The Biggest Game in Town

Anthony Holden: We have a very eminent panel up here. I’m not eminent! My name is Anthony Holden, the only goy within a mile radius! [Loud squeak on mike.] See what they think of it! I think I’m here because I wrote some years ago a book called Big Deal about spending a year as a professional poker player but attempting to earn my living at it.

 

From left to right we have Victoria Coren, Observer columnist, journalist, poker player, writer, recently published a book called Once More with Feeling which is not to do with poker therefore, alas, not here today. But I’m sure she’ll, have you any copies tucked away anywhere?

 

Patrick Marber, best known, of course, as a stand-up comedian! Moonlights as a playwright. One of his plays, Closer, is about to be turned into a movie which we’re all very excited about because he’ll have a lot more money for us to win off him. And of course his first play, a huge success at the National Theatre in the West End and on Broadway, was Dealer’s Choice, about poker.

 

To my right, the doyen of poker writers, and indeed players, Al Alvarez, eminent poet, critic, all sorts of other things, novelist, books on all sorts of subjects: divorce, marriage, suicide, rock climbing, oil rigs and, of course, poker. Two books on poker. The Biggest Game in Town is one of the two best books ever written about poker. (I won’t tell you what the other one is!) What’s your recent [inaudible] Bets, Bluffs and Bad Beats. I see there’s also a book about a bloke called Shakespeare.

 

And, in case I forget, we’ll all be signing over there.

 

If Al and I are looking slightly more, even more, bedraggled than usual, it’s because we got to bed exactly 12 hours ago in Oxford after an astonishing event which was the inaugural championship hosted by the Oxford University Poker Club, which has recently been founded. It was a huge success. One hundred and fifty players in the Oxford Union which has never looked more beautiful than full of green baize tables and 30-odd pros or so-called VIPs from London and 120-odd students from all over the country. It seems that they have inter-university tournaments these days. Apart from being a huge success and they were very good players, it somehow betokens an extraordinary rise in the popularity and universality of poker in this country in the last decade and more, probably largely to do with Channel 4’s Late Night Poker which all of us played on once or more. Perhaps to do with some of the books on display today, or so we are told.

 

But you might be interested to know that, out of the one hundred and fifty players working upwards at the final table, fourth place went to Mr A. Alvarez, who clocked 150 quid! I was dealing at the time, dealt you a full house when you were all in!

 

Al Alvarez: Much good it did me!

 

Anthony Holden: Second and third place were taken by students from Cambridge. But the tournament was won, the inaugural tournament in the Oxford Cup, by a woman who is the wife of a London pro. So we might in a minute ask Vicky about this subject and anybody from the audience, please, if I can see you put your hands up. Certainly there will be plenty of time for questions after we’ve burbled for a bit. But if you want to intervene, feel free. We might talk about women and poker in a minute. But I think it seems appropriate to start, as this is Jewish Book Week, by asking our panellists in turn whether it helps to be Jewish to play poker? I’ll ask Al to kick us off on that.

 

Al Alvarez: Well I’m not sure whether it helps or not, but my first reaction when Marion Cohen phoned me about this was only a Jewish Book Week would have an evening on poker. And then my second reaction was actually, when you think of the Chinese and the Irish and the Baptist text that you see on the poker table, it’s the one thing they can’t blame the Jews for! But, I don’t know, I have an actor friend called Zero Mostel who had a dear friend (whose name I’ve forgotten) who was the prime actor in the Yiddish theatre in New York. When this guy was on his deathbed, Zero who loved the old man very dearly, went in to see him. They used to play klaverjas together which is not a game I know. The guy was lying on his deathbed ‘aaaah!’ like that. Zero went in and whispered, ‘Hi, Joe, it’s Zero’. And he half sat up in bed and croaked, ‘The cards, Zero, the cards, in the top drawer’. And they played klaverjas until he died, I think.

 

I could think of worse ways of going than at the poker table. I must say, going straight from the The Vic to the ‘great poker game in the sky’, doing something I love doing. It’s a beautiful game. I don’t think being Jewish helps at all. But it is a beautiful game. I think having a mathematical mind would help, which I don’t have. I’m good at reading people. I’m not good at the actual maths.

 

Anthony Holden: Vicky?

 

Victoria Coren: Right. Well you’ve started with the one question I was hoping you wouldn’t ask! When I first had the email asking about this, I actually said no, I wouldn’t come, although thanks very much, because I thought I’m probably not Jewish enough. And I thought I’d be caught out and they’ll say, ‘No, obviously you know nothing about being Jewish so you’re going to have to leave’.

 

So I said no. Then I subsequently had an email from somebody else saying, ‘Why aren’t you doing this thing about Jews and poker on March 2^nd?’ Which I was a bit taken aback by because March 2^nd is actually the second anniversary of the death of a friend of mine, John Diamond the journalist, with whom I used to have this row all the time. I would say, ‘Oh God, why do you turn up and do these public Jewish things? I never do’. And he would say, ‘This not being Jewish enough is ridiculous. It’s meaningless. You know, there’s all sorts and you should do it’. And I was sort of superstitious enough to think, well, I can’t quite sit at home all day, burning my little yahrzeit candle, which I am Jewish enough to have, imagining him saying: ‘You know, you should be down there doing that’.

 

And what I thought was, (if you don’t know, he died of throat cancer), his attitude was basically, he kind of rediscovered poker in the last couple of years of his life. What he said was, ‘Well, everything is absolutely terrible. My life is shit. I’ll be dead any moment. I might as well gamble.’ And I kind of thought, terminal cancer or not, that’s the Jewish attitude. [Laughter.]

 

Anthony Holden: You go with that?

 

Patrick Marber: Yes, I do. I think we Jews have a reputation for being interested in money. And I think that’s true to some extent. But I think Jews are very generous people and I think they have a healthy attitude to money which is: it comes, it goes. And I think a gambler is someone with the perfect attitude to money: it’s just stuff to play with. Money and poker, really, it’s just the chips. It’s just the ‘juice’ you use to keep the game alive. So I think there are a lot of poker-playing Jews for those reasons: we like the action; we like the money; but we have a healthy vainglorious attitude to the money.

 

Anthony Holden: …view that poker is not gambling?

 

Al Alvarez: Yes, I think poker really isn’t gambling. I think it happens to look like gambling because …

 

Patrick Marber: The way I play it!

