On Your Marks

Picture the scene: you're back at school; it's sports day and you're about to run the 100 metres; you're not the greatest of athletes, but you want to compete. What the hell, you want to win. You look down as the pistol is raised and see that your shoe laces are untied. You look across and see that your arch rival has started to run. You can quit but still you run because to do anything else would be cowardice, it would be unmanly . . .

Now add some round tables and chairs, beer, ninety other men, three women, several decks of cards and many, many plastic chips. This is poker on Tuesday night at the Gutshot. And I am all in.

The poker gods have bestowed me with pocket tens, a cruel twist of fate as they have given my opponent pocket aces, the best starting hand in Texas No Limit Poker. He is also all in. I wince as he lays his cards on the table. I have become a ‘dog’, in more polite terms an underdog. Five cards stand between me and an exit from the tournament. I follow gaming tradition and stand up.

The flop, the first three cards, come slowly. I'm shouting for a ten, it’s pretty much the only card that can save me. Nothing. The dealer pauses. He wants to maximise my agony. The turn, the fourth card, comes: a lousy rag, a card of no consequence. I’m still way behind in this race and in need of a statistical miracle. The dealer brings the final card, the river: another lousy rag. The cards have held true to form and I have lost.

Leaving the poker table is a biological process akin to birth. The casting forth from a warm, odorous, yet protective environment to the cold, cruel bright lights of um Clerkenwell. Exhausted and red faced, I want to go home. I want my mommy.

I am not alone. I am one of thousands who play poker out of love and admiration of a book: Big Deal by Tony Holden. The true story of a writer who gave up the day job to tour the poker circuit for a year of his life, to live the highs and the lows, from Vegas to Victoria, Morocco to New Orleans, trying his hand with the occasional Anna Kournikova (Ace King to you and me). Big Deal inspired me to take up poker, to discover what a truly uplifting and devastating game it can be. Holden did it all again nearly twenty years later with Bigger Deal. He relived the dream in a world much changed, for the most part a world gone wrong.

In Big and Bigger Deal I felt like I had gained something rare and joyful. I started to play poker. And I’ve been losing happily ever since.

Posted 06/12/2007 14:48:52 by Bobby Nayyar, Marketing Manager with 0 comments.