Playing:Cowboy Carvill, Tallboy Ben, “Pintsize” Howard Williams, Banat “Origami” Banat, “Ginger” Paul Feltham, Tits Milbourn, Giggling Jim Cornelia
Venue: Jamie’s Poker Palace, Hersham
Spilling wine on the felt since 2003.
“Every gambler knows that the secret to surviving
Is knowing what to throw away and knowing what to keep,
‘Cause very hands a winner and every hands a loser,
And the best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep.”
Christ, it’s still light outside. There’s a blanket up at the window and the sun is pounding on it. We’re squeezed round the table at Jamie Milbourn’s Poker Palace in Hersham, slogan – “Suckers Welcome”. We’re shoulder to sweaty shoulder. The place is a sauna, and there’s more people expected. Worse, it’s two representatives from the Ashford Amateur Poker Association, a more boorish bunch of chancers than which you’d be hard-pushed to find this side of goldrush-era San Francisco.
Gambling in the daylight feels like drinking whiskey at the breakfast table. There can be no hiding of dark motives, stealth must take a back seat. It’s as if someone has lifted the rock we’re hiding under, and here we are – seven sorry gamblers, yes gamblers, squinting and exposed. In this month’s Inside Edge magazine – a magazine devoted to gambling in it’s myriad forms – “Barmy” Barney Boatman makes the case for poker players to be considered athletes. One look around the table tells me he’s definately never seen us play.
In seat one, Paul Feltham, slightly frayed around the edges after an afternoon spent wine-tasting. He’s sporting a shirt that can best be described as second-hand, and a spanking new set of ginger-coloured clay chips. They’re not actually clay, as Paul found out after a prolonged argument with the poker shop proprietor, but high-impact plastic composite resin. But, like Paul, they are ginger and they don’t mix well with others.
We play a few hands of 7 Card Stud and Omaha to limber up. Omaha is 4 pocket cards, and then table cards and betting just like Hold ‘Em. However, you must make your hand using 2 of your pocket cards and 3 from the board. To play Omaha is to enter a world of almost infinite possibility and it’s accompanying and inversely-proportional concentration span. If you have trouble remembering your Hold ‘Em pocket cards and subsequent combinations then you’ve got no hope playing Omaha. One glance away, one mis-read turn card and you’ll find yourself on a slowboat to China with only moonshine-crazed tin-mining inbreds for company. Given our less than long-running history of professional card-playing we decide to stick to what we know, or at least what we think we know, the fine game of Texas Hold ‘Em, of which, inevitably, we know less than we think we do.
In seat three, Ho Chi Jimh, the Irish-Asian God Of Lucky Charms, takes the first hand with a pocket queen to go with the two on the board. A first hand win is recognised in these parts as the cold finger of luck tapping you on the shoulder before making a hasty departure, but this time it’s different. There is no chill wind, no nervous silence, no ominous rattling of the shutters. This time it’s Jim. Lucky Jim. Ben straightens his stack, looks each of us straight in the eye and says “He’s reversed the curse.” And maybe he has. I take a 9 Q all the way to the river after flopping a 10 J, but have to call it a day when Jim fronts a large bet. I hate folding to Jim but I must admit the feeling of inadequacy lasts half as long as the feeling of an empty wallet in my back pocket, which I invariably end up with if I pursue Mr Lucky Charms all the way to the end.
Felts folds the next hand on the river, giving it to Jamie, in seat two. Jamie, our fine host, stayed up all night looking at other people’s girlfriends and wishing he was more manly, mainly on account of his owning boobs and appearing to be heavily pregnant. As we will discover during our mid-game meal, he is most likely pregnant with 36 hot-dogs ‘n’ buns and a side-order of MSG. As a result of his nocturnal activities his trademark pinsharp humour is AWOL and the world is a sadder place. In seat four Ben is on the wrong end of a losing streak longer than the checkout queue at Hersham Safeways. He’s taken to listening to Yazz’s “The Only Way Is Up” as an inspirational anthem, and today he arrived armed with a shovel to dig himself out of his hole. He takes the next hand on the button when the flop brings A A 5. Next hand Felts and Jim make big bets all the way with the board showing A Q 3 K K. Jim, admittedly, is usually chasing the bets but this time he’s leading the charge from the front. I say I think it’s an almighty bluff but when the showdown comes it’s Felts holding the 2 7 (!).