 

Al Alvarez: No, it isn’t Patrick. I played … [unclear] yours, tight as a rock! The point is that it looks like gambling because the language of the game is money. That you make statements with your money. When you make a bet, you’re saying something. If somebody bets and you flat call, you don’t raise it and you don’t chuck your hand in, you’re saying one thing. If the man comes out betting and you raise him, then you’re saying something else about the hand you’ve got. So it is actually the way, you can’t play it for nothing. I mean to say, ok, maybe all you’re going to do is play it for matchsticks. But you still want to win the matchsticks. One of the ways you do it is by betting. So that’s why it looks so much like gambling. But it isn’t.

 

Anthony Holden: Obviously what sets poker apart from all other games is the element of bluff, which slots into what Al is saying. And what I say when asked about gambling is that if you go into a casino, obviously there’s craps, roulette, blackjack and everything else. Sometimes there’s a poker room, depending where you are. The poker room, of course, is a group of seven or eight or nine people all playing against each other. Human beings versus human beings, rather than playing against an anonymous house which has an edge. And if you play roulette, blackjack, craps or everything, you are wagering unfavourable odds. You may have a thrilling win if you put ten quid on your birthday at roulette. But if you do it every night you’re going to lose.

 

If you play poker and you know what you’re doing, you’re actually wagering favourable odds and you should, in the long run, win. But of course that’s not true otherwise we wouldn’t be sitting up here doing this. We’d be in the Cayman Islands counting our money!

 

That said, there’s also traditionally said to be a link between poker and writers which many people have tried to prove, going back to Damon Runyon and the Algonquin Round Table, etc. We’re all four up here writers so let’s try that one. Al, what have you got to say about that?

 

Al Alvarez: I hate writing. I mean to say, this is the book and I really loathe it and I can’t imagine what a nice Jewish boy like me ever, how I ever got into this dreadful trade. But now I’m in it, and I’m too old to get out of it, as you see, I’m past retirement age so I can’t become a train driver. I find what I spend most of my time doing is thinking, ‘What am I doing here?’ Because one of the curious things about writing is that it doesn’t matter how perfect you try and get it, that you never quite get the sentence right, or there are things that you miss and, you know, you have work repeated a couple of pages later that shouldn’t have been repeated. That kind of thing.

 

It’s very difficult to pick it up and you sweat and sweat and sweat, try and get this right. And you don’t. But if you don’t, you can pick it up the next day. Or you can pick it up in proof. Or, if you don’t pick it up at all, who the hell’s going to notice? It’s an awful lot of hard work for no reactions somehow or other. Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it’s a kind of risky trade. I think you’re sort of putting yourself on the line. And you don’t have a response. It’s kind of pretty frustrating. It’s also very lonely. I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don’t get any patients. It’s a very curious way of passing the time, and if you go to a poker table, and again you’re sweating to get it right and so on and so forth, and if you make a mistake it’s going to cost you.

 

I used to do a lot of rock-climbing before my ankle collapsed on me. That was the same. You got away from your desk. You went onto the rock face and if you made a mistake you got hurt. It’s like a kind of a model for the life that the writer does not have. Also the other thing I like about it is its company. You know, you get to see people.

 

Anthony Holden: Patrick, you wrote Dealer’s Choice, I think at the time, to some extent, to get poker out of your system which you did for a while although you’re back playing now. Tell us about that, writing as being therapeutic. Was it in that case?

 

Patrick Marber: No, no actually. I think that’s something the press have..

 

Anthony Holden: Ah, well I am the press! Trust me to get it wrong! We’re all the press!

 

Patrick Marber: No, I think that was possibly a story I peddled at the time to make myself seem racy and interesting! It was my first play and, you know, I was having to do interviews for the first time. No, I don’t think I wrote the play for therapeutic purposes.

 

Anthony Holden: You have been, to some extent, a compulsive gambler?

 

Patrick Marber: Yes I had, but about six or seven years before I wrote the play I think I was fairly compulsive, I would say. Much less so now, but only because I’ve got a few quid now and I can afford to lose a bit. Then I was a student and if you blow your grant in one night, it’s not good. Now of course people don’t get grants so they don’t have this problem!

 

But picking up from what Al was saying, I feel the opposite as a writer, that I think I’m drawn to poker in exactly the same way that I’m drawn to being a writer. I enjoy the element of risk and the danger in a relatively controlled environment because whereas Al writes prose, I write dialogue. I write plays that get judged in front of an audience, live every night. And so the sense, or the possibility, of failure, disaster, is there every night with the kind of work that I do. And I get that same exhilarating sense of excitement standing at the back of a theatre watching one of my plays, being received either well or badly, as I kind of do at the poker table.

 

The terrible thing that has happened for me in the last year is that I have discovered poker on the internet. I don’t know if anyone plays that here, but there are a couple of sites: paradisepoker.com; pokerstars.com. Very hard to get the writing done when the casino is just one click away. Before, you would have to at least get out of the house.

 

Anthony Holden: The word last night in Oxford was that if you play pokerstars.com in the early afternoon, which of course is the early morning US time, especially the west coast, there’s a lot of suckers out there! And the later the day goes on, the tougher the game gets. So can you give us any advice on that?

 

Patrick Marber: Er – no. [Laughter]

 

Anthony Holden: Vicky, do you play poker online?

 

Victoria Coren: Yes, I was just thinking I spent last night in a bedroom in Hendon playing a free roll to win a ticket for the Irish poker opening in Dublin! Nothing as glamorous as going to Oxford!

 

Anthony Holden: Did you win?

 

Victoria Coren: No I didn’t, and actually I never fly so even if I had won the ticket, it would have been completely useless. That’s how sick a gambler I am! I played the tournament anyway. Yes, I play poker online all the time.

 

Anthony Holden: Successfully?

 

Victoria Coren: Reasonably successfully.

 

Anthony Holden: Just for the benefit of the audience, one of my doubts about it is that if you put in a credit card number, can you trust them to pay you if you win?

 

Victoria Coren: Yes, I mean this is going to sound like an advert for paradisepoker. You give your credit card number and you sit down at a table and other players from all over the world can sit down at the table as well and you gamble against each other.

 

Anthony Holden: How much of a feel if you can’t see them? How much of a feel do you get for the other players playing?

