Flush with cash

The world's top poker players are in London this month, making and losing their fortunes in two giant tournaments. Victoria Coren, who won £500,000 in last year's European championship, explains how her win changed her life - and how a game for crooks and cabbies has been transformed
Looking around the table, I am the only person here who has won less than $2m (£1m) playing poker. And I've won $1.2m. A relative pauper, I am flanked at this table by the biggest names in world gambling. There is Gus Hansen, the bullet-headed Danish-American legend ($5m); Jennifer Harman, miniature blond leading lady of international poker ($2m); another Dane, the fearsome Rehne Pedersen ($2.5m); Britain's own poker wunderkind, former snooker hustler Ram Vaswani ($3.1m); Swedish veteran player Chris Bjorin ($3.2m); a teenage internet pro ($Godknowshowmany); and the former world champion of poker himself, Greg "Fossilman" Raymer ($5.9m). My own tournament profits - most of them collected in one life-changing poker competition, over four incredible days, exactly one year ago - are dwarfed by the bankrolls of those around me.

Who are these people? And where the hell does all the money come from? We hear a lot about Russian oligarchs who have swept into the UK, and City boys with their rippling annual bonuses. We see house prices change according to their golden whims. But these poker millionaires, who have hit London for two giant tournaments - last week's World Series of Poker (Europe) and next week's European Poker Tour (London) - don't flash their cash around like those guys. They don't appear in the Rich Lists because their money is a secret. You won't see them down Boujis, spraying methuselahs of Moët over a gaggle of hedge-fund managers and Tania Bryer. They don't get photographed with their arms round Prince William at Cartier polo. They just hang around in casinos. Or hotel rooms with wireless internet access. They dress in comfy slacks and Aertex shirts. Their money is for gambling, not spending.

It isn't always poker. They bet on blackjack, baccarat, televised sport, reality TV, and everything in their own lives from weight loss to weather reports. Vaswani, who lives in north London with his wife and baby daughter, was involved in a notorious golf game in Australia last January where $2m changed hands on the course. Yesterday, I was sitting at a table with American poker professionals Ted Forrest ($5.1m) and Erick Lindgren ($5.6m). Gazing shrewdly at a 19-year-old boy in the next seat, Lindgren said to Forrest: "I've never seen this kid before in my life. But I'll bet you £1,000 he's won more than a million playing online poker." Forrest took the bet. The kid nodded silently and performed a little hand mime, as an angler does to indicate the size of a giant catch. Yeah, he'd won a lot more. Forrest removed a fresh, sealed packet of £50 notes from his trouser pocket and tossed it across the baize to Lindgren.

Silly money is flowing through the poker economy, and our government is rather excited about it. While the US starts to clamp down on gambling - recent draconian legislation, powered through by the religious right, has severely restricted the legality of online poker in the United States - Britain is opening up. Since Labour's first attempt to benefit from the gambling boom (the ill-fated supercasino) fell by the wayside, the government has concentrated its efforts on luring poker websites to base themselves in the UK, offering juicy tax breaks and loosening the rules to allow TV advertising.

As if to celebrate the new Gambling Act, which came into effect this month, Britain is enjoying the biggest month in its poker history. The World Series of Poker has been played in America since 1970; for the first time ever, it was franchised to Europe and played in London last week. Those who paid £10,000 to take part are staying on to shell out another €8,000 (£5,600) in the hope of winning another €1m in next week's European Poker Tour (London leg).

So what have they been doing this week, with six long days to fill between live tournaments? Looking round the Tower of London? No, they have been holed up playing the World Championship of Online Poker at www.PokerStars.com, where prizes from $100,000 to $500,000 are being won every night. No wonder Lindgren was so quick to bet that a random kid in a poker tournament had already won £1m on the internet.

The problem for our government is that gambling winnings are tax-free. It would be impossible to have it otherwise: winnings do not come from nowhere; millions of players are, of course, losing. If the government decided to recognise "professional poker" as a career, and take a slice of income tax from the wins, it would have to allow the unluckier players to claim their losses as tax-deductible. It would be forced to compensate the vast majority, and would certainly make a loss.

