“I only play these because my son’s birthday is on the twenty fourth”
That was the excuse put to me for why the large round portly lady in the red blouse sitting to my immediate right had just player the 4c-2d and flopped the nut straight and cracked my pocket kings. That sure as hell did not make me feel any better and before I knew what was happening, my hand was reaching into my inside pocket to gather another twenty with the words….. “buy in”….coming sharply from my mouth in the direction of the card room supervisor.
I do not know why I bother myself with these bloody small £20 re-buy tournaments. They cram the players in and there were twelve on our table alone. What made it worse was that this was the fourth time that I had been outdrawn whilst holding a powerful hand. But the initial ninety minute re-buy period was like a free for all here but I must have been perhaps the only serious cash game player who was sitting in this god damn tournament.
The prize money was only in the region of about four grand and the entire tournament was structured to only last around five to six hours. These small tournaments were nothing more than promotional gimmicks to lure players into the casino in the hope that a large portion of them would end up on the tables and they were nothing more than crap shoots.
Still, at least they provided good entertainment as long as you accepted them as that and nothing more. I know a couple of people who claimed to play them for a living, either they were lying or just deceiving themselves after a good run. I once knew a player who won three on the spin and then never got near to winning one again.
Then there was the time when I showed someone how to play texas hold’em and the following week he came fourth in a seventy five man field. Hardly an indication of my coaching skills as I only had fifteen minutes with him but a serious indication of just how much luck there is with these things.
The large lady scooped in yet another pot with another rag hand and was now sitting on a monster stack while I am sitting there with my puny re-buy stack of 500 points. Six hands later with me having doubled through to about a thousand, I get dealt the As-Qs and manage to create a large do or die pot by getting all in with six callers with a flop of Ks-Js-2h. I have the nut flush draw, one card to a royal flush and other straight possibilities along with my ace overcard.
I am happy to be in a situation to get myself into contention with some chips if I make my draw. The cackling lady to my right is still betting and raising after the flop and the dealer is taking an awful lot of stick from the players for not being able to sort out the split pots fast enough.
That was something else that I hated about these tournaments, the dealers were poor and half the players had more say in dealing the game than the god damned dealer. I just sat there and let them get on with it. Jesus…..the re-buy period is only ninety minutes long as it is without the games grinding to a halt like this.
The cards go on their backs with missus portly showing bottom set, as soon as I saw her hand I suspected the worst. But the eight of clubs brought no help on the turn and I am almost out of my seat to walk from the table when the last card is a spade to complete my nut flush.
I sit back down wondering why the lady in red is getting so excited and reaching for the chips when I notice that the final spade is in fact the two of spades which gives her quads. Strangely enough I start to laugh along with her but not because I am happy, but I am laughing like the insane psychopath who just cannot take it anymore and has lost all control. As I rise from the table having reached my limit of five buy-ins, the stupid bat actually thinks that I am happy for her.
“Just not your night tonight darling is it?” she cackled.
She then tries to quote a famous line from the movie The Cincinnati Kid and gets it all wrong and this just makes my blood boil even more. I grit my teeth and force a smile while all the time wishing her the worst most vicious brutal outdraw imaginable.
I was not buying back into the tournament and we still had around thirty minutes left but my moral had been crushed. I was the first to leave the card room and I was doing the “walk of shame”. I went straight to the bar to get myself a comforting drink although I was driving home so one drink was all I could have and I have always been a stickler for drink driving. As I was sitting there, I was making yet another pact to never again play in these pathetic stupid piddling re-buy tournaments and if I ever did, then someone would have been well within their rights to shoot me.
But I had said this before, a bit like the diets that I kept saying that I was going to stick to and never did. Just then I hear a voice from behind me say “do you mind if I sit here?”
I turn around to see a face that I had not seen in ages, it was Ishtaq Khan. Ishtaq was a small balding Asian guy in his mid forties who I had known for quite a few years dating back to my years in gaming as a croupier.
“Ishtaq” I said with an element of pleasant surprise in my voice, “what are you doing here?”
“More to the point, what are you doing here…..I’m surprised they let you in?” replied Ishtaq
“I was here for the tournament” I remarked.
Ishtaq looked at his watch and then asked if I had been late for the tournament. I laughed and told him what had happened and that I was back in the bar having a drink with thirty minutes of the re-buy period left.
“Well, you know what these twenty pound tournaments are like, that’s why I don’t touch then with a bargepole, they will drive you crazy” replied Ishtaq.
“What are you here for then?” I asked.
“Come for the cash game, I normally play the fifty pound game here as it can be quite good” responded Ishtaq.
Myself and Ishtaq had held a good old fashioned friendly rivalry over the years with regards many things. We would quite often compare sports bets, talk about poker and we were both passionate about Cricket and the banter was always entertaining during any England versus Pakistan encounter. So I could not resist the temptation to tell him that I would be playing in the one hundred pound game and not the fifty which was more or less perceived as the minor game when compared to the money that would be on the table in the hundred pound game.
