I was at the Gutshot poker club in Clerkenwell in January on the day that Derek Kelly lost his court case. That afternoon the jury had decided that Kelly, then chairman of Gutshot Poker, had profited from a game of chance without holding a gaming licence, in contravention of the Gaming Act of 1968. Kelly, a stocky middle-aged Irishman who has the energy and charisma to turn most things his way, had failed to persuade the court that poker should be regarded in law as a game of skill rather than chance. At the club, before the night's tournament began, he made a short, bullish speech. "The casinos won today," he said. "Big money won today." At this, all the much littler money in the room booed the casinos and cheered the Gutshot; then the evening's business—and pleasure—began.
Today, despite Kelly's prosecution, the Gutshot continues to be open for business. Its premises are half the size they were before the case, but it has retained its core, new-generation clientele: the twentysomethings in their sunglasses and baseball caps, who sit at the tables wired into their iPods, riffling their chips and trying fancy moves, and sometimes (to the annoyance of the older players) bursting into testosterone-rush posturing—punching the air when they get a bit of luck, or shouting "Get in," as if a Tuesday night £5 rebuy tournament in Clerkenwell were only a flop away from the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas.
When I started playing poker, about seven years ago, I was instantly captivated by the game that is, as Al Alvarez puts it, "social Darwinism in its purest, most brutal form: the weak go under and the fittest survive through calculation, insight, self-control, deception, plus an unwavering determination never to give a sucker an even break." Yes, luck is involved, but unlike such casino games as blackjack or craps or roulette, you're not gambling against the house with its in-built advantage; it's you against other people. Over the long haul, character and skill decide the outcome.
When I started, there were two places to play in London outside of home games and illegal "spielers" or dens, both of them casinos: the Grosvenor Victoria Sporting Club ("the Vic") in Edgware Road and the Russell Square Gala (known as "Stakis," from a previous regime). The Vic was for professionals, semi-professionals and amateurs with large bankrolls; Stakis was more for the low-stakes recreational player, although it was by no means a soft touch—you could win serious money there. At Stakis, poker was played downstairs in a smoky, rough-edged, congenial card room. Regulars referred to the place as "the Dungeon." But in 2002, Gala closed the card room, calculating that it would make a lot more money if it replaced the habitually grumbling poker players with slot machines, nine of which could take the place of every poker table. Some Dungeon players found their way to the Vic; others dropped out. To cater for the remainder, Barry Martin and Steve Bennett, a couple of Dungeon regulars, set up the Gutshot, originally in an Italian restaurant, before moving it to its present-day location in Clerkenwell in 2004. Providentially, and problematically, the Gutshot—one of a new breed of independent, unlicensed card rooms—set up just around the time the poker boom began.
Changes in behaviour and taste are often powered by technology. Rather as the success of snooker in the 1970s was a result of the spread of colour television, two innovations fuelled the poker boom: broadband internet connections and the "hole camera." Back in the Dungeon days, a few people played poker online, but as they usually did so on unreliable dial-up connections, they always had horror tales to tell of faulty connections losing them big pots. It used to be thought that pornography would be the biggest commercial beneficiary of the internet, but in fact its most profitable areas are all to do with interaction rather than content: gaming, gambling and networking. And television, starting with the Channel 4 programme Late Night Poker, with its innovation of allowing viewers to see the "hole" cards (those known to the player alone), turned the game into a popular spectacle. There are few things more compelling than watching people make decisions under pressure, and as poker is, essentially a game of incomplete information—What does he have? What does he think I have? What can I make him think I have? What are my odds on making the best hand?—the hole camera allows the viewer to see what the players are grasping for.
Television also helped establish the poker variant of "Texas hold 'em"—in which each player uses his two hole cards in combination with the five communal cards to make his best five-card hand—as by far the dominant form. Hold 'em is the easiest variant to televise and the most straightforward to play—"five minutes to learn, a lifetime to master" is the maxim. And it is the version played in the "Main Event" of the World Series of Poker (WSOP) in Las Vegas.
The WSOP began in 1970 as the inspiration of Benny Binion, the owner of Binion's Horseshoe casino. Binion invited six players to compete against each other at five different versions of poker. The winner, Johnny Moss, was elected by peer vote as the best all-round player. The next year, what came to be known as the "Main Event" was held—each player stumped up $5,000 to go up against each other at Texas hold 'em (in subsequent years, the buy-in has always been $10,000). There was no limit on the size of bets that could be made. The event was a "freezeout," which meant that players who lost all their chips were eliminated and play continued until one player held all the chips. The winner, again, was Johnny Moss.
Every card room now runs tournaments along the model of the WSOP, which this year will be running more than 50 events before its Main Event climax. There are also two quasi-professional "tours," the (American) World Poker Tour and the European Poker Tour. Many of the contestants are sponsored to play, most often by online poker sites, but—and this is one of the great things about the game—anyone can take part: all you need is money.