 

Victoria Coren: You do. The key thing is that they have a chatbox. You can chat at the same time. It just goes to show the human need. People who are drawn to poker often like not having to talk, you know. You like going out for an evening. You can sit and play a game. You don’t have to make conversation. But you need to say a couple of things here or there. So even while playing on line, they make a little box so you can say things like, ‘How could you call with this hand, it’s terrible!’ Or you can even order a drink. You can click a button and you get a little picture of a beer! It’s terrible! I think that’s my future, alone in a room sipping virtual drinks, making virtual quips to people I’m never going to meet.

 

Al Alvarez: Do you play under your own name?

 

Victoria Coren: On one site I do and on another site I don’t.

 

Anthony Holden: It’s not obligatory to play under your own name.

 

Victoria Coren: I prefer them to think that I’m not a lady. Not of course that I’m not a lady..

 

Anthony Holden: Whether or not you’re a lady, you’re a female. And as I said to the woman who won this tournament last night, there’s absolutely no reason why women should not be as good as, they are as good at poker as men. Women have got… world series. Yet women … [inaudible]. What are the pros and cons of being a woman at the poker table? How do you turn it to your advantage?

 

Victoria Coren: Well, the pros think you won’t be good at it. They think that women can’t play aggressively and that they can’t bluff. If you don’t have too much pride, it’s very useful not to have too much pride if you’re playing poker, if you’re prepared to laugh along with the cliché that women will only play the ‘nut’, you know, the best hand, that they’ll never bluff, if you don’t mind people saying that sort of thing to you. You know, men are terrible. You know, they have to prove that they can bluff. They go, ‘Nonsense! You know, look! I had nothing at all! Ho, ho, ho!’ And that is more important than winning the money in the long run.

 

What women tend to do is smile and say, ‘Yes, that’s right. I’d be terribly nervous about bluffing,’ and you turn your hand over when you’ve got the best hand to prove that they’re right, and you can exploit their prejudices.

 

Anthony Holden: You can show a little cleavage. When you do that on TV, was that for the cameras or was that to put us guys off our game? There’s a lot of cliché.

 

Victoria Coren: Yes, you sort of have to flirt a bit because men don’t like losing money to women at all.

 

Al Alvarez: They don’t like losing money! [Laughter] There’s nothing sexist about the idea there.

 

Victoria Coren: But you know they particularly don’t like it. You can take the edge off slightly by flirting and being ever so grateful to have won the money and don’t really understand how you possibly could have done it. It must have been a mistake, but it’s very kind of them as a much better player to not make too much fuss and let you win the hand.

 

Patrick Marber: It’s certainly true in my experience, and I have been on it in a big deal, that a lot of what playing poker well is about, is about getting the ego under control. And certainly, particularly I think that year I spent in Las Vegas, I absolutely agree with Vicky. There are a lot of men, very good players, who hated to lose to a woman. And if one sat down, no matter what she looked like, she could be lovely, their play went quite off the rails. And I know quite a lot of women who earn a successful living out there on that very simple human fact.

 

Victoria Coren: Can I just read something? Not to seem obsessed about John Diamond, I did bring this thing that he wrote. There’s one paragraph that… just because you’re saying … for inspiration. This is absolutely it. It’s a column that he wrote in November 1999.

 

‘Just as every man thinks he’s a fabulous driver – have you ever heard a man say, ‘Actually, I prefer not to drive. I’m not really very good at it.’? – of course you haven’t – any more than a man will say to anyone but his doctor, ‘It’s a funny thing about sex. I just can’t get the hang of it.’ Know what I mean? So there is not a man born who doesn’t think he can play poker, even if he’s never played before’.

 

And I think that’s a limit.

 

Al Alvarez: Yes, this business of ego… I think one of the interesting things about poker is that once you let your ego in, you’re done for. Tony and I both made really rather good livings out of a very nice guy who, and he was Jewish, yes, so it’s relevant –

 

Patrick Marber: Is he here?!

 

Al Alvarez: Alas, … he’s gone to the great poker game in the sky. But he spoke three languages. He was a terrible novelist! He was an art collector, had a really good eye and he had a rather sexy profession which we will leave out of it for the moment just in case there’s anyone who knows him here. And he was a terrible poker player. He really was ghastly. He didn’t know what he was doing. But he thought he was playing …. What’s this gang of layabouts? I’m a superior being to them. And he just kept coming back and back. ‘I got outdrawn again.’ I bet you, when he finally went to the big poker game in the sky, he thought he’d been outdrawn. It was a bad beat. It was simply ego. If you’re in a game where you lose consistently, you go. You could get an easier game. There are always easier games somewhere.

 

But, you know, we play a lot of the casinos and in the casinos you play with professionals. I’ve played with an awful lot of professionals, a different class. A completely different class. And if you think, ‘That little twit there, you know, how can he possibly beat me?’, he could beat you. And if you can’t keep your ego under control, it’s going to cost you a lot of money. I think that’s kind of good.

 

Patrick Marber: A question I’d like to ask my fellow panellists. I think we’d all agree that poker is very much a test of character. I’m interested to know whether you all feel you’ve learned as much if not more about yourselves at a poker table, compared to what you’ve learned about yourselves when you’ve been writing. Because writing of course we are all investigating ourselves in various different ways. Even when you are writing biographically, you are engaged in yourself. Where have you learned life’s great lessons at the poker table or at your writing desk?

 

Anthony Holden: Well I would certainly say that the year I spent living Big Deal was as much a journey of self-discovery, and had to be … [inaudible]. I went to a shrink for the first time in my life during that year, partly to create another character for the book but also to learn more about myself. And I think absolutely I have learned more about myself playing poker, in my case, than I have writing. Especially as I write biographies which are about other people, obviously you filter those other people through yourself. Shakespeare … was totally re-created in my image, but everybody does that. There is one professor who even said, ‘Could you just … picture of me on the jacket and a bust of Shakespeare in the background … even trying to look like him!’ In the jacket photograph it was stretching it a bit … But sure, I think that’s absolutely true and I think the more you can honestly appraise yourself and your strengths and weaknesses, the better poker player you’re going to be.