Ishtaq slowly raised an eyebrow and showed an element of surprise that I was going to be playing in this game.
“I wouldn’t be sitting in that game if I were you Carl, especially not tonight!”
“Why?”
“You obviously haven’t been here for a while have you?” replied Ishtaq
“er…..well….I have actually but not to play the hundred pound game. I have been here a few times playing blackjack and have played the tournament a few times but I haven’t played the hundred pound game for a year or so. Why what do you mean?”
“What I mean is that things have changed” replied Ishtaq leaving me still non the wiser with what he was getting at.
“Com on Ish…we go back a long way…..what aren’t you telling me?”
“This is between you and me right?” replied Ishtaq whilst lowering his voice.
“Of course, you know that you can trust me” I said
Ishtaq knew full well that he had my total confidence and did not need to seek further clarification. I had plenty of dirt on him that I chose not to divulge and he knew it as well and respected me for it.
Ishtaq leaned forward slightly out of his chair to lessen the distance between us so that he did not have to speak as highly and said, “the games calved up”.
I sat there looking at him in silence for a few seconds just contemplating what he actually meant by that statement until I was certain in my mind that it actually had only one meaning.
“What…you mean….its bent?” I asked
Ishtaq did not speak but ever so slightly closed his eyes for a second and gently nodded his head.
“How long has it been like this?” I enquired.
“About six months or so, nobody wins in that game unless you are in….if you know what I mean”
I didn’t know what he meant but I sure as hell could guess. Within a few seconds I was trotting off into the card room to alter my reservation from the hundred pound game to the fifty pound one. The card room supervisor made some joke comment about it being wise because of the way that my luck had been running and I just smiled. About a minute or so later I re-joined Ishtaq back at the bar and re-commenced our conversation.
“So why doesn’t someone put a stop to it?” I asked.
“Are you serious Carl, do you have any idea who these people are and who they are connected to?”
I didn’t know anything about these people but it just made me angry that I was being prevented from playing poker in a casino all because of some crooked players. Although there are bent games everywhere and the best course of action usually is just to stay clear of them.
“So how many people know about this Ish?”
“Not very many but its common knowledge on the grapevine” replied Ishtaq.
“So how do they operate then?” I asked.
“Don’t really know” replied Ishtaq
I shrugged my shoulders and smirked and said “so how do you know its bent then if you don’t know what they are doing?”
“Because it’s obvious that’s why, but its only obvious if you come here often and spot the patterns like I have. The same three or four players are always here and it is rare for anyone to come off that table winning other than them. At first I just thought that it was because they were good and the other players were crap but there’s more to it than that. Their all round poker isn’t even all that good but what really stands out is that you never get just one of them on the table on their own on any one night. The only time that they do that is when the first one sits down or when the last one leaves but not a single one of them ever plays an entire session without the others being there. Doesn’t that strike you as odd?”
Whenever I am presented with a problem or something that I need to get my head around then I always try and use probability theory to help me. As I sat there contemplating the situation while Ishtaq was otherwise engaged on his mobile phone, I could not help but come to the same conclusion. I couldn’t work out the odds of the same four players always being on the same table on the same night but they had to be enormous when you sat and thought about it.
There were cash games in the card room almost every night so sheer probability would dictate that at least one of them would have been in that game on their own at some stage. One thing was certain and this was that I was glad that I had changed my reservation on the hundred pound table and changed it to the fifty and I had Ishtaq to thank for that.
I sat there gazing around the casino and was suddenly distracted by Ishtaq saying “hey Carl”.
I looked at him and his eyes darted swiftly to his left to indicate to me that I should be looking in that direction also. As I did I noticed two guys both aged around forty years of age locked in a conversation whilst ordering a drink.
“Don’t let them see you looking but that’s two of them” whispered Ishtaq.
I slowly shifted my position in my seat so that I could look at them without it appearing that I was going out of my way to do so. The more I looked at them, one of them seemed very familiar to me and I was certain that I knew his face from somewhere but then again I knew an awful lot of people and that really didn’t mean anything by itself.
Myself and Ishtaq separated about thirty minutes later with him going across to play roulette and me deciding to play a little blackjack although I had not gone there with this intention but the cash games would not be starting for another couple of hours and I was driving home so having any more drinks was out of the question.
As blackjack was such a passion of mine, I did find it very difficult not to keep a track of the count. Although this was a very poor game to play in. The game was six deck, the penetration was very poor and the games were being dealt by inexperienced dealers who were barely dealing forty hands an hour when the games got busy. Blackjack games were notoriously bad inside casinos that had just completed a dealer training school.
The pit bosses on the night shifts basically had their hands tied with where they could actually put them as they were far too green to place on big roulette games or the higher denomination tables so the best place for them most of the time was on blackjack. But this just messed up your hourly rate because suddenly, the eighty hands an hour that you had been getting suddenly became fifty or sometimes a lot worse.
