I took on a table-full of serious poker players. Here's what happened
When 27-year-old accountant Christopher Moneymaker became the first World Series of Poker champion to qualify via an online site in 2003 and claim $2.5million he was the right man in the right place at the right time with the right name. Too good an opportunity to ignore, his surname became immediately appropriated and used to describe the tsunami of popularity in the sport and the numbers of amateur players entering poker events and leaving with the spoils in their bank accounts.
“The Moneymaker Effect” will be in evidence this Friday as hundreds of players will travel from all over Europe and pay £420 in the hope of qualifying for the final two days of the prestigious World Poker Tour ‘WPT500’ and a guaranteed $1 million prize pool at Aspers Casino in London this Easter weekend. As Moneymaker puts it, “The beautiful thing about poker is that everybody thinks they can play.” Although this should probably be amended to “The beautiful thing about poker is that everybody thinks they can play until they enter an event, having played a few hands online and a couple of games whilst drunk in Las Vegas a few years previously.”
Westfield Stratford City in East London is not Las Vegas - even if the people who populate it seem to share the same affection for athleisure wear. It is, however, home to Aspers Casino, a 65,000 square foot gaming space with wall-to-wall slot machines, 55 table and poker games, and, on the weekend I made an impromptu appearance at the 888Poker LIVE Festival London Main Event in the poker room last October, heaving with humanity and out-there optimism. The gaming floor is, as is the norm, all plush carpet, flashing lights, and a hush of busy concentration occasionally disrupted by the excitement of someone enjoying a temporary upswing in fortunes. It is designed to be exciting and it is.
However, if you have never been in a poker room forget any ideas you’ve picked up from Casino Royale. There are no white tuxedos here, rather a brightly lit, modern leisure space with a bank of screens, hundreds of other players from around the world and two water machines (remarkably few players drink alcohol at the table).
The game is Texas Hold ‘Em No Limit poker, and films such as Rounders, the 1998 Matt Damon drama, along with Moneymaker and the explosion in online gaming, are credited with bringing it into the mainstream and out of the smoke-filled back rooms of gangsterdom and the gambling demi-monde. It is now perfectly respectable to be a professional poker player and perhaps 20% of the 427 entries at Aspers for the guaranteed £400,000 guaranteed prize pool on the weekend I was there would earn a living that way. The rest, myself included, were a mixture of recreational and online players - the “dead money” to the pros - but the beauty of tournament poker is that there is always a chance that, with a steady nerve and a run of luck, you can stay in long enough to take home a pay-out.
That is exactly what 64-year-old grandfather John Hesp managed to do last July in the World Series of Poker main event in Las Vegas. The owner of Bridlington Caravan Centre in Yorkshire had been more used to playing for £50 in a casino in Hull but, in his own words, “became a global poker superstar overnight” by paying the $10,000 buy-in, making it to the last four and claiming $2.6million. Dressed in his patchwork shirt and wearing his lucky hat plastered in the sponsor’s livery, I found him sitting at the top table in Aspers last October while his game was being streamed worldwide online.
“I was a recreational player,” he explained in the Sky Bar during a break. “I still am really but I came out of nowhere in Vegas. I’ve never read a book or had a lesson… it’s just natural. The professionals didn’t know how to play me. It’s a bit more difficult now because I get recognised.”
The tournament I competed in cost £1,100 to buy-in, a price that got you a seat at a table and a 30,000 chip starting stack in denominations from 25 to 5,000. The hostesses flitted around unobtrusively with trays full of double espressos and black filter coffees, offering massages at the table for £1 a minute while the players, overwhelmingly male and under 50, focused on their hand, each other and the dealer. They came from America, China, South America and all over Europe, as well as the UK.
The dealers, mostly Eastern European, changed places frequently as the table slowly filled with players – talkers, non-talkers, flirters, smilers and the studious; one wearing mirrored shades, another with headphones; most were keeping their hands busy with their phones or flipping their chips. Some had played each other before and knew each other’s “tells” - the signs that give away the hand – or thought they did. But they didn’t know me or mine. After about 20 hands it should just be possible to discern the style of the other players or, rather, pick up a hint of a pattern. It should be - but isn’t always.
“Listen, here’s the thing,” says Matt Damon’s character, Mike McDermott, in Rounders. “If you can’t spot the sucker in your first half hour at the table, then you ARE the sucker.” And I was the sucker. It was my only advantage.
The only way to play in this situation and against much more experienced, better players is to play inconsistently: do the opposite of what any rational player would be supposed to do, be impossible to read, play like you’ve never played before, double-check with the dealer, seek reassurance, make mistakes, look surprised. Raise only once, modestly when your house keys should go on it. Go big on a Jack and a nine and bully the most aggressive player off the table just before the break. That kind of rank idiocy might work.
“Do you know what you’re doing?” a clearly exasperated player to the dealer’s right asked me at one point. “But do you know what you’ve got?” asked another, thinking aloud. There were anxious looks at the other end of the table.
After just over an hour, a period of time that seemed to fly by in just five minutes, I was down to about 7,000. Time to wait for a decent hand. Nothing but false dawns for what seemed like another hour but I managed to get back up to 20,000, enough to bluff big at this table.
Two more players dropped out. “Are you hustling us?” asked one guy to my left. “You’ll have to wait and see,” I said. He didn’t have to wait long.
Within a few minutes, we were head-to-head in a showdown. You have 30 seconds to make your bet and he went the distance. I had two pairs and went “all-in”, putting everything in the pot with a satisfying push. I lost - just. And he looked at me and raised a quizzical eyebrow as he went about stacking his chips, the chips that had until just recently been my chips, and said, “Unlucky”. I’ll never know if he meant it and he’ll never know if I was. That’s the beauty of poker. As the playwright and screenwriter David Mamet put it, “The poker player learns that sometimes both science and common sense are wrong; that the bumble bee can fly.”
888poker and the World Poker Tour brings the $1million guaranteed prize pool tournament, the ‘WPT500’ to the 888poker Card Room, part of the Aspers Casino, Westfield, Stratford, East London. There are qualifying tournaments in London and at the Aspers Casinos in Milton Keynes and Newcastle this Friday, 23 March. Players who qualify from any of the Day One events get to play Day Two in London on Sunday, April 1. The Final Table will then play down to a winner on Monday, April 2. For full details of the event, visit: http://888poker.com
