MIDNIGHT at the Gutshot Poker Club and the players are hunched over the felt. The pot is now worth several thousand pounds, some of them mine. A thin rime of sweat glistens on the bald pate of “The Catman”, but his eyes are as blank as a mullet’s. The play is wordless. Catman flips over a winning pair of kings: a small sigh from his opponents, a hollow clatter as he rakes in the chips. The eyes remain void.
“There is something about poker,” mutters Carl Dugan, a muscular young man who describes himself as a “Cage Fighter”. Like me, Dugan was ejected from this East London tournament several hours ago. Like me, he seems unwilling to leave. “Poker pulls you in.”
Today poker is pulling in punters like no other card game. Suddenly, this 150-year-old pastime is huge business: on the internet, in clubs and casinos, and now on the London stock exchange. There are many reasons for the explosion in popularity — technological, fashionable, financial and cultural. The winner-takes-all lottery of life has become part of popular culture.
A game once reserved for seedy sharks and suckers has become not only acceptable, but respectable, played by stockbrokers, housewives and teenagers. There is something about poker, however, that explains its emergence from semi-obscurity to national phenomenon. Simple to learn, but requiring skill, patience and nerve, it is not a game of pure chance. Democratic, seedily glamorous, classless, stimulating, fast, dangerously addictive, universal through the internet, and heady with the promise of easy, tax-free money: poker is a game for our times.
The stakes are high. This week PartyGaming Plc, the world’s largest online poker company, was floated on the stock exchange: on the first day of trading shares shot up by more than 10 per cent, giving the company a value of £5 billion and propelling it into the FTSE 100 ahead of British Airways. Overnight, poker chips rub shoulders with blue chips.
PartyGaming played its cards brilliantly: in four years, it has attracted one million users, and it raked in $602 million (£338 million) last year. It is by no means the only game in town. An estimated $60 billion will be wagered on poker sites around the world this year, and nowhere is the craze spreading faster than in Britain: at any one time, an average of 100,000 Britons are playing poker online, risking some £19 million a day, a figure that has doubled in under a year.
Crucially, almost half British cyber-gamblers are women. “Poker shouldn’t be played in a house with women,” wrote Tennessee Williams in A Streetcar Named Desire. Increasingly it is played by women in their own houses — no having to enter the smoky male preserve of betting shop or casino. Online poker encourages fantasy and anonymity, which many women prefer to the eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation of a live game. Around a virtual table Mrs Dibble from Penge, sitting at the kitchen table in her dressing gown, can log on as Micky “the knife” Spazzatino. No one sees your hands sweat, or the “tell” that says you are bluffing.
The live game is expanding simultaneously. This week, thousands of players began arriving in Las Vegas for the World Series of Poker. More than 6,000 people will pay $10,000 each to compete for a prize pool worth about $60 million, making this one of the most valuable sporting events yet staged. The tournament, to be beamed around the world, culminates in finals from July 7. Credit for the modern boom goes in part to some unnamed cowboys who, according to legend, sat down with a single deck of cards. The result was Texas Hold’em, in which each player gets two cards to be combined with five cards dealt face up, to make the best five-card hand. Hold’em, now almost universal in tournaments, is more subtle than other types of poker, since you share five sevenths of your possible hand with your opponents. Analysts say Hold’em is 70 per cent skill, and just 30 per cent chance.
“Poker is psychology,” Derek Kelly, the Irish owner of the Gutshot, declares. “It’s about how you bet, how you use your position. Are you afraid? Are you nervous? Who are you?” For many players, poker is also a mental workout, a mathematical challenge of the sort that Britons traditionally relish: Su Doku, for cash.
But technology and psychology alone cannot explain the poker boom. Image is vital. Poker was seen in Britain as an American import, associated with Mississippi riverboat gambling and the long stare of Steve McQueen in The Cincinnati Kid. This was card-drama in bars full of cheroot smoke, whiskey and wild women. In Britain, by contrast, it was traditionally the pastime of crooks in grimy vests playing under bare bulbs, or selfconsciously raffish rich kids looking for street cred.
Now the game has become middlebrow and middle-class. Hollywood has lent its imprimatur: the likes of Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson and Sarah Jessica Parker not only play, but like to be seen playing. In Britain the National Lottery has made gambling respectable, for poker is only the most spectacular winner in a gambling boom: Britons wagered £7.6 billion in 2003 compared with £40 billion last year, when profits of gambling companies doubled.
The Gutshot Club is hardly a pit of iniquity. (A “gutshot”, incidentally, is not the bloody fate of the cheat, but the card that comes in the middle of a straight.) Around the tables, under the neon, are pinstriped stockbrokers, elderly men in cardigansand a few women. The Sting, it ain’t.
There is another side, obscured behind the big money, rising stocks and Las Vegas glitz. For every Catman shuffling his gains, there are a dozen punters who have lost what they cannot afford. Gambling addiction experts are concerned. Teresa Tunstall, head of development at Gamcare, points out that internet poker has enabled addicts to obtain a hit at any time, day or night. “People have to realise they are paying for fun, not next week’s rent,” she says.
Derek Kelly of Gutshot shrugs. “No one is forcing anyone to play.” Behind him Catman’s pile of chips is growing, but his eyes remain empty.
