Chips with everything

I’m hit with a king on the turn and my heart misses a beat, writes Ben Bentley. If there’s an ace on the river I’m potentially on a royal flush and it’s all I can do to conceal my ‘tell’.

Surreptitiously I check my opponents’ stony expressions and raise.

I have just joined the legions of Britons who are putting on their best poker face and talking in cliches while playing one of the fastest-growing games on earth, poker.

For today’s players, poker is a big deal. From its humble origins in New Orleans in the early 1800s, later spreading via the Mississippi riverboats, it is now a global phenomenon with millions of pounds at stake in some games.

It became a spectator sport when the programme Late Night Poker was introduced to British television in 1990, but the biggest change came with the proliferation of online casinos. Today, tens of thousands of players in the UK log on every day to an increasing number of game sites.

Poker professionals today are more like celebrities, and fans around the world enter into big-money tournaments for the chance to play against them. It means that even if you are at home in Wem you can be sat at a ‘casino’ table in Las Vegas, high rolling with some of the best players on the planet.

Poker is certainly perceived as a game that comes with all the glitz of a Las Vegas casino, but as a complete novice who’s idea of a card game is Snap during a rainy caravan holiday in North Wales, I have turned to Telford-based poker maestro Steve Upton-Clear to give me a lesson in how to up the ante and play like James Bond.

The basic idea of the game is that each player around the table is dealt two cards and, with a further three community cards on the ‘flop’ to choose from, the winner is the player who not only develops the best hand - royal flush, which is 10, jack, queen, king and ace of the same suit, being unbeatable - but also bets that their hand cannot be beaten.

In my poker masterclass, my inexperience shows when another player at the table raises me £50 and my nerve begins to crumble. Is my opponent bluffing? Has he got ‘the nuts’, as they say in poker?

I begin to doubt my hand and perhaps I’m sensible to do so. On the turn, on to the table comes an eight of hearts and I fold.

“You have to ask, is your hand good, because there’s a point when a good hand can become a bad hand,” says Steve. “Sometimes it’s best to fold - patience is the name of the game.”

Steve himself has been playing poker for 20 years and such is the demand for playing in social situations such as birthdays and corporate events that in January he set up a new poker business, pokerpartynite.com, which offers to organise sporting poker games for social functions and which will stage the Shropshire Poker Championships in aid of Hope House this weekend.

Steve regularly plays in televised tournaments - as does his daughter, who took part in the last Poker Party World Open championships.

Explaining the popularity of the game, he says: “It all started with late-night poker on TV and it excited people that they could see everybody’s hand with the under-table camera. Then you got the internet and people realised that you could set up poker online.

“A few years ago more money was changing hands on internet poker sites than with internet banking.”

Players can now play in satellite tournaments for prize money of up to £500,000.

What makes it appealing is that everybody has a pretty equal chance of doing well out of a game of poker.

“No matter who you are or what you have got when you sit at a poker table and start playing, every single person is equal, male or female,” says Steve.

Novice player Eunice Waterfield, 43, recently played in a satellite tournament in Bridgnorth and won the prize of qualifying for the 888.com Women’s Poker Championships, from which she walked away with $40,000 cash and a diamond ring worth $20,000.

And Katherine Hartree, a player from Bridgnorth, is now said to be among the top three female players in the whole of Europe.

So what makes a good poker player?

“Patience is the key. You need patience at the poker table because you have to wait for the winning hand and put up with the tactics the other players use.

“Poker is a game of chance with skill added on. You need luck, but Lady Luck has not been kind to me in TV studios. It will come.”

Patience being the name of the game, I wait, and in the next round the dealer hands me two sevens - hearts and clubs - and resisting the temptation to shout “Snap!” I consult my crib sheet to see what hand I can develop - four of a kind, maybe, or two pairs.

The guy opposite calls £5 and the next player calls the same. On the flop - that is, the first three community cards to come out of the pack - I see no future in developing my hand and fold faster than a piece of crumpled paper.

With my patience beginning to wear thin, in the next game I am dealt the ace of spades and the six of diamonds, and I raise £2 in chips, with the flop being the ace of hearts, six of spades and six of hearts. I see the opportunity for the full house, which is three same-value cards coupled with two different same-value cards - three sevens and a pair of jacks, for instance.

Could this be the one where I clear up? This must be how high-rollers feel on the telly when they are about to rush the table. Steve tells me that players’ pupils dilate when they are potentially sitting on a winning hand.

I remember his words from earlier: “Don’t let them see your eyes, don’t give them a ‘tell’.”

I call, splashing the pot with chips totalling £25 as do a couple of other players who call. I could be bluffing, of course, but eventually they all fold and I win - £80 if it had been real money.

It’s only pretend money and it’s just for fun, but the rush is undeniable. I now see why so many people play poker. Sensibly, I quit while I’m winning - or rather, while I’m just about breaking even.

* Shropshire Poker Championships are being held at the learning centre at AFC Telford United’s Bucks Head stadium on Sunday, April 20, starting at 4pm. Anyone interested in registering should call the football club on 01952 640064 or contact Steve Upton-Clear on 07968 594573.