The modern era of poker can be precisely dated to May 2003, when the gorgeously named Chris Moneymaker won the Main Event. A Tennessee accountant on his uppers, he won $2.5m, having qualified for the $10,000 buy-in tournament by winning a small-stakes game on the website PokerStars. Moneymaker was the first person to win the Main Event after qualifying on the internet, confirming the merger of the online and live versions of the game that has so boosted the game's popularity. The following year, a patent lawyer from Connecticut, Greg Raymer, who had also qualified on PokerStars, won the first prize of $5m. Moneymaker beat out 838 other players; Raymer came first out of 2,576. When I played the Main Event for the first time last year (also qualifying on PokerStars, but this wasn't to be a Moneymaker story), there were 8,773 entrants, thousands of whom had qualified online. The first prize was $12m.
There is no richer prize for any sporting event, and, unlike any other event or pursuit, it's the poker players who put up the tournament prizes themselves, from their entry fees. This has not gone unnoticed by businesspeople.
Jim Sibcy, the managing director of the British poker television channel Pokerzone, happily makes an analogy between the poker boom and the Californian gold rush: "It wasn't the prospectors who made the money. A few did, of course, but the real money was made by the merchants who sold them the shovels." You can see the shovel sellers out in force each year in Las Vegas at the poker "Gaming Life Expo," held in a convention room next door to the World Series. Here you can buy Greg Raymer "Fossilman" sunglasses, signed photographs of the stars, hundreds of poker books, and computer programs that enable you to analyse your play (or simply cheat).
Poker websites make their money by taking a percentage of the action—every cash pot is "raked," usually at around 5 per cent, and tournaments have a 10 per cent fee attached (so for a tournament with a $100 buy-in, each player will pay the site an additional $10 fee on top of the $100 that goes into the prize pool). As in the live game, it's you against other players. The biggest winners online are the Scandinavians (several Swedish poker millionaires are under 21, and are therefore too young to enter an American casino), while the biggest losers tend to be Italians and Japanese. The Scandinavians are fearsomely aggressive, while the Italians bluff too much. Poker success is to be found in that zone of bravery just this side of stupidity.
With this amount of cash washing around, it's hard to move in the poker world without bumping into someone looking for a piece of it. The annual WSOP, which gets more bloated every year, is the most visible example. In 2004, Harrah's casinos bought the WSOP, and the events now take place at the Rio casino on the Strip, in a huge aircraft hangar of a convention hall, rather than downtown at the smaller and much more atmospheric Binion's (although part of the taste for this "atmosphere" is admittedly a perverse form of nostalgia for the time when Las Vegas was run by the mob rather than by corporations). Harrah's biggest success has been to strike lucrative sponsorship and television deals, none of the proceeds of which ever find their way back to the players.
Meanwhile, the legal status of online poker has come under threat, in the US at least, by a combination of economic protectionism and traditional anti-gambling puritanism. Last year, the US congress enacted legislation which prevents domestic players using US bank accounts to deposit funds in any foreign-owned website. The effect has been to lower the profits of some sites and increase those of others. But if the aim was to discourage online poker, the law has not had that effect: the number of Americans gambling has not fallen, even in those states where it is technically illegal.
The British are much more relaxed: from the stock market, horse racing and the gentlemen's clubs to bingo, the pools and the high-street bookies, gambling has long been integral to our culture. (America may have the bigger casinos, but they're usually out of town, away from "respectable" society.) There are few restrictions, online at least, on where British people can play. But "offline," as live poker is increasingly called, is another matter. Whole new generations of players—some who watched poker on television, some who had played on the internet—have come into the live game, some with great success. Roland DeWolfe, for example, who used to play at the Gutshot, is the only person to have won both a European and a World Poker Tour.
If one of the purposes of new gambling legislation is to protect the vulnerable, then card rooms like the Gutshot should have been unexceptionable. It is in casinos, where there are craps and roulette tables to suck up their cash, that young men who have just been knocked out of a poker tournament can get into awful trouble. In the new card rooms, you can see the workings of money and adrenaline, but little bad feeling or bad behaviour.
Following the success of the Gutshot, other independent card rooms sprang up all over London, and in other parts of the country too. There is an enormous appetite to play live poker at smallish stakes, with the players content to let the establishment make its profit on tournament fees and cash table rakes. But the money has also attracted the casinos to the game, including the Gala chain. Though I happen to quite like casinos, in a slightly aghast way, it seems obvious that poker is best served by small card rooms, separate from the casinos, with the only job of legislation being to regulate how much the establishment can charge in rake and tournament fees.
