Bigger Deal

How long, O Lord, how long until poker is officially classified as a game of skill? It didn’t happen in 1960 when Parliament passed the Gaming Act which legalised casinos in the UK, thereby putting out of business not only all those sleazy basements in Gerrard Street where Greek hard men played stripped-deck five-card stud, but also the posher, though equally sleazy, drawing rooms in Belgravia where Aspinall first fleeced the aristocracy. Although Terence Reece, who played bridge for England, had said there was nothing to choose between the two games in terms of skill, the bureaucrats who control these things thought differently and classified poker as a game of chance, along with bingo, craps and roulette, and that’s how it’s stayed.

Bureaucrats, of course, are good on administration and bad on practical experience. About 25 years ago, a man I’d known at Oxford became head of the Gaming Board. He was a nice, intelligent guy, the son of a bishop, who played a little bridge but had never played poker or even placed a bet on anything. His only qualification for the job was that he was a high-flying civil servant and the post was vacant. Dark and lonely work, but somebody has to do it, as Joseph Heller said of cunnilingus.

I know why the bureaucrats were confused. Poker looks like gambling – and at a low level of skill it is gambling – because it has to be played for money. Money is the language of the game. How and when you bet or check or raise is a form of communication, a way of telling the other players the cards you have – or pretend to have. There may not often be much chitchat at the poker table, but in a good game you can have hours of interesting conversation with no more than four words: “Check”, “Bet,“ Raise,” “Fold.” Handling your chips – knowing when to bet and when not to – is as much a skill as handling your cards and it takes a lifetime to learn it.

Poker at its best is like chess. It’s about thinking and psychology and intuition. So why the prejudice against it, especially now gambling is a government-sponsored activity, a voluntary tax on the poor that keeps the Treasury’s coffers full? Maybe the politicians tell themselves that that kind of mindless gambling is just fun. Also classless, since a 14 million to one shot makes everyone equal and equality is a political issue. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that schools got rid of competitive sports and sold off their playing fields on the principle that one child being better at something than another was politically incorrect.

For others, it’s a moral issue. Twenty-odd years ago, three of us now involved in this web site – Tony Holden, Hugh Howard and myself, along with Eric Drache, a well-known Vegas professional – tried to sell the idea of televised poker to production companies on both sides of the Atlantic. None of them would even consider it. In those days there were no mini-cams under the tables, but the problem, for them, was not technical. They turned us down because poker, they said, is gambling and gambling is immoral.

Since then, poker has become a global craze and the TV channels are scrambling to air it. Even so, the prejudice remains. In London recently, the Gutshot poker club has been forced out of business because a jury has decided that poker is just a game of chance. If that’s what those twelve good men and true believe, wouldn’t you love to sit down and play a little cards with them – not for the money, of course, just show them how far mere chance will get them.

It simply doesn’t make sense. Gamble on the Stock Exchange and, if you have the skill, you become a pillar of society, as well as rich. Do it with cards and, no matter how skilful you are, it’s a criminal activity. When will it ever end?