Playing: Casino Carvill, Folding Felts, Ben "The Thinker" Summersby, Guilty Jim, "No-Blinds" Keggers, Welsh

Venue: The Carvill Casino, High Stakes Poker Room

We take a brief run through the Hold 'Em rules, in which Keggers tries to stand defiant against the staking of blinds, announcing their inate absurdity, nevermind that the whole of the card-playing world doesn't seem to think so. Pay up or ship out Kieran, my man, them's the rules.

Gareth is new to Hold 'Em, and he won't get lucky until he sparks up his lucky cigar, after which he hustles us all through a fug of smoke so thick we wouldn't know if he was pulling aces from his socks.

First big pot of the night, though, goes to Jim. An ace-high flush, the first of too many. He'll eventually get 7 of the fuckers, sharing the pot with 4. He must have fallen into a vat of playing cards as a baby. It knocked the sense out of him though - I caught him later chancing it with a pairs of two's in the hole against my straight, with nothing, I mean NOTHING on the board. That gave me a big win and a couple more good hands left my stack towering, but I had to sit tight until the end of the game as there was nothing else with my name on it.

Felts' stack by this point was looking pretty moody. Jim had suckered the lot out of him. That was when the Shot Heard Round The Table happened. Jim, first to bet, decided he had to break some news to us. Ominously, he anounced that he had something to say.

WHAT??!?!?!!

He wanted to show us his cards.

THE??!?!?!!?

But he said we all had to agree to fold before he would do so.

FUCK???!?!?!?!!!?

We didn't move. Jim flipped them anyway. Ace-Eight. His insides were being eaten away by guilt, he said. His ugly demons were berating him from inside, he said. He didn't want to take any more of our money. He thought he was cheating us. His cards had been unbelieveable, better than he could have dreamed. He felt bad and wanted to feel good..... Five streams of torrential abuse aimed themselves at Jim. He wasn't ready for it. He bummed the deal. He doubled the pot. He never recovered. Meanwhile, 4 places to the left, Felts' Ace/something, his first playable hand all night, hit the muck.....

Meanwhile Gareth sucks on his Siglo IV and mops up hand after hand.

Trying to keep an eye on the game I forget I'm even in a hand. A tiny pot goes to a pair of Kings and when realise and muck my cards I've missed out on the best cards we've seen all evening - full house, Kings full of 8's!!!

Eventually the pressure's too much for Benny and he wipes out. We call the game and start another - 20 quid buy-in, no-limit. Gareth steams in early with two dynamite bluffs and almost doubles his pot. There's a lot of action as Ben tries to make up for his loss. Felts is happier this game, and the no-limit seems to have freed everybody up. That and the beers we've been sucking on all night. So free do we feel, in fact, that Ben hits the bottom again. He buys back in, and is swiftly followed by Keggers biting the big one. They're both haemorraging money into a river flowing straight to Wales.

At 3.30am we start one last game, 10 no-limit. Keggers is out cold on the sofa, Jim's saying his bedtime prayers, hoping to absolve himself before the Devil takes his mortal soul. 2 or 3 hands in I crash out in an all-in showdown with Gag. 25 quid in one pot gets changed up into Welsh sterling. I deal but it's way past Felt's bedtime and even Ben is thinking better of carrying on.

Gareth sneaks out early in the morning with a spring in his step, to be met outside by his gold-plated jalopy here to take him home.......