Playing: “Horseshoe” Benny Binion, Mr K. Keggers Esq. – C.O.O., Jimmy Cornelia – The Smartest Kid On Earth, CarrotTop(tm), and everybody’s buddy – “Chip” Carvill
Venue: Benny Binion’s Private Members Club, 3rd Floor, Binion Towers, West London
“We hope it’s chips, it’s chips!”
8pm, running late, the boys aren’t happy. I’m sitting in traffic in Southall, a small suburb of Delhi, transported magically to the subcontinent by the A4020. Hurricane Feltham is rumoured to be hitting Ealing tonight so I brought a waterproof. They say if you spend twenty minutes looking around the table trying to figure out who is the mug, then it’s you. I’ve kept them waiting for 40 minutes so I’d say it’s the whole lot of them.
Benny comes to the table eager after three straight losses. He’s in danger of going on tilt soon, and he’s been overheard praying to God, Allah, Buddha and anyone else who will listen. In addition he’s dressed head-to-toe in a custom-made fur coat consisting entirely of hamster fur (his Eastern European supplier having temporarily run out of Lucky Rabbit’s Foot pelts after the Rabbit’s Foot Tanner and Curer Expo 2004 in Minsk last month). And he’s off to a flying start with a first hand win. The flop comes 8 2 6, and a big Benny bet causes a fold that ripples round the table and nets him a couple of ceremonial quid. He’ll come to wish he’d preserved those chips in amber, because the next hand I take them right back off him, using the pair of 8’s on the board and my Ace to win with a cheeky Ace High against his lowly King.! The hand sets a pattern for things to come, Benny repeatedly scaling the sheer rockfAce of Mt. Probability, only for his ropes to fail as he reaches the summit, sending him tumbling back down the mountain, our cackling fAces peering over the cliff are the last thing he sees before he splashes down and the river carries him away to Losersville.
All eyes are on Jimmy tonight, the Smartest Kid On Earth and the Luckiest Man Alive, capable of clearing a casino floor with a well-aimed pair of 2’s. He’s a giant of the game, a talisman and a terrible destoyer of worlds. He even sweats like a superstar, a fine sheen of healthiness on his skin. His hair sits tightly coiled atop his head like a 99 ice-cream, smooth and synthetic. Men have acquired new passports and fled the country to avoid facing him (cf. Garthy “O.G.” Williams, in self-imposed exile up a Swiss Alp with only a fondue-set and a cuckoo-clock for company). But he’s yet to play a hand. Super Smart Jimmy. Jimminy Smartpants. Show us what you’re made of, James! Balls like mahogany. Chuck down a three-high like it’s the best hand you’ve ever been dealt! No. He folds.
Mr Feltham beats Ben by a number. With 7 7 8 9 on the board Felts swipes it with a 9 against Ben’s 8. £6 pot. Mr Feltham asks us to sit back and admire his well-honed sucking action. Years of practice, we presume, servicing the needs of Streatham’s answer to Ironside, his lover and business-partner Mr Carney. Mr Feltham lets these insults fly over his head and float upwards with the sweet yellow smoke from his cheap Honduran cigar.
“Value for money!”
he says as he wraps his lips around it once again. It’s almost obscene.
And now, ladies and gentlemen, the moment you’ve all been waiting for. Flop comes A 7 10. Jim bites. We go back and forth until the board reads A 7 10 4 2. There’s £10 in the pot. Showdown. Jim flips his cards – he’s got a pair of 2’s. AND ONE OF THOSE 2′S CAME ON THE RIVER!!!!! Jim played a nothing hand all the way to Nowheresville, and he paid for the privilege. His maverick ways will support him no longer. His wingman Goose has long since dumped him and moved on in search of another fresh young dude willing to turn the gambling odds upside down and inside-out. My pocket 5 5’s win the hand, the pot, and the goddamn respect of every miserable soul at the table that night. Jim reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a contract signed by himself and El Diablo, the signature fading fast but the clause concerning the ownership of the co-signees soul still intact and very much a legal obligation.
Enter Mr K. Keggers Esq., ready, willing and able to espouse his crackpot theory of poker, popular psychology, eyebrow mechanics and the science of the mind. In a step exponentially more believeable and thus more truly frightening than Ben’s claim to have compiled a detailed and possibly erotic dossier on each player before the game, Mr K. Keggers Esq. performs a feat of Paul McKenna-esque mind-mystery-trickery. Pointing a long, slender finger at Mr Feltham he says
“He only plays if he knows he can win.”
No-one moves, no-one takes their eyes off him. We can hear Felt’s heart do a little hiccup.
“Jim’ll play anything, Carvill’s a blagger and Benny’s desperate.”
