High Rollers Chasing Pots Of Gold On Caribbean Island
Of all the visitors to the Bahamas in the past week, the last thing 724 of them wanted to do was to go home with a sun tan. While the other tourists headed for the beach, this lot made straight for a dimly-lit hotel lounge, and the only reason for packing the sunglasses was to make sure their opponents couldn't see the fear in their eyes when they made a $10,000 (£5,600) raise on a completely worthless pair of cards.
The Atlantis Hotel in Nassau is hosting something called the Poker Stars Caribbean Adventure and, tomorrow, after seven days and nights of gambling, someone will walk away from the last remaining table with a pair of bloodshot eyes, cramp in both buttocks, a complexion not dissimilar to Count Dracula and a cheque for $1.36 million (£770,000).
The boom in poker became apparent to many over Christmas, when you could barely find a TV station not showing a game of Texas Hold 'Em, and sales figures from department stores and supermarkets revealed that families were abandoning the traditional post-prandial Scrabble and charades for an afternoon engaged in a game once associated with smoke-filled saloons and Stetson hats. "Okay grandma, let's see what you got."
Then it was off to the pub, where strange conversations could be overheard. "The mother-in-law had me beat with a pair of pocket kings, but with five, six, seven and eight showing after the turn card, the river made up a straight with the nine, and we split the pot." Where a river once conjured up visions of a flowing expanse of water, it's now entered the lexicon as the last card in a game of poker.
The poker revolution all began with the internet, and while previous boom-bust experience of this medium suggests it may eventually turn from Pokerstars dot com to Pokerstars dot gone, it is making household names out of people whose charisma rises in direct proportion to their inability to show an expression, or even a pulse rate.
One such player is a 39-year-old Australian, Joe Hachem, who used to be a modestly remunerated chiropodist in Melbourne before succumbing to his nation's famous passion for a punt. Hachem did well enough in games rooms to try his luck against 5,618 other players in last year's World Series of Poker, effectively the world championship, and pocketed $7.5 million for winning it. Suffice to say that Hachem has treated his last in-growing toenail, and had less trouble than most this week in raising the $8,000 entry fee for the Pokerstars Caribbean tournament.
He, too, played a game of Texas Hold 'Em with the family after Christmas dinner, which was a bit unfair on the relatives, though as he gave them all a large chunk of his world-title winnings, they probably weren't too bothered when he cleaned them all out of matchsticks after the brandy and cigars.
It was watching his family play poker at Christmas when he was a youngster which got him started, and he was eventually playing thousands of hands a day at home on the internet. His first game was a 50-dollar buy-in, and his ability to spot opponent's little quirks and foibles quickly took him into higher stake territory.
"You can identify an opponent's character without having to see them," said Hachem, who will sometimes - like a chess grandmaster - have several games in progress at the same time. Like all the top players, he's learnt the trick of knowing how - when you've got a good hand - to keep your opponent thinking you may not have, and how - when you've got nothing - to persuade him that you're concealing a pair of aces.
"Poker is about 70 per cent skill and 30 per cent luck," he said, "and in a short game you could probably pull in anyone off the street and he might beat me. But in a long game, I'd eventually take his house, his wife and his mortgage. There's an old saying in poker. It takes 15 minutes to work out which guy at the table is the sucker, and if it takes you longer than 15 minutes, then the sucker must be you.
"There are all sorts of ways of making your opponent do what you want him to, and when it came to the crunch hand when I won the world title, I recalled that my opponent had been saying all along how much fun he was having just being at the last table. I had a good hand, and when I raised I said, 'Still think this is fun?' It was calculated to make him think I was nervous, and it persuaded him to gamble all his chips he had left on the hand."
One of Hachem's biggest rivals in high-stakes poker is the man he displaced as the world champion, 41-year-old American Greg Raymer, and if the Americans had an edge in this tournament, it probably lay in the feeling that this was home from home.
The vast Atlantis Hotel resort on "Paradise Island" is a spectacular monument to bad taste, an amalgam of Las Vegas, Butlins and Blackpool, and painted entirely in pink.
The whole island, in fact, is so thoroughly Americanised that you don't have to venture very far before coming across a McDonald's fast food outlet or a Dunkin Donuts, not to mention being invited, at roughly 10-second intervals, to have a nice day.
Tourists also pay for everything (mostly through the nose) in US dollars, of which Raymer has plenty after winning $5 million in the 2004 world championship. It was a nice return on his initial entry stake, in an online qualifying event, of $160, and the American is now a full-time professional making "a nice living" from internet and live games all around the world.
Neither Hachem nor Raymer survived the early stages here after taking their places among the other 722 players (a good many of them female) each with their own individual style. At one table there was a player who had all the animation of an exhibit at Madame Tussauds, while next to him, a man with a jacket emblazoned with "The Hawk", hopped around the table like Basil Fawlty every time he lost a tight hand.
There were players plugged into digital MP3 players, one relaxed between hands by filling in Sudoku puzzles, and the quotient of dark glasses to bare eyeballs was about 50-50. Lots of them had mascots, from teddy bears to Kermit the Frog puppets, while others sought help from an even higher authority.
However, when the man with "Hooked On Jesus" sewn into his baseball cap was among the first to go broke, it was further proof that a poker player is always on his own.
