ACCORDING to Anthony Holden, who knows a thing or two on the subject, my only experience of playing poker was of the very best sort. That is to say, round at a friend's house, "with a couple of drinks and a bit of joshing." Enough money at stake to make you bothered about losing it but not enough to ruin anyone's life.
That, says the author who has just published his second book on the game, Bigger Deal: A Year Inside the Poker Room (the first was tagged Big Deal: A Year as a Professional Poker Player), is the "original poker." But things have changed. What was once an amateur game of derring-do, enjoyed by small groups of like-minded individuals, has the hit the big time, and seriously.
When Holden, whose day job sees him writing about classical music for the Observer, first played the poker world championship in Las Vegas in 1988, there were 167 starters; when he played in 2006, there were nearly 9000. The entry fee of $10,000 remains the same but you can qualify by winning a satellite event, with "buy-in" fees starting at as little as $6. "It's an astonishing change," says Holden. "The advent of online poker in particular has brought in a whole new raft of younger players. And the scene when you go Las Vegas has changed - in the old days it was rather collegiate and everybody knew everybody else. Now it's a massive convention, with people from all over the world, about 50-odd countries I think."
The World Series of Poker (WSOP), as it's now known, is exactly that: there are some 55 different events, the world championship itself being the capstone. The winner last year walked away with a cool $12m, a bundle more than the £1m carried off by the winner of the British Open Golf championship the same weekend.
That allure may in part account for the huge rise in numbers of poker players worldwide, not least in the UK , where online poker is now the second most popular form of gambling pastime behind the National Lottery. Huge numbers are honing their skills online, while poker clubs and casinos are cropping up all over the country. "It's fashionable, even chic," says Holden. " Hollywood stars are playing it; it's a mass global activity. Thanks to television there are big stars like Dave "Devilfish" Elliot and Phil Hellmuth, who are like pop stars or sports stars. They're all multi-millionaires and walk around with a swagger and have their own websites and fanclubs and grace the covers of poker magazines."
American television networks are seemingly keen on having the game recognised as a sport and the world WSOP given similar billing to the likes of NFL. The author of countless books on the Royal Family - as well as on Shakespeare, Tchaikovsky, Lorenzo da Ponte and Laurence Olivier - Holden would approve, if only because he feels that having represented his country eight times in the world championships, he would surely be in line for a knighthood - an offer he would nonetheless decline as, somewhat peculiarly, he doesn't agree with the honours system.
Sport or game, knight or mister (or missus), it's perfectly possible to make more than a living out of being a poker player, but aren't there many more losing fortunes than making them? Daft question. "Of course you get people lots of people losing lots of money," Holden says, "but as many a serious poker player will tell you, poker is not gambling. There's a rather pretentious saying that money's just a method of keeping score, but put it this way - in every other casino game, the odds are stacked against you, which is why casinos have chandeliers and deep-pile carpets. With poker, if you know what you're doing, you're waging favourable odds - if you make the right calculations."
I've had this explained to me before, by a poker-playing mate - let's call him Dave - as though I were Bertie Wooster wondering why the best of six games tends to be an unsatisfactory way of settling the Drones Club darts final. Calculated risk, control over your own destiny, entirely different to backing a horse: Dave's watchwords all. But then, you know, we can't all be winners, and while most poker bores - sorry, Dave - are apt never to have the mantras far off the tips of their tongues, most are slightly coy when it comes to detailing their winnings. That there are, apparently, 2,598,960 five card poker hands you can be dealt, suggests to me that a winning hand is almost never a surety.
What makes a good poker player, then? "It takes a combination of aggression, ruthlessness and an ability to read other players around the table," says Holden. "You must be able to sniff weakness and you have to be a 'leather-ass', which is poker-speak for patience - you have to wait, not just for good cards but for good situations.
"The game is also a huge exercise in keeping your ego under control. One thing I'm often asked is about women - it's a game where the sexes can compete on level terms and there are still some men who cannot bear to lose to a woman. In poker-speak they go on the tilt, begin to play very badly and make bad decisions.
"I know a lot of women who play up to this and make a good living out of it; they'll come to the table with a bit of cleavage showing to put the guys off. They're very good players who know exactly what they're doing and the effect they're having on the male ego."
Down at the poker table at Glasgow 's Riverboat Casino on the Clyde there is a definite sense of egos bristling. One woman (no cleavage) is playing with six men. Most players are middle-aged, although one guy looks like he could be anywhere between 25 and 45. It's a £50 buy-in game but there's none of the gold jewellery or expensive clothes that might hint at poker-plundered wealth. Dare I say it, there's a slight whiff of divorce.
Graham (a family man) and Chan, who I speak to at the bar, know one another and have played poker for about five years. They both say they win more than they lose, spending "a few hundred" a week, either online or in clubs. Graham, who's "in table mode" exhumes self-confidence. "It's pretty easy to make money online," he says. "There are a lot of players who've never played properly and don't know what they're doing. This is far and away much better (playing at a table) though; beating weaker players is so much more satisfying when you can see them."
The typical poker player, according to Holden, is a bit of an outsider. "They stand apart from this and that and I think one aspect I do like is that it tends to people who don't want a boss. You want to make your own decisions about how you spend your own time and your own money." He would certainly appear to fit the bill. In the early 80s, Holden left his job at The Times after loudly insulting his then boss, Rupert Murdoch, in the presence of The Queen and a room full of VIPs.
Years before that, when poker was just something you saw in the movies, he and a few friends from his days at Oxford started a Tuesday night poker game in London . Their number included the poet Al Alvarez, the poet, who went on to write the seminal poker tome The Biggest Game in Town, and David Spanier, now dead, who would write Total Poker. "If you go to Nevada now, people cannot believe that these three legendary poker books emerged from the same little home game in London ," says Holden.
He may be forgiven for indulging in a little nostalgia. The young whipper-snappers have inexorably changed the game. On televised games, etiquette has gone out the window. "There are a couple of bad boys, like Hellmuth and Mike "the Mouse" Mills who are deliberately rude to people at the table," he explains. "They throw tantrums when they lose a hand, jump up and down, use the F-word, and so on. Some, I think, do have personality problems, but they're also half doing it because television loves it."
Another celebrity of sorts whom Holden hasn't much time for, after famously declaring, as a Whitbread Prize judge in 2000, that it would have been a "national humiliation" if the Prisoner of Azkaban had won, is Harry Potter. I ask if the books would be improved by substituting poker for quidditch. His reply? "He'd never be aggressive and ruthless enough. I don't think he has a leather ass."
This article appeared in The Herald