What about you Mr K. Keggers Esq.?
“I don’t know what I’m doing…”
As if to prove this point Kenny J. Keggers III goes belly-up over the next few hands. He really doesn’t know his arse from an Ace…
BONG! It’s the final hand of this game. BONG! It’s the culmination of 6 weeks of intensive training by Ben (staying up late, dealing himself hands, memorising the odds, committing burglary to cover his bankroll). BONG! It’s all 5 of us in. BONG!
Flop comes 6 8 9
Ben shoves in £2. Keggers folds, Jim folds, Felts meets him. I fold. This is some serious action.
Turn brings a Queen. Feltham’s hair is, I’m suring, glowing a deeper shade of crimson than normal. The opening chords of “Wild Wood” start strumming on the stereo. Feltham checks. Ben bets into him with £2. Feltham pulls the dagger from his sock and re-raises £4!! Benny calls and Jim peels the river from the deck and lays it down:
Queen
BAM! There’s a sweat on Feltham’s fAce. Ben sits. And waits. You could cut the tension with a knife, as if the tension in the room was an actual, physical object like a rope, pulled taught, as if Ben and Felts were each holding an end of the strained, quivering rope, wondering who would let go first, who’s hands would start to chafe first, who’s beads of sweat would start to run off their fAce anddown their arsm on an inexorable mission to loosen their grip on the fibres. Feltham knocks on the table with his knuckles. Check. Benny grabs his stack, about £4, and declares all-in!!! The air around us is buzzing, as if the air were filled with an actual buzzing thing, many tiny little buzzing things!! Feltham calls quickly and gentlemen – we have a showdown.
Benny flips a Queen Seven!!! Trips!!!!! Mr Feltham stares for a moment, as if reliving a fond memory of a time before cards, before cigars, and gambling and money and instead a time of skipping through the daisy-filled fields around his house as a boy. Then he turns over his Five Seven and rakes in about £16!!!!!! Straight to the 9, on the flop!!! It’s all over for Benno, he’s wiped out. Cash me out and cash me in!!!!!
At this point Mr Feltham picks up my notes, squints, and says “Remember the good ol’ days of ‘Benny wins 1st hand’!?” What a bitch.
Game 2
Board brings 5 2 K K 3. Kaptain Keggers hangs in till the river, and steals and average-sized pot with his pocket 3’s making a fullhouse – Ks full of 3s! I win the next hand with a giant pre-flop £1 bet. everyone topples like dominoes on an old Blue Peter domino-toppling world-record attempt. I take the next hand as well when a Q on the river pairs my pocket Q to outrank Feltham’s pair of jacks.
Keggers gets out his accusatory finger again and declares, somewhat incongruously, that I am one heck of a big bluffer and shouldn’t be trusted further than I could be thrown. I exhale what little breath there is from my post-win breathless lungs, gulp some air down and try to speak. But there’s nothing there. I can’t form a word. Korragious Keggers has knocked me down with a feather, Trevor. A pair of Qs, sensibly gambled, statistically computed, watermarked, stamped and cross-checked by my team of researchers, and he calls me a big bluffer?! I suggest you take a long, hard look inside yourself, Mr Bigshot Corporate Fat-Cat, next time you’re making ITPR clerk Bob Cratchit redundant, probably around Christmas-time. Then we’ll see who’s holding the cards. It’ll be Bob, on the way home to his poor crippled son and meagre Christmas dinner, while you chomp on your cigar and relate the story, for the umpteenth time, of the card game when you won £3 with a full-house.
Ben mounts a campaign! Can this be? Yes, Benno wins a nice pot when someone (not in my notes but probably Krazy Keggers) foolishly piles money in when the board reads A 6 7 8 9. Ben flips his 10 and he’s on the comeback trail!
Meanwhile Jim has munched his way through a year’s supply of spuds. Pringles, Sensations, nothing’s safe from his gaping maw. I wouldn’t be surprised to see him drive home in an Irish Potato Board van. Crunch, crunch, giggle, crunch, giggle, giggle, crunch. Only a £10 win on the next hand with 6 6 6 7 7 takes my mind off his incessant crunching.