The AAPA contingent arrive in a cloud of dust and flies, pockets ringing with the sound of clinking minatures. Urgent phone calls had been received earlier in the day concerning the precise amount, position and placement of small blinds, big blinds and raises. A startled silence and a slowly evaporating exlamation mark hanging in the air greeted the news that we’ve upped the minimum bet to a quid. First Banat picks his eyeballs up off the floor and then contemplates, for the merest sliver of a second, a month in which his Pot Noodle budget could be halved. His mouth already dry, he manages to squeak a polite refusal. Then the child prodigy Howard Williams, aware his meagre pocket money can only stretch so far, and certainly not as far as a trans-county train ticket to Hersham, decides to stay at home. Faced with these two pitiful examples most poker schools would have closed the door and got on with business, but in an overwhelmingly inclusive and egalitarian move the swift decision is made to embrace our less fortunate brethren. The blinds are lowered. And there, trundling towards us, comes the trojan horse….
It’s mainly a drawing game, with fortunes changing hands on a regular basis, none of us yet smart enough to throw a good yet obviously losing hand. Poker is nothing if not patience and restraint, of which those amassed here tonight have neither. Me and Ben clash heads over 2 3 J 8 A with me taking the pot holding J 3 to his Q 3. Jim and Howard go to the river with K 10 6 J 2, Jim winning with pocket Q’s against Howard’s fold. Howard takes the very next hand, though, his single 9 matching up with A A 9 6 7 to make two pair. The hand after that between Jim and Banat required even more balls of steel, or a head full of cotton balls – A K 5 5 2 is on the board, full-house territory. A mexican wave of folds leaves these two playing, and the showdown is Banat the winner with A 7 beating Jim’s K 7! The following hand, unbelievably, gets even more tenuous. Felts, with one win to his name so far, piles ginger chips in on every round, only to be met by Howard facing him down across the table. There’s £15 and 5 6 10 3 J on the table when the finally show ‘em, Felts with a disgracefully insufficient A Q losing out to Howard’s outrageously speculative J 5. All the way with a pair of 5’s! There must have been desperation written on Felt’s face, and maybe nothing would have made Howard fold that hand. We could all learn a lesson from Mr Kenny Rogers when he sings “You gotta know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em”.
All in all, though, the night’s big winner is Howard. I haven’t actually got him winning much in my notes from the first 2 games so either he won it all in the third, he did it when I wasn’t looking, or he was surreptitiously smuggling chips from my stack into his all night, which would explain a multitude of discrepancies including why I didn’t win. To be truthful, he plays tight, tight as a gnat’s chuff. And if you’ve ever had a romantic liason with a gnat, and his/her chuff, you’ll know how tight we’re talking. The wonder kid’s got lollies and footie stickers to buy with his money, so he takes care of it. He makes good decisions and sticks with them, and he’ll keep winning as long as the decisions remain good.
Ben went all-in halfway through the night, board showing 8 K 2 A 7. After some deliberation I met him there. I had K 2 to Ben’s K 9. He didn’t take it well, but made a wonderful, surging comeback in the second half, clattering through all that dare step in the lumbering giant’s path. Breathing lungfull’s of pure ozone, he repeatedly pokes his head down from beneath the treetops to flip yet another perfectly calculated winning hand. He reckons by the end of the night he was perfectly even – Jimmy White awaits!
We spot Banat’s tell the very first time it happens. After sitting on his stack all-night, playing as tight as a gnat’s bumhole (and if you’ve ever had a romantic liason……), he’s on the big blind of 50p when he reaches over and hesitantly places another 25p chip on top. “Make it 75p” he says. The bet heard round the world. The board brings J A 6 6 4. Only Howard makes it to the river, and sure enough when they flip ‘em Banat’s showing A J to Howard’s K J. You have been warned! I can’t remember what he went home with, but it can’t have swung much either way, and anyway most of went on his feeble search for an edible Hersam-based pizza parlour and the rest on a taxi(?!) home.
Felts faced an uphill struggle all night, ginger power evidently failing to materialize. He repeatedly got taken down close to the cloth, and went all-in a couple of times, only to emerge the victor and double up his weak stack. Best hand: a three-wayer with me, him and Ben. I’m holding Q Q, Felts has got Q 10 and Ben’s got Q A. The flop brings 7 J A, at which point Ben’s winning. Turn brings J, Ben’s still winning, and river is a K. Felt’s has won with a straight to the A, I wisely, if belatedly, folded, and Ben is sick as Ben usually is.
Jamie fed us mechanically-recovered dogmeat snacks, then went to bed at approximately 8pm. Jimbo’s pact with Beelzebub has been rescinded, so Super Lucky Jim has been demoted to “The Man From Molesey”. He was down a bit when we packed it in, very early due to desertion by the “tired” hordes, to watch episodes of The Office, after which we all felt like winners anyway.