1/7/2024 0 Comments Celebrity brothel gameIs this an inherent difference between the sexes, or a state of affairs orchestrated by the way poker has been marketed for the past century? Victoria Coren Mitchell, probably this country’s most prominent female player, has said that intimidation is certainly a factor. Men, generally, like to compete against each other a bit more.” Breviglieri agrees that women tend to be less competitive: “I think that’s why there are fewer women in poker than men. It’s never-ending.” The game is popular with professional and ex-professional sportsmen who seem to need an outlet for their competitive urges: Boris Becker, Carl Froch and Neymar all play, and Trickett himself was an aspiring footballer before he discovered poker.Īs for the gender aspect, he says: “I don’t know if it’s a testosterone thing. I ask Trickett why men are so in love with poker. I made £1k on cryptocurrency in two weeks and I don’t even know what a bitcoin is It is clear that, when I enter the real tournament, I’m going to fall flat on my arse. There follows a long pause while I think. At one point Breviglieri asks what I think we should do with the hand we have been dealt. He teams up with another journalist another professional pairs up with another member of the media and I sit next to Natalia Breviglieri, the woman lumbered with explaining the finer points of the game to me, an idiot.īecause professionals are involved, the games move so quickly I begin to panic. In a chilled private room with cream chairs, I sit down opposite Sam Trickett, who has won more tournament money than any other Englishman in history. The message couldn’t be clearer: to sit at the table, you should be a man.īefore I can compete, I am given a pre-tournament lesson with the professionals. The only women around are serving drinks in short shorts, tights and white socks, and, I notice, providing massages at the table. Though the game has always existed in the abstract for me, it is a regular fix for countless men in this country – hundreds of whom are sitting around the casino’s tables, hoping to get rich. So, to find out why poker is almost exclusively played by men, I accept an invitation to enter a tournament in Nottingham, where the total prize money is £8.5m.įor me, a poker newb, walking into Nottingham’s Dusk Till Dawn casino is like a virgin crossing the threshold of a brothel. The scale is minuscule, and with Skittles there is no sense of jeopardy: we are risking none of our own money. “At the casino, the only women are serving drinks in short shorts and providing massages at the table”Īlthough our Notebook editor, the cursed Bobby Palmer, ends up being the winner technically, I win two hands and, as I’m sweeping the Skittles to my corner of the table, I feel as though I already have a taste for the game.īut it’s not enough. It also becomes clear to me that more than anything else it’s a game about confidence: in order to play well, you need to be confident in your ability and confident about holding your nerve – often, for all intents and purposes, lying – in front of a group of people. It’s a mixture of psychology, secrecy, showmanship and chance. Even when the stakes are low (we are playing for £10 and in place of poker chips we are using Skittles) there is an undeniable thrill to the game. A group of six, all of whom know how to play poker better than me, congregate in the upstairs room of a pub. In order to investigate, I start by organising a poker game with the ShortList lads. When was the last time you saw a film in which half a dozen women played poker? And, though there are strenuous efforts in the industry to attract more women to the game, these might be like closing the stable door after the horse has bolted: on billboards, TV and in films, the consensus is that it is a game for men. And yet, wherever there is poker, there are men: men drinking whisky at the table men in smoke-filled back rooms, cigar in one hand, cards in the other men sitting cross-armed, chips in front of them, their eyes hidden by their hoods. Why is poker such a male phenomenon? There doesn’t seem to be anything inherently masculine about the game. The Shortlist team play a low-stakes game Oh, by the way - I only learned how to play poker a week ago. I turn my cards over, so that they lie face up for the world to see. Two kings in his hand makes three of a kind. My Tom Hardy doppelgänger turns his over. There is an audible frisson as the stand-off reaches boiling point. I push my remaining chips past the line and look at the dealer. I know one thing for certain: I didn’t come to partypoker’s Millions UK tournament only to bow out with a whimper. Each time I’ve raised the stakes, he’s raised them with me. Everyone’s fallen by the wayside but me and a guy who looks like Tom Hardy.
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