 

Victoria Coren: Yes, interesting that. I’ve never actually thought about that before. I think, in terms of learning about yourself … particularly interesting for women because you rarely get the chance in the normal world to sort of compete that purely and that aggressively in something. It’s probably been interesting to have a go because I wouldn’t do it in any other sport and I wouldn’t do it professionally and I wouldn’t do it socially. You know, take on men in that way, to be implicitly saying, ‘You know, I’m better than you and I’m going to prove it by taking your money away,’ or whatever it has to be. It’s quite interesting because I suppose, as far as that’s concerned, I’ve had a go at it and I think I do find a kind of thrill in competition, which may be quite masculine. I’m not sure. But I do enjoy the chance to show a bit of that kind of aggression, but not too much. I actually don’t want to be thought of as a threat. You’re saying you think ego is a problem for some people. I’m almost the opposite, because I don’t want to be thought of in the card-room as too threatening, and I –

 

Al Alvarez: Come on! It’s very interesting. Do you really think this business of aggression and competition is there? Surely a lot of it, you know what they say, all you need to play Texas Hold ‘Em is a leather ass! Simply a lot of it is about patience and waiting and so on and so forth. If you kind of go in there and say I’m going to beat these silly asses! That’s not what, you would have to go with the game.

 

Victoria Coren: What’s your point? There’s a part of it where you study somebody else’s game and work out how they play in order to get their money off them. It’s not entirely unlike casing someone’s house because you’re going to burgle it because you know they always go bowling on Friday. When you’re studying someone quite closely thinking, ‘He always bets in this way with a good hand, and this way with a middling hand’, it’s actually a very confrontational thing to do. You’re looking at each individual person, looking for their strengths and weaknesses and trying to –

 

Al Alvarez: But this isn’t confrontational. The point is, if you are making use of those strengths and weaknesses then you are using them for your aims. That is not confrontational, that’s manipulation. That’s a completely different kettle of fish. I think it’s all about that. I think part of the game, like using money as it were as the language of the cards, is also about manipulating. All that charming stuff, you know. You’ve done it, I’m sure, and I’ve done it in California. ‘I’ve got a bad ankle.’ I turn up with a stick, English accent [speaks a few words with exaggerated English accent] ‘Oh, I know, you’re …

 

I paid for two holidays that way. [Laughter.]

 

Anthony Holden: It’s certainly true that having an English accent in the western United States is a huge advantage because as soon as you open your mouth they think you don’t know how to play. During that year I was called ‘London Tony’ within seconds and occasionally people would say, ‘Chew on that raise, Albion!’ [Laughter]

 

We should press one or two basic things that are coming up. I can see some poker players I know in the audience. There are some who perhaps have never played. One thing that emerges from that dialogue was one basic truth which is it’s not just a question of getting good cards. If you’re lucky enough to get good cards, it’s a question of making the maximum amount of money with those good cards. There’s no point in getting a straight flush if you’re such a tight player that everybody else at the table folds as soon as you’ve bet. Or, as in my case, spill a Bloody Mary right across the green baize at the shock of getting a straight flush! In which case everybody folds their hand, you get into trouble and are regarded, quite rightly, as some sort of nerd!

 

I think I agree with Alex about situations. It’s about patience, it’s about waiting. Poker is wonderfully classless, whether in London or anywhere else in Britain or in America or wherever. You can sit down at a table with people you know very well, because you’ve been playing for thirty years like me and Al, or you get down with a bunch of strangers. It’s a completely different game but you’re playing the same game.

 

When it’s a bunch of strangers, it’s one of the few completely classless activities. You can’t tell from the way people are dressed, from their demeanour, whether they’re Bill Gates millionaires (Bill Gates is a poker player), whether they’re hobos in off the street, whether they’re happily married, whether they’re unhappily married, all of which will affect their game. And some players will attempt to get this out of them in conversation. The chat during a poker game, for me, is one of the most essential and enjoyable. There’s some very funny backchat occasionally at poker games, but it’s also a way of trying to find out about the other players.

 

So we’ve mentioned that. We’ve mentioned aggression. We’ve mentioned ruthlessness. We’ve mentioned patience. Patrick, what else? What are the qualities required to be a good poker player?

 

Patrick Marber: I don’t know about that. I suppose everything you’ve mentioned, of course. Patience, painfully.

 

Anthony Holden: The proverbial poker-playing face is also important, but most people develop that within a few years.

 

Patrick Marber: I would say that the thing for me about poker is, I probably win as much as I lose. I’m not particularly good. People think I’m good because I’ve written about it but I’m not actually. I’m sort of middling, average fodder. But it gives me a lot of pleasure. The thing I’ve most learned about it is how to cope with defeat. It’s too … …

 

I have a 17-month old son and I think learning how to lose is incredibly important in life. That’s my big lesson from the poker table and I haven’t …. And apologies to anyone here … [several voices together]

 

Anthony Holden: It can be regarded as an asset, to be a bad loser. You don’t necessarily have to lose gracefully.

 

Patrick Marber: Well that’s right. There’s a line (I quote myself!) in Dealer’s Choice where one character says, ‘At least I’m a good loser,’ and the other guy says, ‘That’s why you’re a loser!’

 

I don’t think that’s necessarily true. I think the compulsive need to win is actually some … … sometimes, if you are defeated, you learn more and it’s good for the soul.

 

Anthony Holden: I’ve said in print, and Patrick hasn’t disagreed, that (there was a profile of you in one of the papers, it was anonymous) Patrick and I have the same fault, if we have a fault as poker players, which is that we play too many hands as we both like to play. I certainly am famous on Tuesday nights for saying I was enthused by the spirit of play … … a call that I shouldn’t have made. Just because I get very bored folding all the time. And that is a fault because you’re escaping from our rock face to, there’s a large degree of escapism.

 

Al Alvarez: Yes, we’re all recreational players. We’re not pros. The fact that we write about it doesn’t mean we play better than ordinary players at all. And, in fact, we are probably rather low down in the scheme of things. But we’re not professionals. Professionals are just better at it.

 

Patrick Marber: Yes, I think that’s true. The pros are there to win and I think that people like us are there to play. It’s a huge distinction.

 

Anthony Holden: There’s an increasing number of pros too on both sides of the Atlantic, and we should tell those who don’t know that the rise in public tournaments has been phenomenal in the last ten years and of course they are very different skills. Tournaments are laid on by clubs because they generate large cash games afterwards as people are knocked out of tournaments. But tournaments are a chance for anybody in the room wanting to start, and one of my sons is in the room, and all my sons (apart from family games where they beat me hollow) have started, and it is possible to start from comparatively little money in tournaments where, of course, the entry fee is your maximum liability and you can play with some of the best players in Britain, some of the best players in the world, risking only 50, 100, 500, however much you can afford … the maximum you can lose.