Then came the Gutshot case. As Kelly tells it, the impetus for prosecution came from a separate, but hardly disinterested, source. "The police had come down and were happy with what we were doing. But then the casinos got involved. Gala basically paid for the prosecution." Whatever the motivation, once the prosecution was brought, there seemed little chance that the Gutshot could win. The legal arguments (surrounding what the judge called a "garbled" law) came down to whether poker is a game of skill or chance. It is, of course, a mixture of the two: any fool can get lucky, but over a period of time the skilful player will win. The letter of the 1968 law, however, has it that poker is a game of "equal chance," and anyone seeking to profit from the game should hold a gaming licence, as the casinos do. After Kelly was found guilty, the Gutshot developed its online operations and narrowed its live operations, in effect turning itself into a private members' club. Its clients pay £3 every time they enter, and can "choose" whether to sign a form pledging to "donate" a percentage of any cash pot they win. By these means, the club flirts with the spirit of the 1968 act—that no profit should be made from hosting games of chance in unlicensed premises—while obeying its letter.
On 1st September, however, the 2005 Gaming Act comes into force. It may well kill off all of the new-generation poker rooms. The new act gets rid of many of the loopholes in the 1968 act that have made it possible for clubs like the Gutshot to exist. It makes clear that anyone wishing to make money by hosting poker must obtain a casino licence, and stipulates that poker games outside of casinos—such as in members' clubs—will be restricted to a maximum £10 stake and prize pools limited to £200; that is very small potatoes indeed, likely to be of interest only to the most casual players. The government seems more interested in licensing so-called "supercasinos." A casino, super or not, is essentially a machine for separating people from their money. Poker players just want to play poker in safe, congenial surroundings.
To try to give poker clubs a legal basis under the new act without registering as casinos, 13 of the new clubs, including the Gutshot, have established the United Kingdom Poker Club Association. They are lobbying for poker to be reclassified as what the new act calls "prescribed" games—games of skill rather than chance, like bridge and whist. The argument will drag on until January at least, when Kelly's appeal against his prosecution is heard.
Another option is for clubs to pursue the "legal route" and get themselves registered as casinos. This is what Dusk Till Dawn, which plans to open in Nottingham, wants to do. The club, whose 45 tables would make it the largest poker room in Europe, has satisfied all the legal requirements to gain its gaming licence except for one: the final hearing at the magistrate's court to approve its licence was delayed by appeals from the casino groups Grosvenor, LCI and Gutshot's old friends Gala. "If we were a casino," Nick Whiten, Dusk Till Dawn's co-owner, told me, "it'd be 'stamp our licence and off we go,' a handshake and a couple of rounds and it's all sealed." Instead, the casinos appealed against the licence on the only available legal grounds: that there is insufficient demand to open a poker club in Nottingham—an argument that seems difficult to sustain, as Dusk Till Dawn already has 3,000 members.
Why are the casinos so set on obstructing the independent card rooms? I've failed to get anyone from Gala to explain this to me. It's partly a matter of a closed shop protecting their own interests; Whiten also speculates that casinos are worried about losing their "leaking" poker players, many of whom will splash away their hard-earned poker money on a couple of rolls of the dice. (He estimates that around 40 per cent of poker players are habitual gamblers.) And, probably, the casinos are worried, in Dusk Till Dawn's case, about the precedent of poker rooms setting up as legal gaming premises: if the poker venture fails, the card room can then become a casino—providing new and unwanted competition.
As Derek Kelly says, "poker is better value than drinking… it doesn't hide the cost. Poker tells you the cost of what you're doing." But even if, for most players, poker is a reasonably cheap night out, it's still an all-consuming activity. No matter what the stakes, when a player is about to make a decision that might win him a tournament or cost him a pot, you can, in Kelly's words, "see every fibre of his being come alive."
Walter Benjamin wrote that betting "is a device for giving events the character of a shock, detaching them from the context of experience." It's as good a description of poker as I know. But the rule is not to play scared, because when you play poker with cash you can't afford to lose, it becomes a sure thing that you will lose it—scared money is dead money. But money in poker is just the way you keep score, and its only instrumental use is as the means to get into bigger games.
The biggest game of all, of course, is the Main Event, which starts on 6th July in Las Vegas and will grind to its climax on the 17th. The days last 12 to 15 hours, rewarding the aggressive, the disciplined, the patient, the lucky, the fearless. Among the thousands of other players who all just want one thing—your money—among the clack-riffling of poker chips, the noisy posturing and misdirections and quiet psychological ploys, you find out how brave you are and what the limits of your concentration and stamina are. In two days of play last year I made just two bad decisions. The first was when I was too timid to commit almost all my chips to call a big bet that I was sure was a bluff; the second was when I "represented" (acted as if I had) a hand that my opponent was too clever or stupid to believe in. The first decision cost me a large pot; the second put me out of the tournament.
There is no other pursuit in which an amateur can enter the top professional events and have a chance of winning a prize. Among the many paradoxes of the sport—or game, or pastime, or however it should be defined—is that its biggest event has become far too huge and yet shows no sign of being unsustainable. It takes place in a huge, ugly room in one of the most intolerable cities of the world. And yet—as is the case for the thousands of others who take part—nothing could stop me being there.
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