I have never understood why anyone would want to gamble in a virtual environment. Everything about it is unreal, except the part where they take your money away. Why not just throw the money away, and dispense with all the tiresome mouse-clicking? But the news that poker is Britain's fastest-growing form of online gambling made me think again. It is estimated that £40m a day is currently being staked at online poker parlours. A six-fold increase in the number of players over the course of 2003 is likely to be repeated this year. Poker, as everybody knows, is a game not of chance but of cunning, mathematics, psychology - and chance. At last the expert poker player can work from home, fleecing the beginners from the privacy of his bedroom.
Sadly, I am not an expert poker player, or even a very good one. I am not even very good at being online. An attempt to set myself up playing poker at www.ladbrokespoker.com went awry from the outset, ironically because I already have an online account at Ladbrokes, on a defunct debit card that could no longer deposit funds or be used to close out a modest, longstanding credit. After a quick call to customer support, and a long chat with a woman who had occasion to say "Shan't keep you a moment!" no less than a dozen times, I was ready to log on.
On the internet you have no poker face, which is good news for those of us who like to jump up and down when we are dealt a pair of fours. The only weapon with which you can intimidate and confuse your opponents is your online player name. It must be selected with tremendous care. After some deliberation I chose LordLucan - heartless, famously unlucky at cards (that ought to reel 'em in), with a good reason to be gambling from a remote location. Alas, the name was taken, for all I know by the genuine article. My second choice, TroubledLoner, had too many characters. Finally, I settled on a simple but unsettling mixture of menace and milquetoast: BadChris.
As BadChris I intended to stalk the five-card draw tables until I had parlayed my deposit into a substantial nest egg, leaving nothing but flat-broke farm boys and housewives in my wake. But there weren't any five-card draw tables. No one seems to offer draw poker online, and this is really the only kind of poker that I know how to play. They offer Omaha, but I don't even know what that is. Eventually I found a seven-card stud table with a game in progress and a seat available. I drew up nice and slow and sat myself down (click!) with my $50 in chips (it's all in American money; current gambling laws prevent poker sites from operating in Britain) floating above my chair. On the running commentary alongside the virtual table, the ominous words "BadChris sits down" appeared. All over the world, I fancied, people were swallowing their gum.
What followed was a lot of flashing and beeping that did not help to refresh my basic understanding of seven-card stud. The graphics, no doubt sufficient for a veteran of the virtual tables, were very difficult to interpret: who is doing what? Why is it all happening so fast? Whenever it was my turn I was prompted by a box that offered all the options open to me: CALL, RAISE, FOLD. It blinked insistently while I tried to figure out what I had in my hand. I chose without thinking. Then the phone rang. By the time I got off I had parlayed my $50 into $10.20. I turned off the computer, went into another room and thought about what I had done.
It was time for a fresh start. I went to another site, www.pokerroom.com, and sat through a patronising but ultimately helpful tutorial on the ins and outs of Texas Hold 'Em. Then I logged on to a practice game - play money only - in which BadChris was represented as a 3D character, a nerdy guy with glasses, seated among other 3D characters. Here were Johnnyboy60, T-Roy5, fresh daddy, McFly_81(Maria Stein) and the estimable Smoky20. I bought $1,000 worth of chips with my pretend money. After the first hand I was actually up by $2. Fifteen minutes later and I was up $136. I was feeling confident.
Looking around the edges of the screen, I saw that there was a facility for me to chat with my opponents, although no one had availed themselves of it in the half hour I had been online. I decided to get the ball rolling.
BadChris: nice christmas?
No one answered. I raised $10, two people folded. A pair of fives came up on the flop. No use to me. Then -
T-roy5: so is anyone else here from detroit?
I pocketed my winnings and headed for another table. After five minutes' play I cleared my virtual throat.
BadChris: you know what? I could sure go for a muffin right about now
Greathand77: did u mean muff
helensmum: im having a muffin right now
BadChris: what kind is it?
helensmum: blueberry
Greathand77: lmao
I was chatting and playing at the same time. I was holding my own at Texas Hold 'Em, a game whose rules have always eluded me. I felt I was ready to play for real money again. I put another $50 dent in my credit card and found a table where the stakes were $2-4. This, as it turned out, was a little rich for my blood. Most of the players came to the table with three or four times the amount of money that I had brought and could force me out of a hand at will. I didn't fold when I should have, and when I did it was too late. There was no time to chat here; the robot moderator kept saying, "BadChris! It's your turn to act! Hurry up!". I hesitated, and I lost. The whole 50 went in three hands.
Very much chastened, I went back to Ladbrokes, ponied up another 50, and sat in on a game where the stakes were never higher than 50 cents and the pot averaged $16. I joined in, played eight cautious hands and lost half my money. I was ready to give up when I was dealt an ace and a two in the pocket; I hung around because of the ace, but another two came up on the flop, and then miraculously, another two on the turn. Meanwhile the player to my left had driven everyone else out with his high-handed betting. I looked at his pathetic username, andypoke, and decided he couldn't beat three twos on his momma's birthday. I raised him 50 cents. He called. I won. I logged off with $49.40 in chips, just 60 cents down on the day if you don't count the 100 bucks I lost earlier. And if you don't count the money I'm going to lose tonight after my wife goes to bed.
