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Lucky at Cards

You know what it’s like, being a writer. You have all this work to do, all these jobs — and somehow, you find all these excuses to avoid doing them.

I found a great one.

Online poker.

I’ve loved poker for as long as I can remember. I always will, even though it has broken my heart any number of times. I don’t play every week, or every month, or even every year. I have long stretches away from the tables, in which I don’t even think about it; but for a strange and crazy while recently, I found myself playing just about every hour of every day, in a frenzied race against time…

It started like this. There I was, successfully avoiding all the work I was meant to be doing, happily playing online poker, when something horrible happened.

An idiot knocked me out of an online tournament one place short of the money. I trudged up to bed, late, grumpy, miserable. And I asked myself, “Why do I do this?”

I thought I knew why I did it.

I did it “to win.” I did it “for fun.”

But that hadn’t been fun at all. And I didn’t win.

In the morning, I had the revelation that led to Diary of a Mad Poker Player.

It showed me why I was “doing this.”

I was doing it to avoid doing what I should have been doing. Which meant that the night before I had succeeded, rather than failed. I had failed “to win.” I had failed to “have fun.” But I had successfully avoided getting down to work and writing for an entire evening!

Well, that was ridiculous. I’m a professional writer, not a professional poker player. So what was I going to do, huh? Write, or play poker?!

And in that same flash of revelation, I saw my answer.I was going to do both.

Play poker, and write about it.

The story presented itself instantly, in three glorious, excitement-packed acts.

The previous year, an unknown, twenty-seven-year-old Tennessee accountant — with the wonderful name of Chris Moneymaker — had parlayed the $39 entry fee for an online tournament into a $10,000 seat at the Big One: the Championship Event of the World Series of Poker. And, in true Hollywood fashion, he only went on to win the damn thing. And $2.5 million.

Well, if he could do if, why couldn’t I?

So I set off, via cyberspace, for Vegas.

It was a wild ride. Up one moment, down the next; soaring with the eagles, plummeting into the crocodile-infested swamp. And the more I threw myself into it, the more I found myself standing back, and taking a look around at the alternative universe that is the Poker Life. The more I saw of it, the more questions I had. I consulted experts. I talked to lawyers, card room directors, website owners - and especially poker players, from the biggest names in the game to the unusual guy in the Hawaiian shirt next to me.

And I played tiny-stakes super-satellites, and fought my way up the poker food-chain. I learned that to win at Hold Em online you need to think differently about the game. You can’t see your opponents, so what do you do? You rely on betting strategy. They can’t see you whimpering behind the sofa when you’ve re-raised five callers all-in from the Big Blind with nothing. So go for it. Look for the big pots, with lots of limpers, and blow them out of there. Use your stack, rather than your cards. After all, anyone with a “Real Hand”, such as the Big Pair you are pretending you have, would have gone all-in ahead of you. Therefore, no-one has one. Therefore…

Okay, it doesn’t work every time. But you’d be surprised how often it does.

When I arrived in Vegas, I could hardly believe what I was seeing.

I’d last covered the World Series of Poker in 2001. Even three short years before, it had still felt like a family event. Everyone knew everybody. The Press Office at the Horseshoe Casino was delighted to see anyone who even vaguely resembled a journalist. In the poker room of the Mirage Hotel, where I was staying, a quarter of the tables were being removed to make way for a keno desk.

Well, in May 2004, that keno desk was out of there. And downtown, in the splendidly dowdy Horseshoe Casino, where the World Series of Poker has lived since its inception in 1970, you could hardly move for wannabe-Moneymakers. The day before the Big One, there were lines for the last satellite tournaments stretching out of the casino and round the block. Camera crews were everywhere. More than two and a half thousand players entered for the Championship Event ­ about one-third of them Internet qualifiers.

And the tournament itself was electric. Watching poker, live, can be about as exciting as watching paint dry; but this was enthralling. High-stakes poker and high-ratings TV combined to make drama, and spectacle, in an atmosphere that crackled with electricity.

Poker has a long and colorful history in the USA. It has been played here, in various forms, for two hundred years.

But it is only now that poker has captured the public imagination.

There are two big reasons for this — the Internet, and Television.

The Internet has brought the poker table into everyone’s computer. You can find a game, instantly, any time you want. For as long as you want. At whatever money level you want. Millions play for free, using play money rather than cold, hard cash. No casino could possibly afford to spread free games. Besides, the poker room in a casino can be intimidating, to a new player. Not so your own computer, in your own home.

On TV, the World Poker Tour is produced with entertainment in mind. The audience can see the players’ hole cards. What audience doesn’t love to be ahead of the game? To know more than the competitors?

And now, thanks to TV, the world has discovered the appeal of poker.

Which — if I may quote myself — is this:

Where else but at the poker-table, in our ordered and regulated lives, can you lie and deceive, trap and steal, harass and bully your fellow citizens, and still be considered a fine, upstanding - indeed, admirable - human being? We love poker not just because of the thrill of it, and the intensity of it, and the puzzle of it that is as complicated as the most fiendish crossword ever devised: we love it because, at the table, we are free. It’s just you, out there in the forest, hunter-gathering, a world away from the trappings and trammels of civilization.

Diary of a Mad Poker Player is, as its subtitle says, a journey. It was a journey that turned into an exploration of a fascinating world. The poker table is a truly inclusive, equalizing place. You may be sitting next to a big shot or a nobody, a drunk or a cold-eyed professional. The hunch-player may be beating the mathemagician. And — although it is almost always the other way around — the beginner may be doing everything wrong and winning all the professional’s money.

Because there is an old saying in poker:

I’d rather be lucky than good.

Me? Well, it cost me an arm and a leg — or, to be precise, my beloved prewar Gibson Granada banjo. And I didn’t win the World Championship: but looking back — well, I can see that I could hardly have been luckier.

Not because I get good cards. Like most other players, I can often feel that the poker gods withhold their favors from me, and give me all the wrong cards and my opponents all the right ones.

No. I am lucky at poker because I happened, purely by chance, to find myself writing about a subject I love at the very moment when it has become the hottest thing around.