Playing: “Cool Hand” Carvill, “Bad, Bad Leroy” Banat, Ken “The Elegance” Middleton, “Moody” Mark Malloy, Amarillo “Slim” Gorman, “Watchful” Willy Ring
Venue: The Banat International Indoor Hold ‘Em Arena
“They call me the moonlight gambler…”
We’re in Banat’s House of Cards and it’s looking to be a clean-up. I’m 45 minutes late but the rest of them look like 90 minutes of aperitifs. Good news. Sean’s played before but I’m thinking maybe I heard him wrong and he really said he’d been played before. Played like a cheap violin, by a man with a limp. This should be easy.
We play a couple of just for fun hands of Hold ‘Em and immediately Banat’s more questions than answers. Willy asks what the cards in the middle are for, and my head’s ringing so much from the cash registers going off in my ears that I’m sure my eyes are lighting up like laser beams. I wish I’d bought some shades. I don’t want these people to see my primal lust for their cash. Even a balaclava would do. There’s 600 quality David Westnedge* plastic poker chips on the table tonight so we cash in and away we go.
The table looks like a peanut farmer’s convention. We’re knee-deep in them, and my cards have probably been preserved for the next hundred years in a layer of salt.
I’m up a couple of hands and an early lead but make some foolish calls instead of concentrating and suddenly Sean’s chip leader by about a fiver. Sean will bet anything, all the way to the river. He’s asked me three times if I’ll go and see Damien Dempsey with him next week. I’ve said yes three times but secretly I’m going to get a pea-shooter and take one of the Irish crooner’s eyes out. Willy will fold anything, up to and including pocket rockets, I think. He’s tighter than the crotch area of a pair of overalls three sizes too small. Frankie Laine tells us that if we haven’t gambled on love then we haven’t gambled at all. I don’t know much about him, but he sounds like he recorded the album standing at a urinal.
Will nearly breaks the bank on a big hand that cripples him for the rest of the game. I had the nut flush but there was so much money on the table he had me checking my hole cards again just to make sure. My cold sweat evaporated when he lined up his big 4-card straight, unaware that he needed a fifth to make it worth anything. In biro on the piece of paper next to him is written the order of hands, and next to Three-of-a-Kind he’s written “three cards”.
Mark’s halfway through his bottle of vodka and two-thirds of the way through his chips. He piles it in for hands like 3-card straight draws and two-pairs, a crazy maniac card-counter, but he’s counting the cards in Italian. In binary. Backwards. He’s got one chip left and goes all-in, seconds later raking back about 15 quid with his flush on the river.
There’s a lockdown in place on Banat’s drinks cabinet. He’s shelled out 300 quid for a barrel of assorted brandy and he doesn’t want to wake up and have to fish someone out of it. After the first game he makes a cocktail with a lot of lime. I take a taste and he tells me it’s also got lemon in it. Then he tells me that his lemons are off.
Ken turns up with a bottle of Jack Daniels, a lungful of Belgian air and a bellyfull of Duvel, but he’s mediterranean by nature and probably bathes in olive-oil and he hasn’t got a clue. Thank God. I’ve turned semi-pro and the last thing I need is a wise-guy with a tan and a suitcase full of dirty Belgian euros.
“Mad” Mark Malloy’s crazy ways soon wipe him out of the first game, and we cash in. Sean, Willy and me are all up, me about 20 quid. Next game comes, and we’re playing pretty smoothly. Sean wins with a full house, although he was playing under the impression it was two pair, because that’s what he shouts triumphantly as he smacks his cards down on the creased Subbuteo felt. Then a litre of vokda kicks in along with, I’m guessing here, half a kilo of crack. Within minutes Mark’s fallen off his chair, pissed up the bathroom wall, phoned a girl to call her a “c*nting b*tch whore” and fallen off his chair again. This is while we’re waiting for him to pay the big blind. There followed “The Tut Heard ‘Round The Table” and the start of a giant karmic exchange. “Mad” Mark wins the next three hands with straights, including a Broadway. He must be holding about 45 quid!
The Elegance has the body of a boy, drinks like a man and plays cards like a girl. He’s at the wrong end of the table, up to his eyes in discarded peanut bags, and it takes us a few rounds to remember he’s playing. Ken’s going South, and the scribbled order of hands makes regular journeys in that direction as he tries to work out the cheapest way to drown.
Amid some of the most uncourteous behaviour this side of a prison barge, players are going missing on a regular basis, the attention deficit about as deficient as it gets. It’s a child’s party in full swing and there’s 5 special children right here waiting for the raspberry ripple. But there’s only 5 raspbs, and they know who they are.
Mark’s intravenous injection of ethanol and cat’s piss eventually takes it’s toll, and halfway through the game he’s gone AWOL and is never seen again. He gets blinded out, plain and simple, a pathetic endgame to an enjoyable and sometimes surprising battle of the wits. He had the money and the muscle to edge anyone out, but he blew it on blinds and bad plays and if anyone’s looking for a mark then he’s got it in name and nature. In the words of Sophie Ellis-Bextor, “if you’re feeling kind of mixed-up, just remember it’s a mixed-up world”…..
Around 4am Banat gives up waiting for 4 aces in the pocket and goes to bed. William’s hanging on by his fingernails and the whole tournament has descended into the sort of disarray you see in the old army experiment footage when they pumped soldiers full of amphetamines and acid, threw them in a field in Montana and told them it was Vietnam so KILL! KILL! KILL! The soldiers ran around for a while shouting and being agressive but pretty soon they were inspecting their own arses or laying face down in the mud and wondering what it would be like to have a thorax. Sean’s broke but happy, Ken’s been smothered in oil and wrapped in muslin for the night, and I’m 50 quid richer which I blow extravagantly on petrol and charcoal briquettes on the way home.
*David Westnedge, manufacturer of gaming supplies, is, I’m convinced, a Wizard of Oz-esque midget hiding behind a glittery curtain and conducting his business with a set of levers and a maniacal grin. He knows as much about poker as I know about plastics manufacturing, and his Set of 100 Poker Chips is one of my most uninspiring but sadly necessary purchases of recent years. Their “fully-interlocking” feature has been proven to be a wild overstatement of the facts, and where the box claims “+tray” you will instead find a flimsy membrane somewhat akin to clingfilm, although without that oil by-product’s incredible self-proclaimed ability to cling, preferring instead a friction free and expandable frame which precludes the easy measuring of it’s contents. I left a message on Mr Westnedge’s office answerphone enquiring as to which unexpected retail premises his affordable but almost useless products are liable to turn up in. Mr Westnedge has so far managed to elude me, although the evidence suggests that his entire supply chain consists of Mr Westnedge in his garden shed with his patented “Crappy Plastic” machine churning out his brittle gambling discs which are then loaded onto the back of a bread van and delivered to the Farnham Art Shop, a tiny shop with amazingly intricate displays of everything but art materials. Run by a trio of late middle-age Jewish women and a stunned-looking gentile, it’s a fun-packed kaleidoscope of board games and bawdy gossip. Westnedge’s crap fills the shelves and alarms went off the first time I bought anything in there. It’s probably not a shop at all, but their knick-knack packed front-room.