31/03/08
Poker..I hardly know it. -
Categories: Last Tuesday it was the turn of Carl Donnelly and myself to be the guests on Sky Poker's live tournament show. Its a fairly laid back show that mainly requires on the guests providing some witty banter while playing against 650 members of the public in an online poker tournament. To many of you that may sound fun, and I have no problems with the witty banter part, being a self-proclaimed master of chat wit. I'm only self-proclaimed because no one else would proclaim me as such a thing, but that's not the point. Where I failed in the requirements on said show was that until one month ago I had played poker all of three times in my life and in all of those I had lost, drastically.
Not drastically to the extent that there is now some large stetsoned man sitting comfortably in what used to be my house, having just driven in what used to be my car and having pointless arguments whether or not to let the what used to be my kittens in or out with what used to be my girlfriend. No, nothing as bad as that. However I was really sad I lost all those chocolate biscuits and £7.50 which cut me real deep at the time.
When my agent rang me about the show his first question was 'Can you play poker?', and I said bluntly 'No. Not in anyway, shape or form' assuming of course that covered all possible poker bases. I've never heard of underwater poker being played with moose instead of cards but if such a thing existed, I wouldn't be able to play it. Hearing this conclusive response, he simply said 'well you're going to have to learn, you have a month'.
This meant it had become a challenge, albeit a slightly shit one, but nonetheless I couldn't back down. So for the last month I have been cramming poker knowledge down my throat. I say cramming, but actually all I've done is the odd bit of online poker with 'play' money, a concept so dangerous that you never really care whether you win or lose and make ridiculous bets, because it doesn't ever matter ever. Someone at a gig sent me the Harrington guide to poker by email which I gave all of two minutes of concentration before getting distracted by anything else that has even an ounce of interest about it. Its bizarre because a name like Harrington would normally make me want to read a book, because it sounds like he might be a detective or someone with worldly knowledge. The sad reality is is that he is probably just a fat, rich man who wears visors, smokes cigars and prays for actual friends. I had recently read a book called 'The Big Blind', which was a fiction all about poker. Sadly I hadn't paid much attention to the clever stuff and more just dribbled about the author who used to front Sleeper, and was well fit.
The last bit of training was Carl spending three hours in a pub teaching me some poker skills. This was most useful until we both had a shandy and became both sleepy and paranoid that people would see us gambling in a club and go all 'Joe Pesci' on our asses.
Despite lack of knowledge the show went well and not least because I got to use the phrase 'I've folded more times than an origami master'. Carl did better than me, winning a whole £30 for the NSPCC, which means maybe one child can get foam padded stairs or something. I however won nothing, but in consolation of letting people suffer due to my lack of aid, we were both told we did pretty well compared to other people on the show and we even lasted longer than a poker pro that was there two weeks before. Not that they named the poker pro, and therefore were probably lying. Either way, I discovered I actually enjoyed it, and am now intent on buying my own visor and gambling my life away big style. My girlfriend and cats had better keep their fingers/paws crossed.
In other Douieb news...Its Edinburgh mental time at the moment, pre-organisation and admin-wise. Its amazing how trying to put together a 40 word description can almost ruin friendships and mental states despite the fact that in reality, none of the festival punters give a toss and only focus on the shiniest poster, 5 star reviews and whether or not it has tits and violence in it.
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