 

I couldn’t have written Big Deal unless tournaments had just become big business at the time because I played with the then world champion and the top ten in the world with the maximum liability involved. But it’s a very different skill. Can you explain at all the difference between tournament play and cash play in terms of skill?

 

Victoria Coren: Well, there are different sorts of tournaments, of course. The high-profile ones tend to be no limit. I mean, I’m not a very good tournament player. I’m a better cash game player because tournaments really do involve an awful lot of aggression. I mean it’s a knockout thing. But in a cash game you can sit there for ten hours and if you are reasonably patient, which I am, I think my own thoughts and wait for aces, you can make small profits and little sums here and there. In tournaments there’s no time for that. It’s all very fast and everybody is trying to knock each other out and the people that come in the top six get the money. So that is not a place to be patient and calm and suppress your ego.

 

It’s funny, actually. I once played in the women’s tournament at the World Series in America. Because in America women play and they’ve got a … … and in the ladies’ powder room before it started, there were all these women who were going to play sort of saying. ‘Oh, I’m really nervous, I don’t think I should really be playing’. And ‘Oh, you’re much better than me’. They were saying, ‘Nonsense, you’re a really good player’. This is absolutely bizarre because any other tournament I’d ever been in before, it’s all men walking around going, ‘Yeah, this tournament’s got my name on it; this is my game and it’s down to me and I’m gonna do it! I’m in the zone’. Literally looking in the mirror going, ‘You’re a winner!’

 

Metaphorically at least, that’s the attitude that tournament players have. They go in and they are going to be the man. Except in the ladies’ tournament in Vegas, where they’re all blushing and saying, ‘I don’t know if I wore the right blouse.’

 

Anthony Holden: Surely there are some women in Vegas who refuse to play in … … Al, you came fourth out of 150 last night. How did you manage it?

 

Al Alvarez: Patience. Also, I’m an old man and this was in Oxford with a lot of kids there who’d read books of mine and thought, Oooh!, you know. And so I made a move, they buggered off! [Laughter]

 

Anthony Holden: Like, this is God to me!

 

Al Alvarez: Yes, that’s right. That’s what I like to hear.

 

Patrick Marber: Did you play any differently than you would have done if ..

 

Al Alvarez: No, I hadn’t played a tournament for about a year and a half and I realised what I was missing. I’m not going to do Vegas again because I can’t do these long, long hauls. Sort of, if you make it all the way, it’s four times 12-hour days, or 14-hours days. I’m too old for that. I get to my bedtime, my sell-by date, or whatever it is and I want to go home. But last night was terrific. It’s a completely different rhythm in a cash game. You know you can always make a move. You know you can put your hand into your breast pocket and get some more money out if it goes wrong. But in a tournament, you can be said in for all your money at any point so you can’t make any mistakes so you have to, it’s all about where you’re sitting at the table. It’s all, which is what poker is very much about. It’s a positional game and you can sort of make big bets with lousy cards if you’re sitting late in the hope just of picking up the antes. Mostly, what you don’t want to get is ‘called’ when you make a bet in that thing. But … lets you have a really strong hand!

 

Anthony Holden: And nobody is going to win the tournament without a lucky hand at some point. I’m always reminded of the golf story, which some of you will know, about Gary Player chipping in from a bunker to win some big tournament. As he walked to the flag to hit his ball out of the hole, one of the crowd said: ‘You lucky bastard, this is worth 5,’ and he turned to them and said, ‘Yeh, I find that the more I practise, the luckier I get!’ And I think there is a lot of truth in the fact that poker players make their own luck in the way that they play.

 

Do you play tournaments?

 

Patrick Marber: Yes I do. Well I play tournaments online and I occasionally play them in what is laughingly known as the real world.

 

Al Alvarez: There’s a drama man talking.

 

Patrick Marber: I’ve done quite well in tournaments in general, in little tournaments. I haven’t ever gone to Vegas and played big. I’m sort of coaching myself to get up to that point.

 

Victoria Coren: The series starts in May. I’ll tell you the problem with Vegas is that it’s all gone ‘no smoking’ and actually the British Open in a couple of weeks at the Vic is no smoking. I was very annoyed about this. I was trying to explain to … in the card room that poker players tend to smoke. It’s a bit like being that Jewish thing again. You think with people that genuinely believe that they were going to have a long full, happy, wealthy life and die comfortable of old age, they wouldn’t be playing poker. Because it’s all about thinking, you know, I’m prepared to lose. Maybe the right card will come off the deck and I’ll suddenly win a huge fortune and have a great couple of weeks. If you’re prepared to gamble with your money, if you’re prepared to lose it. I think somehow they go together in my mind, smoking and thinking, ‘Well, what the hell! Either I’ll get lucky or I won’t’.

 

It kind of goes with poker. There are people that in general tend to be pessimists. You know, 60 per cent of the reason to go down there is because how much you’ll enjoy standing at the bar telling your bad beat story later.

 

Al Alvarez: Yes, that’s something that is really interesting about … is that nobody ever remembers the house they win on. They only remember the house that … … what is called a ‘bad beat’ and it always begins with, ‘Can you believe the shmuck quality on a pair of deuces. I move all in and he pulls me on a pair of lousy deuces!’

 

Patrick Marber: I think we could generalise that Jews are particularly … stories of their misfortune …

 

Anthony Holden: Ok. We have about quarter of an hour left. Is there anybody out there?

 

[Inaudible remark from audience.]

 

Ah, cheating. Very good. We should have talked about cheating, and one of my regrets about Big Deal is that there’s not enough cheating in it. While I was living that book I was told of a school out in the Nevada Desert where they teach people to, one of the methods of cheating these days is to use invisible fluorescent dye I suppose it is. You put it on your fingertips and as you handle the cards, they gain … … mark the cards to distinguish what … they are so you can see. It helps in a game like Stud where you … and people where certain types of specs, or these days lenses so you can’t just see where these cards show up. But I just learned not to play in places where people don’t know the host. If you didn’t know where you were, I think you’re taking a big risk in some parts of America … sitting down to games. Anybody ever come across any cheating?

