In the world of online poker, men become women and women become men. But in Dublin today, they'll play face to face, writes Conor Pope
Luck doesn't usually get you far at the poker table. Every once in a while, however, if the gods of chance are smiling broadly enough you might have a stroke of ridiculous good fortune at exactly the right moment in exactly the right card game allowing you to hit the jackpot.
For most people, that moment, if it ever comes, will come at a low-level card game with friends and might bring in enough cash to cover a meal in a restaurant or a few rounds in the pub. For journalist, novelist, TV presenter, poker star and all-round renaissance woman, Victoria Coren it came at the appositely named Victoria Casino in London four weeks ago and won her £500,000 (€745,392).
She was taking part in the London leg of the European Poker Tour (EPT) at the invitation of the tour sponsors, online poker site www.pokerstars.com, when she hit paydirt, making history by becoming the first woman to win the event.
After seeing off the challenge of more than 300 hardened pros - the vast majority of them men - she entered the head-to-head encounter against a particularly aggressive Australian. Just minutes into the heads-up she was dealt an unpromising unsuited 6, 7 combination. Her opponent, meanwhile, had a much more attractive pair of eights. Until the flop - three communal cards dealt on to the centre of the table - went down.
The 5, 3, 4, on the table gave Coren a most unlikely straight - an unbeatable hand in the circumstances, known as "the nuts". Blissfully unaware of the terrible misfortune that was about to befall him, the cocky last man standing read her tentative betting, sensed she was vulnerable and tried to bully her out of the game by going all in - betting his entire stake. She called, he lost everything and she walked away with the top prize. "I had already thought it through and I knew he was very aggressive so I had to try and let him hang himself. I thought it might take hours but as it happened, four hands in and I flopped the nuts."
PRIOR TO THE London event the most Coren, who writes a weekly column for the Guardian, had won at a poker tournament was £25,000 (€37,272) - at a celebrity event three years ago. "That was the sort of amount to make you jump up and down and go out and buy yourself a new car. But £500,000 is a staggering, life-changing amount of money to me. I know there are poker players who win and lose that amount of money in a single night but it is beyond my comprehension."
The kind of money up for grabs on the world's poker circuits is beyond most people's comprehension. Season two of the EPT - one of the three biggest poker competitions in the world - finished this summer and had a total prize pool of €9,824,000. Of the 2,000 players who competed in cities across Europe, nearly a quarter qualified via the tour sponsor's website. The top four finishers at the grand final in Barcelona were all pokerstars.com qualifiers. The winner, incidentally, was a 19-year-old American student, Jeff Williams, who pocketed €900,000.
The number of players playing poker in recent years has ballooned because of the success of online poker. Women in particular have taken to it and now make up more than a quarter of all online players - compared to around 5 per cent on the live poker circuit.
WOMEN IN SOCIETY are not conditioned to be aggressive but this engendered passivity "doesn't work at the poker table", says Coren. "Online poker is great for women who like the thrill of gambling. After a day of being bullied by aggressive men, they can go home, mix a martini and, behind the safety of the poker screen let out all their pent-up fury" - often after adopting a male persona.
In the same way that an attractive blonde woman from Texas you meet in an online dating forum is actually a 45-year-old bearded trucker from Athlone, there is an inordinate amount of gender swapping in the world of online poker. Men pretend to be women so people will think that they can't bluff and women pretend to be men so people will think they can.
The gender swapping is, says Coren, a "weird part of the human psyche". She is in Dublin this weekend to compete in the Dublin leg of the EPT, at which €2.5m is up for grabs. In just three years it has become one of the most important poker competitions in the world. It is set to be the most important because of the inevitable scaling back of US competitions after a ban on online gambling was introduced there in recent weeks.
In particular the ESPN-televised World Series of Poker, which takes place in Las Vegas every summer, could be badly hit. In 2003 fewer than 1,000 people took part in the tour when accountant Chris Moneymaker - who is also playing in Dublin under the pokerstars.com banner this weekend - emerged from a $40 (€31) Internet tournament and went on to win the $2.5 million (€1.96 million) grand prize. This year, 8,773 players gambled for part of an $82.5 million (€65 million) prize pool. More than half are estimated to have qualified via the web.
MIKE SEXTON, HOST of the World Poker Tour television programme, believes the US ban on online gambling will hurt what is considered a sport. "I wouldn't say it will put poker in a death spiral but in the long run it will hurt the growth of poker," Sexton says. "The World Series of Poker is going to be devastated over this."
Coren isn't much bothered about the future of poker and is more focussed on this weekend, although she knows that no poker experience will ever be able to touch her first big win on home turf. "If I set out to try and top it, I'd drive myself mad. I love playing and I will carry on playing but there isn't another event that I can ever win that can compare with that win," she says.
With her £500,000 in the bank, would she consider giving up the day job and becoming a full-time pro? "I write because I like doing it. Poker is fun and it is challenging but I wouldn't like it to be my life. It is a very cool thing to have in the armoury but I would not want it to be the only thing in there."
The pokerstars.com EPT tournament takes place in Dublin's Regency Hotel today and tomorrow