of them are yet to come. They will get married, get divorced, get drunk, have babies, end up in court over inadvisable business partnerships. James’s dog, Skala, is going to die.
Well – we’re all going to die.
But, until death comes, any of them could be back at any time. They appear and disappear again, as Feste dips in and out of Illyria.
Still, the game goes on, always the same. Even the money’s the same, passed round and round and round the same group of people from week to week and year to year. Same arguments, same jokes. I call . . . was a very good horse. I call . . . was a very good horse.
KING QUEEN SUITED
This is a big hand, even at a full table. In their classic textbook Hold’em Poker For Advanced Players, Malmuth and Sklansky classify it as a ‘Group Two’ hand. Group One hands are AA, KK, QQ, JJ and AK suited. Group Two hands are TT, AQ suited, AJ suited, KQ suited and AK offsuit. All other hands are Group Three or lower. These lists are in rough order of where each hand falls in the group, too – it’s worth noting that AK unsuited (so beloved of the aggressive modern player, who is too quick to shovel all his chips in with that hand before seeing a flop) has been calculated as statistically less lucrative than lower picture cards of the same suit. Malmuth and Sklansky are talking mainly about limit cash games – but limit or no limit, tournament or cash game, KQ suited is a big hand.
Chad Brown raises it up to 38,000, and everyone passes round to my big blind. I find K♣ Q♣.
He’s an interesting character, this Chad Brown. He’s an actor from the Bronx, who has had a few roles in TV shows and films including Basket Case 2. I have actually seen that movie. Years ago, in my teens, I was a devoted horror fan. At least one night a week, my friend Jess and I would curl up on the sofa with a packet of Revels and a VHS in which teenagers with more sexual experience than us would take it in turns to be slashed, chopped, hanged, beheaded and otherwise despatched in grisly ways until one of them (usually the virgin) walked into the sunlight at the end of the film, usually on the arm of a friendly vicar (unless the friendly vicar had turned out to be one of the vampires/werewolves/slashers etc). For some reason, some time in my twenties, I completely lost the ability to watch horror films. Like rollercoasters; I