Every day in Britain an estimated £40m is staked at online poker parlors. Tim Dowling takes out his credit card and tries his hand at the nation's fastest-growing gambling habit. No one has ever understood why anyone would want to gamble in a virtual environment. Everything about it is unreal, except the part where they take your money away. Why not just throw the money away, and dispense with all the tiresome mouse-clicking? But the news that poker is Britain's fastest-growing form of online gambling made people think again. It is estimated that £40 million a day is currently being staked at online poker parlors. A six-fold increase in the number of players is likely to happen in 2007.
Poker, as everybody knows, is a game not of chance but of cunning, mathematics, psychology - and chance. At last the expert poker player can work from home, fleecing the beginners from the privacy of his bedroom.
On the internet you have no poker face, which is good news for those of us who like to jump up and down when we are dealt a pair of fours. The only weapon with which you can intimidate and confuse your opponents is your online player name. It must be selected with tremendous care.
I selected the name BadChris after a lot of deliberation and wanted to use that online player name to stalk the five-card draw tables until I had parlayed my deposit into a substantial nest egg, leaving nothing but flat-broke farm boys and housewives in my wake. But there were not any five-card draw tables. No one seems to offer draw poker online, and this is really the only kind of poker that I know how to play. They offer Omaha, but I do not even know what that is. Eventually I found a seven card stud table with a game in progress and a seat available. I drew up nice and slow and sat myself down (click!) with my $50 in chips floating above my chair. On the running commentary alongside the virtual table, the ominous words "BadChris sits down" appeared. All over the world, I fancied, people were swallowing with fright!
What followed was a lot of flashing and beeping that did not help to refresh my basic understanding of seven-card stud. The graphics, no doubt sufficient for a veteran of the virtual tables, were very difficult to interpret: who is doing what? Why is it all happening so fast? Whenever it was my turn I was prompted by a box that offered all the options open to me: CALL, RAISE, FOLD. It blinked insistently while I tried to figure out what I had in my hand. I chose without thinking. Then the phone rang. By the time I got off I had parlayed my $50 into $10.20. I turned off the computer, went into another room and thought about what I had done.
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