But they can smell money, these ministers. They know it's there. They are not yet sure how best to get it, but they are reaching out to bring it closer, closer ... and it's working, though not quite well enough so far. Even at the relatively low rate of 15% at which Gordon Brown is offering to tax UK-based betting sites, the sites don't yet want to pay. However, they are relocating from South and Central America to places in Europe such as Gibraltar and the Isle Of Man, where they can pay much lower taxes while taking advantage of the Gambling Act's new opportunity for websites in these areas to advertise on British TV and apply for a British gaming licence.

What is also happening is that high-rolling gamblers themselves are moving from America to the UK, where they can play online poker without fear of arrest. But the individual gamblers' cash still goes drip-drip-jangle beyond the government's grasp. At least the non-doms (non-domiciled plutocrats who live here tax-free) are flinging their money at estate agents, nightclub owners, hotel bartenders, antique dealers, clothing merchants, football teams and Lamborghini salesmen. Poker players are just sitting there in their slacks, passing the cash back and forth between themselves. In Las Vegas this year, one big player told me, "I'm not playing at the Mirage again. I sat there for nine hours, winning $40,000, and the bastards still wouldn't give me a free dinner." That's gamblers' logic for you.

Most people know, by now, how poker was transformed in this country from an underground hobby for crooks and cab drivers to a mass-market craze. The alchemy began at the start of the millennium with the intersection of two crucial factors: television (most notably Late Night Poker, which introduced the game to a whole new audience of potential players) and the internet (which provided an environment for the curious to play, in the comfort and privacy of their own homes).

Just over five years later, we have a multi- billion-dollar industry on our hands. Poker websites are worth more than airlines, and have created a rather frightening number of young millionaires. The World Series of Poker (Europe) was won by Annette Obrestad, an 18-year-old Norwegian. She collected £1m; she has already won more than $1m playing online poker in the past 12 months alone. Compared with Obrestad, the Welsh runner-up John Tabatabai (who collected £581,000) seems rather old at 22. As for me - until quite recently, a freakishly young poker player in a world of elderly men - I feel, on the wrong side of 30, like an ancient dowager of the baize. Not that I have failed to benefit from the boom. At the end of next week's European Poker Tour (London), or EPT, somebody will win a big crystal trophy and £500,000 in cash. This time last year, it was me. Unless lightning strikes twice, next week will mark the end of my bewildered year's reign as the official European champion of poker.

The poker revolution had been good for me, financially if not 100% emotionally, before my big win. A piece of my heart may yearn for the underground days of the last century, when only 500 people in Britain seemed to play poker and it was a quirky, romantic little hobby. But I found a new professional sideline doing TV poker commentary (as well as writing a poker column for this newspaper, which would have been pointless in 1995, when I could have reached everybody interested in the game with about 10 phonecalls) and have been sponsored by websites to play quite a few big tournaments.

Although I play a lot of poker, I still have a foot in the world of financial reality. I still have a day job, and could not justify shelling out regular huge sums for the luxury of tournament poker. But if you have a decent profile as a profitable player (which is quite easily gained for a woman; we are still a minority in the live game), poker websites will often pay your tournament expenses if you wear their logo while you play them. It raises their profile in poker rooms and poker magazines, as well as giving the company a human face; this is important, when your business involves a game dealt by computers and played by innately suspicious and sceptical people.

I was put in to the London EPT last year by PokerStars, the website that sponsors the whole tour. I play on the site anyway, and like it, and some of its employees are personal friends, so I was happy to wear the endorsement logo. I have been a profitable "cash player" for a long time, but I didn't have a fearsome record in tournaments; I had won only a few small events, and £25,000 in a televised celebrity competition. Fun though it was to play in a line-up with Eric Bristow, Willie Thorne and Roger de Courcey, that was not considered the toughest competition in history. The most likely result in this big, professional London tournament was that I would play in it for a few hours, have my picture taken for a few poker magazines, and get back to the cash game.

