Poker. It conjures up some images doesn't it? Smoky bar back-rooms in 1920's Chicago? Sending the Mafia boys round to collect unpaid debts? Today's images of poker are different.
Aged around 8, I joined a new class at school. Thoroughly by chance I came to sit next to a boy named Leyton. Over the next few weeks, I became friends with Leyton.
Then one rainy day, Leyton showed me a new game his parents were playing. It was called 'Poker'.
Flash forward to early 2004, a communal kitchen in Camden, around 2300.
Sitting at the kitchen table are 5 young men and 2 young ladies. Standing behind them is myself, wondering why I was familiar with the basic concept of poker.
The stakes are not particularly high, with a buy in of £1. Still, this situation is one that was repeated numerous times over the following months. In fact, post-band and songsters, the residents of the ground floor of Dennis Holland Lodge would gather to share drinks and a quick few hands of 5 card stud.
So what has caused this resurgencee in gambling?
How has it come about that a 32 year old IT consultant from Surrey can be the new poker legend? Everywhere you look nowadays poker is in your face. On tube trains, billboards, in newspapers and on TV there are adverts aplenty for online casinos, offering higher and better rates of return than the others. One company, vcpoker.com, uses average run of the mill people to advertise.
Poker high roller Nick "The Greek" Dandalos claims that the next best thing to playing and winning is playing and losing. Then again, he is successful. So are people in it to get rich or for the fun of the game? I suspect the former.
Modern day poker, much like the rest of the internet, allows people to fool others perceptions. If a 57 year old builder from Stoke wants to be a rich and successful property developer from the Docklands, he can be. Online poker makes players faceless and nameless. You can be anyone you want to be.
So is poker the new Pokemon? Or will it fade to relative insignificance like so many fads before it?
Timmy "Three of a kind" Magic
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