 

Victoria Coren: I cheated in my home game once. I have a game at my house and we’re cheating. It’s quite friendly. I mean, we’re not people that tend to socialise with each other apart from at the poker table. But it’s quite friendly. I cook dinner and we chat about things and they have been, like the dinner, you know, very small rake, very reasonable. And for sort of ten years they’ve been turning up every week. And this one guy who’s been playing for about five years. You say, nowhere where you don’t know the host. We all knew each other. There was this very dramatic night one night. He always used to deal this game, which apparently should make you suspicious to begin with. Which was something like, ‘Oh he’s seven-card Stud high low with one-eyed Jacks wild was the game’. And some of the people sort of started to notice that it never got to all seven cards. When it got to about four cards, the guy who was dealing said it was bet enough for everyone had folded in this. And it was this very dramatic moment where the cards were dealt and then two of the other guys sort of stood up and said, ‘Right, before you look at your cards, we are prepared to bet you £2,000 that you’ve got a one-eyed Jack,’ which obviously statistically he must take this bet. He hasn’t looked at his cards. It’s a crazy bet and he wouldn’t take it. He wouldn’t take it. Eventually, they turned over his cards and he did have this one-eyed Jack and I thought, ‘Wow! this is the moment where someone pulls out a shotgun and we all punch each other and …’. The other people said to him, ‘We’re very disappointed in you. We’d like you to leave.’ And I thought, ‘What a very middle-class burglary!’

 

Al Alvarez: Did he leave?

 

Victoria Coren: He left. I see him at the casino sometimes, but I do not speak to him now.

 

Anthony Holden: For anybody here who knows the movie The Cincinnati Kid, there are several very good poker movies. The Cincinnati Kid, I think, is the one that best captures the world of the hustler, of the poker. But the hand at the end of The Cincinnati Kid in which Steve McQueen, the kid, it’s five card Stud, one card at a time. He gets a full house and Edward G. Robinson, the man, gets a straight flush on the last card to beat him. I got a guy while I was writing Big Deal to calculate. He worked out for me that if you play five card Stud 24 hours a day, seven days a week, it would take 347 years, just for two of you, just like 2-handed, I think it’s 437 years for those two hands to come up! And anyway, if they did, one player would assume the other was cheating or the dealer and the shotguns would have been out long before Edward G. called, which of course he shouldn’t have done because Steve McQueen had two … and he had impossible … in a straight flush.

 

Any more questions?

 

[Inaudible question from audience.]

 

Ah, good question. I’m very superstitious. Yes, if I have a good win I will wear the same clothes to the next game.

 

Al Alvarez: So keep away from him!

 

Anthony Holden: And not take them off until I next lose. Johnnie Chan, one of the great players of this age, has an orange that he had in front of him when he first won the World Series and he’s still playing, about a dozen years later, with the same rather mouldy orange in front of him. Patrick?

 

Patrick Marber: Right, there are some nights where I think, ‘I’m lucky tonight,’ and then there are other nights when I’m not lucky. I think that’s true of poker as a game. There are some nights where you just hit cards that are miracles and other nights you don’t.

 

Anthony Holden: … the very phrase which is that somebody’s been living right, if they get what’s called ‘a rush’, which is a run of good cards. Or have a good evening. The other players will say, ‘Well, you must be doing something right’. Al has a phrase … [several voices – inaudible]

 

What do you have to do to get a good hand?

 

Al Alvarez: I used to be. I think I’m absolutely not now. I used to carry little tokens in my diary. … that’s right.

 

Anthony Holden: A mezuzah wasn’t it?

 

Al Alvarez: The mezuzah is on the door … …

 

Anthony Holden: … I gave Mr and Mrs Alvarez for their silver wedding a silver heart which was then fashionable … He took it off and used it as his talisman for a long time.

 

Al Alvarez: For a long time. I think this is to do with getting old. I absolutely don’t believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck. I think that’s Patrick’s right. You get these nights when everything goes right and you get nights where you play exactly the same way and everything goes wrong. And all you have to do is, which I imagine we’ve all four of us, you have to get to the state of mind where you think it’s all one game. It’s going to finish when I fold my hand and go up to the big poker game in the sky. If I go away, the game is going to be there tomorrow or next week or next month, whenever it is I come back. And so I’m having a bad time, get up and leave. You’re not going to get the money back that time, go away. Come back when things are better. That’s the only way to look at it.

 

When Tony and I … 20 years or 30 years or something, played in the game on Tuesday night, and I kept religious accounts of it, but it was kind of the one game. Now I play in casinos and don’t play in social games it’s just an eternal game. It’s not a Tuesday game. It’s there 365 days of the year.

 

Victoria Coren: I’m not terribly superstitious but I think it’s affected. I don’t think I really mean it. I think I just think it’s a nice thing to be. You see the players around with like sugar teddy, sugar on his chips, I think it’s a nice thing. I remember reading a thing that I thought was lovely. Harpo Marx in his autobiography, it’s about Minnie Marx and she used to play poker. She always used to draw to an inside straight, which, you’re right, it’s a terrible thing to do. Lancey Howard is the worst poker player in the world, he would do that. But she used to do it because she said that she’d had five sons in a row so her destiny was to make five cards all in a row. But of course she lost an absolute fortune playing poker. But how nice, I thought, to play that way.

 

[Inaudible question from audience.]

 

Anthony Holden: Funny you should mention it! Playing tote … [Several voices together.] Clive Sinclair once said to me a long time ago that as he climbed into bed on a Tuesday night after we’d been playing, ‘How come you’ve either won £500 or lost £5 and it’s never the other way around!’ [Laughter]

 

And also the very first time I played in the Tuesday game when I was terrified. I was the deputy Watford correspondent of the Hemel Hempstead Evening Echo earning £100 a month, £1200 a year, 1970, and I lost £100 which was a month’s pay gross the first time. And he’d got me involved in this and I wrote to Al, of course he’s a poet, so I wrote him a poem saying, and my wife at the time was called Amanda who wasn’t entirely sure about this, I’m not married any more and that may be partly to do with poker, although my second wife is a poker player: it helps a lot. I wrote a poem to Al saying,

 

‘I lost but I learned how not to do it

I say this to Al with perfect candour

But don’t forget it was thirty quid

Next time you see the fair Amanda.’

 

To which he replied:

 

‘Thirty quid is far too much,

Beyond the little woman’s ken.

Her mind revolving on food and such,

Take my advice and divide by ten.’ [Laughter]

 

[Several voices together.] What were we talking about? Oh, private lives. Newly-married man.

 

Patrick Marber: I’m ok, touch wood. She understands.

