very flirtatious, but I think he’s just teasing. He wears a Hawaiian shirt and makes terrible jokes. He reminds me faintly of Ted Bovis from Hi-de-Hi!. He told me that he booked two rooms at his hotel: he sleeps in one, and the other is the venue for a secret round-the-clock cash game, staffed by two dealers Howard brought with him from Blackpool. There are 42 enthusiastic poker players in town, why waste it? Howard invited me to play. I went along and watched for a while. But I didn’t play, not with my tiny bankroll and a heat to worry about in the morning. I just watched the money change hands, and laughed at the furtive way they tried to disguise what was happening when a waiter came up with room service. Then they tipped him £50, just in case.
♠
Jesse May, now firmly installed as commentator and not playing, is running a book and offering me at 10/1 to win the heat. I’m deeply offended, and tell him so. I should be 66/1.
‘Don’t worry,’ drawls Jesse, pocketing another wad of money bet on Cabbage, ‘you’ll go right out by post time.’
I am awestruck by Jesse May. He’s such a Damon Runyon character: a handsome, giggly, gambling-crazy New Yorker in ridiculous shoes. I am also a little shy because Shut Up And Deal is one of the greatest things I’ve ever read. It’s so intense, so enthusiastic and bitter and real. In person, he crackles with love of poker and excitement about the forthcoming games, but I know from the book that there are no stars in his eyes. This is an honest, unconditional love.
He writes, ‘People always want to know what’s going on, and what’s going on is people are going broke. There are no guys and there is no peer group, just a bunch of desperate lonely souls trying to make a few bucks for themselves by fucking over others.’
I have ventured out of the Tuesday game and into the card rooms just enough to get a sense of what he means. I also know that my own game is flawed by the weakness of compassion. If somebody comes into the card room drunk, or loses a big pot and goes on tilt, I can see my opponents’ eyes light up. I see them offering to buy more drinks, or talking about the fatal hand to keep it in the atmosphere. But if I see a player sliding helplessly down the greasy ladder of uncontrolled loss, I don’t really want to win his money. The situation is supposed to spell opportunity, but it just makes me sad.
The other commentator, Nic Szeremeta, editor of Poker Europa magazine and one of the Late Night Poker founders, gives me some kindly advice about tournaments. He tells me to play tight at the beginning, and start gambling or getting aggressive later on. I smile and make a note, knowing perfectly well that I’ll be playing tight from start to finish. I’ve never done anything else. But I appreciate Nic’s advice and I’ll try, I’ll try.
Nic also points out that I don’t have a nickname and I need one. He suggests ‘Sticky Vicky’, on the grounds that he once knew a Thai stripper with that name. I decided to soldier on without.
♠
I play pretty horrible in my heat. I’m super-tight anyway, and the whole situation is so terrifying that I feel sick whenever I consider playing a hand. I can’t think about entering a pot with anything less than a pair of nines or I might actually throw up on the table. So, helpfully confirming every prejudice the guys have about female players, ignoring the advice they all gallantly gave me before the match, I allow myself to get quietly blinded down – taking an absurd and pointless pleasure in not being the first one out, after Cabbage gets boiled within half an hour.
Part of me knows it is a classic novice’s mistake, being glad not to go out first. Who cares? The winner of this heat will go through to the final, the runner-up will go to the semi-final; every other place is meaningless. Of course it’s better to go down in a blaze of glory than pass your way to an ignoble third or fourth. But my fingers are frozen, I’m like Eric Bristow with dartitis. I just cannot move my chips without a huge hand. I’m soon down to only five £50 chips, and I’m desperate to avoid putting them in the pot.
Two hundred and fifty quid! It’s half my mortgage payment for the month! But here, it means I’m nearly skint.
You can’t cash in your chips during a tournament. It’s a knockout. In cash poker, you can get up and walk away whenever you want. In a tournament, you must remain at the table until you have every chip in the room, or none of them.
When I am obliged to put in nearly half of my precious remaining chips on the big blind, and look down to find 10♥ J♥, I sit worrying about what to do if anybody raises. I know I am not supposed to pass. But I have no ace and no pair! Thank God, I get a walk. Thanks only to this particular line-up of players overestimating my ability to grasp pot odds, and therefore failing to raise my big blind, there is no footage out there of me passing 10♥ J♥ with half of my entire stack in the pot already. Because I would’ve done.
And then – what do you know! – I find aces. Well, hello, little fellers. What a beautiful, calming sight. This is the premium starting hand in Texas Holdem, and your odds against finding it are 220/1. That means, in a Holdem tournament, I am always 220/1 to find a hand I am actually happy to play. So I am suffused with relief to see them: my twin saviours have finally arrived. I stick it all in and get called by Bambos with Q♣ 9♣.
Bang, bang, bang, three clubs come down on the flop, and that’s the end of my first experience with televised poker.
♠
Deep down, I know I must blame myself for getting so low on chips that Bambos was happy to call and gamble with his hand. But I still complain about the ‘bad beat’.
I am comforted in the kitchen of the TV studio by Jonas, a Slovenian talk-show host who’s playing tomorrow. He is wearing a vicar’s outfit.
‘I have bad boy image in Slovenia,’ he tells me. ‘I play cards, ride Harley and have lots of women.’
So the vicar’s outfit is presumably a joke about his reputation. It would be perfect, if only the show were going out in Slovenia. I suspect a UK audience is going to be puzzled. Then again, this programme goes out at midnight and the viewers are all drunk. Half of them are sitting in their underpants, wondering what happened to the ice hockey. They might not even notice.
Jonas tells me about PlanetPoker.com. It is a website launched by Mad Mike Caro, which offers people the opportunity to play poker on the internet.
It won’t catch on, Jonas explains. Poker is all about face-to-face interaction. Banter, cash moving back and forth, handling chips and cards, the narrowed stares and the reading of body language. Mike Caro of all people, author of the famous Book Of Tells, should know that. It can’t work as a computer game. Besides, very few people would ever be prepared to type their credit card details into the internet. What are they, straight off the onion boat? Poker players deal in cash, and suspicion.
But where the internet can be useful, Jonas advises, is to discuss the game with other players around the world. You can already do this on ‘forums’, and Jonas visits these regularly on his home computer in Slovenia to argue hands through with his peers.
‘But you don’t want everyone to know how you play,’ he tells me. ‘I, personally, choose to pose as an Albanian.’
♠
By Sunday, Cardiff is getting hot. The local Stakis casino has never seen such big action, Howard’s secret cash game is thriving, the £1,500 tournament buy-in is starting to look like loose change for the Coke machine. Players who have been knocked out are hanging around to soak up the fun of the TV cameras, funk for their friends and play extra poker on the side.
Stepping into the hotel lift, en route to the studio for the morning match, I see it is already occupied by an elderly couple and a tall, faintly sinister man in a long black leather coat and rose-tinted sunglasses. He winks at me.
I recognize that wink. It was played in slow motion over the closing credits of the first Late Night Poker series. It was the wink of the winner – a man who, I discovered from the white letters on the screen under his name, was a professional jeweller. From the gossip this week, I now know that he is not a jeweller, he just bought a pawnbroker’s shop after leaving prison.