But somehow the hours became days, and the field shrank from 500 players to 300, 200, 100 ... until there were just two of us left: myself and a macho Lebanese-Australian player called Emad Tahtouh. We were even in chips. My only strategy was to use Emad's aggression against him, as long as I found the right cards to do it with. I found the right cards. When I "flopped a straight" (as the poker parlance goes), all I had to do was bet it weakly, and Tahtouh could not resist the temptation to shovel in his chips and try to bully this nervous girl out of the pot. Three hands later, blinking and speechless with disbelief, I was clutching the trophy and one of those ridiculous giant cheques you see on Comic Relief. Having failed so far to give birth to any children, save anybody's life, or even watch the sun set over Hawaii, I can confidently say this was the most amazing night of my life. But I only remember it in flashes: hugging the dealer; an incoherent phonecall to my parents; my beloved brother getting out of bed and coming down to the casino in the middle of the night; and (my favourite memory of the whole business) being kissed and congratulated by all the regular local players in the card room - my funny, extended, post-nuclear family - as though they were genuinely happy that I won.

The money I could take or leave. As it happened, I left it. That £500,000 stayed on deposit at the casino for a good month, until I finally took it out and deposited it in a building society account, where it still is today. I haven't bought a flat, a car, new breasts or a ticket round the world. I haven't even quit my job. I bought quite a nice top from Selfridges, took a lovely week's holiday in January, gave some of it away, and the rest is untouched.

Do I feel rich? Quite the opposite. Having never had real money in the bank before, its existence has created a sudden nervousness in me about not having it. I worry about how long it will last, and what I will do when it has gone. I never wanted or needed half a million pounds; now I've got it, I wish it was a million. Or five million. I suddenly understand how footballers, the moment they can afford to fly everywhere first class, start worrying that they can't afford a private jet. I'm not an idiot. I know the cash-cushion could save me in future times of illness, unemployment or childcare. Certainly it offers peace of mind and greater professional freedom. And if I were a truly good person, I suppose I could give it all away. But in my heart, it is poker money.

The option is there to sign a longer-term sponsorship deal with a poker website. I'm happy to wear a company logo for tournaments - I'm rather proud to; it makes me feel "professional" - as long as I trust the company and it offers enough of the personal freedom that is so intrinsic to the spirit of poker. The most significant result of the EPT, for me, is the confidence and self-belief that comes from winning a major tournament outright; the experience has made me a braver person, as well as a better player. The bankroll is there, in my heart, to allow me to keep buying into the big tournaments for years to come, and protect me against any serious runs of bad luck. When you are a gambler, there is always a rainy day.

That is the funny thing about being a poker millionaire, even if only a dollar one. Cash is nothing more than chips, just the tools of the trade, like fishing rods to an angler. This game is all about money, and nothing to do with money. It is about competition, challenge, adrenaline, ambition, fear, pride, rivalry, self-worth. I'm in it for the excitement, the adventure, the late nights and the funny post-nuclear family. I'm in it because it makes me feel alive. And I'm in it because I'm addicted.

You either feel it or you don't; if you don't, perhaps you will find all this obscene. I have had days, walking into a Las Vegas tournament room where 3,000 people have paid $5,000 each to play a game that might end for them in five minutes, when I've felt pretty unsettled myself. The feeling passes soon enough. It is madness, but it is a wonderful madness.

Gordon Brown and Tessa Jowell and the rest can keep prowling round and round the casino, sniffing the air and tapping at the glass. They will find a way to get their slice of the invisible economy. September has kicked off well; the tournaments are here, Gordon, and the websites are coming closer. Meanwhile, I will stay in the bubble with Obrestad, Vaswani, Lindgren, and everyone on the internet from the teenage millionaires to the crazy dreamers, using the money to keep playing, keep playing, keep playing.

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