 

Al Alvarez: I think it’s part of the deal. When I got married, I would spend every weekend rock-climbing and I played poker on Tuesday nights. It was part of the deal. That’s what she was marrying. And she, my second wife, had no problems with that at all.

 

Anthony Holden: I think our wives would prefer us to be slinking off to a smelly dark room with a bunch of other men and one or two women than be having an affair. I mean it’s, she tends not to ask me whether I’ve won or lost.

 

There is a received wisdom, I think it comes from Freud, that when we’ve been in Vegas away from our wives (although my wife comes), the sex element is completely subjugated to poker. It takes the place of sex. The libido … ashes.

 

Al Alvarez: It is very curious. Yes, it’s really interesting. The World Series, the first time I ever went there, there were these kind of two or three thousand men milling around and nobody was interested in, all they were interested in was the little blink of interest in what’s the next card going to be. It is a very curious situation.

 

Anthony Holden: I hear muttering on my left, the effect that poker has on your domestic life?

 

Victoria Coren: Well, again, not to be too much of a token woman, but I do sometimes think that if I did get married and have children it would be very difficult to play poker in the way that I do. And I think that one of the reasons that women don’t play so much in this country is partly because it’s not so easy to go out three or four nights a week and say to your husband you know, ‘You stay home with the kids, I’m off to play cards!’ I mean I can’t imagine doing that if I had a husband and I can’t imagine the people in the card room thinking I was anything other than a freak if they thought I had two kids at home being looked after by someone else. And also I think probably I’d think about money differently. I think women, when they have children, if somebody raises you know £100, I think their brains go, ‘That’s three pairs of children’s shoes.’

 

Al Alvarez: Oh come on, Vicky. Do you ever do that?

 

Victoria Coren: I don’t do that now, but I do think that..

 

Al Alvarez: I think you can’t play if you translate it into things.

 

Anthony Holden: Another fundament point. If you’re asked to place a bet of a thousand pounds, if you relate it to your mortgage payment or your car payments or your school fees or whatever you’re connected to … when I choose to go poker … I’ve always kept a separate bank account which is completely to do with poker and if it goes into the red I punish myself by playing … and I used to make myself get to 5,000 plus before I allowed myself to spend any of it because you can always lose it the following week. I remember going out and buying a tv and a video in the early days of videos, and a sofa to watch it on, on the strength of being a winner. And of course the following week I lost it all back and that was how I learned that lesson. Another question?

 

[Inaudible question from audience.]

 

The game played in the world championships is called Texas Hold ‘Em. For those who don’t know, that’s two cards down called blind cards’ or hold cards to each of probably nine or ten players around a table. And then there’s going to be a flop which is communal cards, revealed 3, 1, 1, with a between each reveal. And the idea is to use either or both of your hold cards to improve on the card three in the middle to win the hand. It’s a variant of Seven Card Stud. That’s regarded as the sort of uber poker game at the moment. Al and I, I know, prefer that. Anybody prefer anything else?

 

Patrick Marber: I prefer the High Low games because there’s more action. You stay in longer.

 

[?]: Omaha?

 

Anthony Holden: Omaha is the same thing with four cards to each player where you have to use two, no more no less than two from your hand.

 

Patrick Marber: Yeh, I like any game where I can stay in longer.

 

Anthony Holden: Yeh, I like games where you can get more cards.

 

Patrick Marber: More cards, more hope.

 

Victoria Coren: I kind of like Hold ‘Em best too. It’s very difficult to find a Hold ‘Em game in London now. They used to play it at the Stakis a couple of doors down when they closed the card room at the Vic.

 

Al Alvarez: Thursday nights at the Vic now. Thursdays, Saturday, Sunday.

 

Victoria Coren: Yeh, although not at the moment because they’re doing it anyway. No, but it’s very difficult. Actually because there are going to be people thinking like Patrick, although he’s a very much better player than he’s giving credit for, he’s not really like that at all. In theory, the reason everybody plays Omaha now, and you can play it with four cards, five cards, six cards, is because you want to give weaker players as many reasons as possible to stay in the hand. So the thing with Hold ‘Em is, what makes it the most fantastic game, is that any two cards can win. You can do anything. There’s infinite room to be creative with two cards. But, it’s also very … to look at your 9 and a 4: that’s going nowhere, and chuck it away. And the thing with six-card Omaha High Low, ok, the highest hand is going to win half the pot; the lowest hand is going to win half the pot and you’ve got six cards to make one of two hands. I mean there are people who just won’t put their hands down. So in theory it’s more lucrative because if you’re a tight layer, you throw your hand away and all these other people think, ‘Oh, I seem to have two pairs, I’ll keep betting, keep betting, keep betting’. So in London now it’s hard to play Hold ‘Em but I think it is the best.

 

[Inaudible question from audience.]

 

Al Alvarez: Well in the one that we all played in..

 

Anthony Holden: But some of them you have to pay to enter, which I decline to do. But there was one so-called celebrity one that launched I think the third series of this extraordinarily successful prog in which we four all played with … Martin Amis, Stephen Fry, both of whom are good players, and a then totally-unknown comic called Ricky Gervais who is now flavour of the week, who was a very nice guy I recall. It’s the only time I’ve met him. He didn’t know how to play poker. He was drafted in at the last minute! First to be knocked down. He was very gracious about it.

 

Patrick Marber: He may or not be a nice guy, but he was pretty unfunny. That was the amazing … He was poker jack. He was just awful. But he is the comic genius of our age.

 

Anthony Holden: I think one aspect of it is that we all started with £1,000. We were actually paid £1,000 to take part but you had to play with it and somebody was going to win the lot and maybe we’ll reveal who that was. But I remember thinking, the last thing you want to do is lose on television. I mean, that is going to be the most humiliating. I was thinking last night, ‘Is it more humiliating to lose in the Oxford Union when you’re regarded as a star of the IPA semi-professional or on television?’ There was no doubt I didn’t mind at all last night. But I certainly was deliberately cautious.

 

I don’t know whether you remember, Vicky, the first hand at that tournament was a big one. I remember I called so I must have had some sort of hand. I don’t know what it was. Then somebody raised.

 

Victoria Coren: I raised.

 

Anthony Holden: You took a bit of a beating in that first hand. But I began to realise unless I was very careful it could be all over in the first hand. But you..

 

Victoria Coren: Well no, my thinking on that hand was specifically that, that people don’t want to be seen to lose on television, especially on the first hand. It was 5, 10 … … Stephen Fry had a pair of fives.