During the next three hands, Ben will lose an astonishing amount of money. Talk about bad beats. He got beat by Bad Bad Leeroy Brown. Got his arm ripped off and got beat around the head with it. He got beat like Bad Religion, beat like Bad Medicine. Ben got beat like a bad babysitter with his boyfriend in the shower, losing 50 bucks an hour. First to tan his hide was me. Ben is sitting on 9 9 and the flop comes A A 4. Ben’s on the button and raises, everyone else drops out and I re-raise. Ben gets duped like a faulty photocopier and my 10 10 rakes in about £20. Next up is Korporal Keggers. Ben bends over and takes it while the K-Man slaps him this way and that. Ben’s holding pocket rockets! The board was showing 2 Q 10 Q J. Krafty Kieran could have hung on till the end with a pair of 2’s, judging by past form, but on this occasion he let’s rip his Queen to blow Ben away with Trips and take a £10-er from him!!! By now we’re all quite sure that Ben is drowning, not waving. With fire in his eyes and the tilt alarm going off full volume he tries to scare me out of a pot, but we both stay in till the end. And the end shows 4 spades on the board, 8 4 6 10 J. In a re-run of my greatest triumph at the Hersham Bowl I steal the £10 pot from out of the big man’s hands with my flush to the King against his flush to the Queen!!! A devastating blow for any man, and especially worse for Mr Summersby, still on the lookout for his first poker title of 2004 and a seat at the inaugural Hersham One Hundred tournament later this year.
Around this time my notes traditionally get a bit vague, and this is the case now. I’ve got entries for Felt’s going all-in with 10’s and 2’s against Jimbo’s 4’s and 2’sd. A remark about Feltham’s truly audacious yet still fallible bluffing system. But look, what’s this? In a tired scrawl near the bottom of my scrap of paper, the simple entry “Ben wins big”. The big man claims he made back quite a wedge of his losses, and I certainly remember some big hands coming good for him. So when he moves into the other room, wields his acousic axe and performs the musical equivalent of the ancient art of Chinese weaving, he let’s emotion speak it’s deadly truth. And what we all bear witness to is a primal howl of despair tempered by hope. Loss balanced by opportunity. Oblivion crushed by a bright, shiny new future where the odds were forever stacked 51:49 in his favour.3 with a full-house.
Ben mounts a campaign! Can this be? Yes, Benno wins a nice pot when someone (not in my notes but probably Krazy Keggers) foolishly piles money in when the board reads A 6 7 8 9. Ben flips his 10 and he’s on the comeback trail!
Meanwhile Jim has munched his way through a year’s supply of spuds. Pringles, Sensations, nothing’s safe from his gaping maw. I wouldn’t be surprised to see him drive home in an Irish Potato Board van. Crunch, crunch, giggle, crunch, giggle, giggle, crunch. Only a £10 win on the next hand with 6 6 6 7 7 takes my mind off his incessant crunching.
During the next three hands, Ben will lose an astonishing amount of money. Talk about bad beats. He got beat by Bad Bad Leeroy Brown. Got his arm ripped off and got beat around the head with it. He got beat like Bad Religion, beat like Bad Medicine. Ben got beat like a bad babysitter with his boyfriend in the shower, losing 50 bucks an hour. First to tan his hide was me. Ben is sitting on 9 9 and the flop comes A A 4. Ben’s on the button and raises, everyone else drops out and I re-raise. Ben gets duped like a faulty photocopier and my 10 10 rakes in about £20. Next up is Korporal Keggers. Ben bends over and takes it while the K-Man slaps him this way and that. Ben’s holding pocket rockets! The board was showing 2 Q 10 Q J. Krafty Kieran could have hung on till the end with a pair of 2’s, judging by past form, but on this occasion he let’s rip his Queen to blow Ben away with Trips and take a £10-er from him!!! By now we’re all quite sure that Ben is drowning, not waving. With fire in his eyes and the tilt alarm going off full volume he tries to scare me out of a pot, but we both stay in till the end. And end which showed 4 spades on the board, 8 4 6 10 J. In a re-run of my greatest triumph at the Hersham Bowl I steal the £10 pot from out of the big man’s hands with my flush to the King against his flush to the Queen!!! A devastating blow for any man, and especially worse for Mr Summersby, still on the lookout for his first poker title of 2004 and a seat at the inaugural Hersham One Hundred tournament later this year.
Around this time my notes traditionally get a bit vague, and this is the case now. I’ve got entries for Felt’s going all-in with 10’s and 2’s against Jimbo’s 4’s and 2’sd. A remark about Feltham’s truly audacious yet still fallible bluffing system. But look, what’s this? In a tired scrawl near the bottom of my scrap of paper, the simple entry “Ben wins big”. The big man claims he made back quite a wedge of his losses, and I certainly remember some big hands coming good for him. So when he moves into the other room, wields his acousic axe and performs the musical equivalent of the ancient art of Chinese weaving, he let’s emotion speak it’s deadly truth. And what we all bear witness to is a primal howl of despair tempered by hope. Loss balanced by opportunity. Oblivion crushed by a bright, shiny new future where the odds were forever stacked 51:49 in his favour.