Online poker gets real, by Dominic Wells - The Times - 20th November 2008

Web poker enthusiast Dominic Wells attends the first annual PKR Live tournament and walks away with a chunk of the $75,000 prize pool

Last week, 22-year-old Peter Eastgate became the youngest ever World Series of Poker champion, beating 6,843 other players to win a record $9.1 million. The game is bigger than ever, yet its outlaw past clings: two years ago the US banned the operation of online poker sites. Perhaps that’s all part of poker’s pull on the psyche. It whiffs, still, of riverboats and last-chance saloons, of Bond tuxedoes and cocktail dresses slit right up to here. It’s a gladiatorial arena in which bluff and cunning and nerve count for as much as the dry calculation of odds, where fortunes are made or lost on the turn of a card or the tremble of a hand.

The internet site that caters most directly to these fantasies is PKR.com, which this weekend held its first live tournament: 150 players, some travelling from France, Germany, Scandinavia and even Canada, descended on the Loose Cannon Club in London for a crack at a $75,000 prize pool. PKR’s unique gimmick is that you choose your own 3D avatar to interact with others in an amazingly realistic way. And now these virtual gamblers were playing each other in the real world for the first time. It promised to be a fascinating experiment: how would the fantasy of poker live up to the reality?

As we take our seats, the most glaring discrepancy is how few women there are: no more than one per table, sometimes none. The conclusion is inescapable. Some of those women you’re flirting with online… may not be women at all.

Take John, screenname GeorgieBoy4 after his son. In baseball cap and a beard, he couldn’t be more blokey. But his avatar, he confesses, is a leggy brunette. “I think players do treat you differently as a woman,” he says. “They’re less inclined to think you might be bluffing.” And do they flirt? “Oh yeah. One bloke, when he found out we were both coming to the tournament, said he’d buy me a drink, and then asked what hotel I’d be staying at. He’s in for a bit of a surprise!”

Conversely, at the end of my table is Martin, screenname ManOnFire. A young hunk in a “Counter Terrorist” T-shirt, with tattoos climbing up both bulging biceps, he says he once played on PKR “and this guy starting having a go at me. Like, ‘God, you’re so sad, choosing a muscle-bound avatar with huge tribal tattoos on the arms.’ Er, excuse me? That’s who I am!”

As for the man to my right, he says he recently became a werewolf (PKR offers some special options around Halloween and Christmas). But in real life he’s not fierce enough to repulse my finest bluff of the day.

Crucially, I’ve already established my “table presence”: I’m dressed in a Kenzo jacket and a black trilby with a sparkly skull-and-crossbones; I turn up late but unflustered and immediately start talking to my table-mates. I make an intimidatingly large raise early on; when I toss in a rubbish hand, I make out it’s a wise fold of a good hand in honour of one that I can sense is better. All this is designed to spell out “don’t mess with me”.

Back to Mr Werewolf: when he raises 400, I re-raise with my pair of sixes. He calls. The next three cards on the flop are no help – a Queen and a couple of nonentities – but all the same I confidently stick in a big raise of 2,000. He thinks hard. I keep cool, though I swear that if I weren’t wearing a jacket, you could see my heart leaping under my shirt. At long last the hapless lycanthrope folds, exposing his cards: an Ace… and a Queen! He’s only folded the top pair, with an Ace kicker! To push someone off a great hand through sheer force of will is a thrill, and something you can’t pull off online.

Not long afterwards, I knock another player out after I hit a flush, which I “slowplay” – that’s when you decline to raise, which might scare the other guy off, but call if he does so. With luck he’ll interpret this as weakness, and stick in all his chips. The best thing about it is not so much taking the guy’s stack of 7,000, but doing so while getting a massage at the poker table from an Ibiza Angel – one of a travelling troupe of trained lovelies in white, who minister to the aching shoulders of weary players. “I’ll be lucky for you,” she breathes in my ear, and so it proves. Now if online play can throw up anything quite so James Bond, I have yet to find it.

I won’t detail all the many, many hands during the long, occasionally thrilling, often arduous slog to the final two tables where the money is. Suffice to say that I survive the first day’s play, breaking up at 2.30am after 12 continuous hours when 150 players have become 20, and I go out honourably the following afternoon in 15th place to win $1,100. I have my time quite literally in the spotlight, on the final tables, and my to-camera interview for the PKR website. It’s magic.

Realistic PKR may be, and the bonds it forges are impressive: the weekend was full of lively chat between players meeting up for the first time; so lively that two rivals were ejected after punches were thrown. But for my money, nothing in the fantasy of poker can quite compare with the adrenaline rush of living it.

(Credit: The Times)

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