Playing poker by proxy

I’ve just started reading Anthony Holden’s “Bigger Deal – a year on the new poker circuit". It’s a follow up to his “Big Deal", written 20 years ago, in which Holden describes the year he spent trying to make his living as a professional poker player in the late 1980s. The new book chronicles how the poker scene has changed beyond recognition in those two decades, thanks mostly to the game’s worldwide internet boom and attendant ‘new breed’ of players, but also partly because of its unlikely success on television. In the intervening years, a significant number of other changes have also happened to or around Holden: he’s divorced; he’s now in his late 50s; his children have grown up and moved away; and many of the old familiar faces of the poker circuit have gone too, replaced by a much younger internet-playing generation sitting at the gaming tables with baseball caps and I-Pods.

This book might sound an odd choice for a forty year old woman I know (even if it does fulfil one item from my resolution pages list). But then I do enjoy playing poker, and the previous book was delightfully enthralling – full of the life and the colour and the characters of the professional circuit as it was, all narrated against the constant clack of gaming chips. That I should select this book to put in my handbag and start reading on the train up to London today was, however, possibly more subliminal.

We had called an informal meeting of our board of trustees. The purpose of this was to pass on the news of the significant funding changes that are afoot so that, by the time of the next proper board meeting in four weeks, they could have started planning how (or even if) they wish to proceed from here. Trustees were concerned and sympathetic about the situation and reacted with consummate professionalism. What occurred to me, though, whilst sitting there with the conversation going on around me in the hotel bar, was that we were all playing a kind of poker game.

And the more I thought about that – with Anthony Holden’s book glowing away in the handbag at my feet – the more I started thinking about how many things at work are like a poker game. According to the type of player you are and your level of confidence in your game, you might bluff (or play it straight); might accurately read the ‘tells’ of your opponents (or miss them); might up the ante (or fold); might go all in (or play it tight). Ultimately, as in poker, you are in control of if and when you choose to show your cards; if you plan each hand in advance, there is always a strategy available to you which means you can keep your hand unseen, leaving others to only speculate on the cards you might have had. And much as playing your cards close to your chest is sometimes the right strategy, so showing your hand can be as well.

If Anthony Holden had been at the meeting, I wonder what sort of poker player he’d have categorised us each as? I continued reading Bigger Deal on the train back; and then again at home this evening where I washed my chips down with diet lemonade.

Chip shop chips, that is, not poker ones.