There I was last week being so rude about my gym and their big unavoidable screens. Today I arrived, stepped on the cross trainer and there right in front of me on the Sky Sport screen was a poker tournament. Five minutes warm up, 15 minutes on the bike, ten minutes rowing went by unnoticed, with me clocking up unheard of rpms when I bothered to notice. Then I had to go to the other side of the gym and do weights and machinery stuff where I couldn't see the game. I kept sneaking back between sets and caught the last card of the last hand. The coolest of the final two lost to an arbitrary river card.
Now, if they'd had poker for sport at my school, I wouldn't have had anything like so many problems. I flatly refused to play lacrosse after a few games of gutsy girls coming at me with long sticks at head height while members of my team yelled 'Cradle, cradle!' at me when incredibly I had the ball. I stood stock still, let the ball drop out of the net, and waited to be battered to death. My heart was not in it. I did not want to play, no one wanted me in their team. So I staged an early version of a sit down strike - Bertrand Russell hadn't got there yet - and sat down on the grass refusing to move. I was sent to the headmaster. This being a progressive school, the result was not a beating or a detention, but 'the consequence' of being taken five miles out into the Hertfordshire countryside by the Head in his car, let out and told to get back in time for English. Every games lesson this happened, and I stuffed my cigarettes and matches up my kickers and wandered contentedly back to school over fields and through lanes, puffing on my fag. It was a satisfactory outcome, but if they'd known that poker was a sport, I'd have been a perfect pupil.
I've been playing online poker for two or three years now. I lose. Not heavily - that is I don't play for high stakes, but invariably, in the long run I lose. Not that I don't get how to play to win, but after I've been canny and ice cold, as ice cold as it's possible to be when you can't see your opponents, for a while, I think, fuck it, I don't want to be smart, I want to gamble. I've got the wrong temperament. Awful shame, because what I'd like to be more than anything else (maybe even more than being a writer) is a professional poker player. Once I wanted to be a song and dance man, but the time has passed for that, and my voice was never any good though I was a whizz of a dancer. But if I couldn't be Gene Kelly, I'd settle for being Victoria Coren who, after winning some huge poker tournament, is my hero of Autumn 2006.
The thing is I can't really believe that it's not all down to luck, finally. If you play really tightly so you don't play anything that isn't solid gold it gets tedious. Anyway, playing odds seems delusional. If a potential winning hand is 18/1 aren't you still just gambling on happenstance? 2/1 is worth a gamble, but 18/1 or 33/1 is the same as saying maybe, isn't it? Probability is theoretical. Poker is real life, cards turning up or not turning up. Neurological scientists can't help me on this, I think I need a statistician to set me right. Where is the sense in playing the odds, when the odds are just as likely not to come up even when they're due? Aren't there odds for an 18/1 hand coming up when it's time for it to come up, if you see what I mean? Now my head aches.
There's another thing I wasn't good at in school: maths. Any attempt to manipulate numbers made me cry. Now it makes me panicky, but I don't have to take any tests - except I suppose in poker. But I don't risk enough to make it matter. I suppose logic is the problem. Logic is a dim, fogbound intuition that I can glimpse, but I can't quite put my finger on. This is not the result of the disappearance of my neurons (though I suppose it doesn't help), it's just the wiring. All I need to make me content is not to want to play poker. But I do, I really do.
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