 

Anthony Holden: It was two years ago! [Laughter] I was there! I can even remember it! It’s available on video tape. I remember Stephen Fry had a ‘tell’. We haven’t talked about tells, which people have involuntarily often way of giving away unconsciously, of course, that they’ve got a good or a bad hand. I think I can now say publicly that for some years, Mr Alvarez, I think he still has this tell actually.

 

Al Alvarez: Tell me!

 

Anthony Holden: In one of the houses I lived in over the years, we had a pew, when they were trendy in Islington, on each side of our dining table. And for a while I always made sure I sat on the same side as Al because when Al got a good hand (I think he still does it), he pushes his chair back so the whole pew would go back! … would know to fold. I do remember in the telly game that Stephen Fry kept doing that rather curiously, and that indicated that he wasn’t as good as he was pretending to be.

 

Victoria Coren: Not that helpful on the first hand. …Still on that learning curve at that point. You were unlucky that day. You were playing very well and something, Amis got lots of aces.

 

Patrick Marber: … Amis was very lucky. I was happy to leave this to him. A marvellous writer. [Laughter] It’s one of my absolute irritants and kind of pleasure to be outdrawn by him. Tony won this competition, by the way, on the television.

 

Al Alvarez: He had a little deal.

 

Victoria Coren: They carved it up, the two of them.

 

Anthony Holden: It came down to me and Al, head to head, and we were given a break and we went outside and, as they said, did a deal and carved up the 7,000 in terms of the chips we had left, forgetting that we were wearing microphones! [Laughter] They all led to the directors and producers who were listening to us! ‘Shut up Al, we’ll sort it out later!’

 

Maybe one more question. Madam?

 

[Inaudible question from audience.]

 

Ah. I think myself that card sense is in the genes, yes. I mean I personally come from a very card-playing family. But my father, on the troopship back from the war in 1945, from East Africa, it’s a famous story in our family, lost £50 playing poker, which was everything he had in the world. So although my parents were very keen bridge players, canasta, gambling games were fine for matchsticks or pennies, poker was strictly verboten throughout our childhood. Which, of course, is why my brother and I soon wound up in poker schools.

 

I tell the story in the book that in my 30s, going back to Lancashire to play bridge with my parents, my theory is that bridge and poker don’t mix. There’s nobody that’s good at both. What’s the point of the game? Well, I don’t want to play with a partner. It was the sort of a game where you don’t get to play with dummies, so I always overbid. My mother says ‘spades’: she means ‘hearts’. So I’ve got no patience with this stuff! So I would always overbid and my mother eventually said, ‘I can’t understand it. You’ve got such good, my God you’re playing poker, aren’t you?’ She rumbled it.

 

So, yes, I think there’s a lot in that and certainly like in other sports, football, whatever, you find there’s a lot of father-son or parent-child things going on in the professional poker world.

 

Patrick Marber: I think it’s a very good question and I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently because last week I gave my son, who is 17 months –

 

Anthony Holden: Did he outdraw you?

 

Patrick Marber: I just gave him a deck of cards to play with, just to see what he’d do. He’d never seen a pack of cards before. His face lit up. He spent the next three hours playing with this pack of cards, just putting the cards down, looking at every card and back. And I’m not sure whether I’ve introduced him to a lifetime of misery or joy.

 

Al Alvarez: He’s an intelligent man, that’s all you’re saying.

 

Patrick Marber: But I think people who have an interest in cards, per se, are born. You either get off on the sensuousness of a deck of cards, and the potential, and the possibility of what it might bring you, or you don’t understand what I’m talking about. To some people they’re just bits of coloured paper, and to others they represent an ocean of possibility.

 

Anthony Holden: While writing my book, I went to the Cincinnati Playing Card Company in Cincinnati where these things are made and I saw sheets of playing cards coming out of the printing press. For some reason I expected lots of aces and then lots of kings. But of course they come out in a unit of a deck which is then cut up into little pieces and I was given one and I realised that this utterly harmless piece of cardboard could actually ruin people’s lives, break up marriages, have people selling their homes or their cars or whatever. So I really had a very strong feeling that I wanted to take it home and frame it, which I did, and hung it on the wall before it did anybody any harm.

 

Vicky, do you want to say something on that?

 

Victoria Coren: Generally, I think I agree that there’s a genetic element. I do think there’s something about, you look at a pair of red …and you either find it beautiful or you don’t. I think there is a genetic thing because our family was similar to yours. Two generations ago lots of them played, but in our house no, absolutely not. Partly because my father remembered various uncles and the terrible disgrace when they sort of lost everything. But that in a way comes back to what I was saying in the beginning about perhaps I shouldn’t turn up because I’m not Jewish enough and I’ve left all that behind and I don’t know anything about it. Definitely there’s a thing that when I go to the card room, where one of the things why I feel so profoundly happy to be there, is it feels a little bit like getting in touch again with the generation that came before. You know, before my parents went to university and learned to speak properly and could ‘pass’. The generation before that that didn’t have any money and were kind of struggling and gambling and hoping that some magic thing would happen and their lives would be transformed. I kind of see that in the card room at the Vic and it’s strangely familiar. And I think that is kind of why I love it.

 

Anthony Holden: I’ll end on the story which I love of the proverbial man from the desert in Las Vegas who comes in from the desert carrying two suitcases. One contains a million dollars and the other is –

 

[Alvarez continually interrupts him.]

 

He’s going to correct me on the … it’s like having a wife here!

 

The other suitcase is empty. And he wants to put all the money on red at roulette, even bet as you know. There’s some … The pit boss calls the supervisor, calls the floor manager, calls the security boss, calls the duty officer, calls the legendary Benny Binion himself who famously said ‘No limits’. So he said, ‘Ok, let the guy put the million dollars on red at roulette.’ He negotiated the zero off the roulette board, which of course made the odds exactly accurate. The ball went to him. He would spin it throughout … … It landed in red. He was paid a million dollars. He filled up the other suitcase and he walked away out into the desert and was never seen again. And the reason that all gamblers and poker players love that story is that it’s … … [inaudible] … If that happened to any of us, you would think, ‘Well, I’m a million up, I can … [inaudible]’ and some people won’t be happy until they’ve lost the lot.

 

So one of the key pieces of advice to go away with today is ‘Quit while ahead’, which I think we’ll now do. Thank you very much.

 

[Applause]