But the time passed until I was notified that the cash games were about to start. I had lost a little money on the blackjack tables as well and maybe this wasn’t going to be my night. I was in fact the very first person to take my seat and I had chosen the best seat that would allow me the best view of the one hundred pound table. I wanted to see what these guys were doing for myself and try to ascertain what their methods were.
I had been sat at the table for a couple of minutes when Ishtaq came along and sat at the opposite end to me. This game was a dealers choice game and the minimum buy in was fifty pound and the blinds were two pound. I reached into my wallet and started to count out two hundred and fifty pound.
I’d also taken around twenty singles (£1 chips) from blackjack because I knew that I would need change of some sort in this game. As was counting out my money, I could see out of the corner of my eye, a couple of figures taking their seats on our table and I instinctively looked up.
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, these were the two guys at the bar who Ishaq had pointed out to me. But what the hell were they doing on the fifty pound table, Ishtaq had said that they only played on the hundred pound table. I glanced at Ishtaq and I could tell with the look on his face that he had also not foreseen this unexpected turn of events.
Suddenly the two hundred and fifty pound that I’d intended to count out suddenly turned into the fifty pound minimum. As the table filled up into an eight handed game. I found myself wondering if any of these other guys were members of the team. I could only account for three people who I knew were straight and I was one of the three.
Just why were these guys on the fifty pound game and not playing on the hundred table? I don’t know the answer, maybe they were trying to deviate how they were operating, maybe they thought that people wouldn’t notice as much if they changed tables, maybe the team was bigger than Ishtaq thought and that they were playing both tables when the other one opened up, maybe the hundred pound game wasn’t opening tonight.
Too many questions and not enough answers. To be honest, even putting fifty pound on this table was rather foolish but curiosity had got the better of me and my thirst for adventure and excitement was coming to the fore.
I actually got off to a great start and tripled my original fifty pound in the first six hands of play although having one hundred and fifty pound on the table instead of fifty may not have been such a good idea in a game like this.
The two suspects were actually losing money after about an hour of play but there was one guy on the table who was winning over a grand. I was trying to run various situations through my head. If we had three straight players on this table which consisted of myself, Ishtaq and the other guy whose name I didn’t know by name but actually trusted. Then if there were three team members who were cheating the game then that left two other players who would also be straight.
That could all be wrong and all just supposition but I had to look at various situations to try and figure out what was happening. One thing that I had figured out and this was that there was absolutely no value in this game whatsoever if nearly half the table was fiddling. I then made the decision to withdraw from the table when my stack reached two hundred and fifty pound as I didn’t want to be manipulated into a big pot with a strong hand while holding a big stack.
Suddenly something hit me, I noticed Ishtaq seemed to be watching the guy who was winning. Not blatantly but subtly with little deft movements of his eyes which unless you were actually looking directly at him were almost impossible to spot. Could this guy be the other team member? But he had arrived late and so Ishtaq had not had the opportunity to point him out to me.
What were these guys doing? Were they signalling or marking cards or what? We had a house dealer called Wayne so no one was getting to deal the cards and I was watching the two guys who Ishtaq had pointed out at the bar like a hawk whenever they held their cards. If they were signalling and doing it well then that would be next to impossible to pick that up.
But now something else hit me, the two other guys who I had pegged for being on the level had both sat down in this game with large stacks compared to the size of the game. Why they were sitting on the fifty pound game and not the hundred pound game with stacks like that was a mystery. So what I did next was to ask one of them outright that’s what.
I smiled and said “I would have thought that you would be sitting in the hundred pound game with that kind of money”
The guy nearest to me simply shrugged and said, “I would have been but the table wasn’t open and I cannot stay too long so I couldn’t wait”
That’s it I thought, this team were simply going where the money was and if that meant the fifty pound game then that is where they would go. The irony of it was that I had originally put my name down for the hundred pound game and that would have enabled me to avoid these people. I had only changed my mind following the advice of Ishtaq and now I was on the fifty pound table with the line up from hell. Maybe this wasn’t going to be my night after all but I still had the option to end the session about a hundred pound ahead which would eliminate my buy-ins during my hour of misery in the tournament and that would just leave me with the minor losses that I had incurred during my stint on the blackjack table.
I was still curious about how these people were operating when I received an education about ten minutes later. I felt certain that one of the players had pumped the pot for the one of the others and the poor unsuspecting guy with the large stack had got caught in the middle. He had obviously been shepherded into either the nuts or a very strong hand. The hand was hold’em and I never got to see the pumper’s hand because he folded on the river which when looking at his action up to that stage was very strange indeed. Sure enough the player who I suspected was in fact holding the absolute nuts with the top straight while the other guy paid him off with a set.
As I sat and looked at the respective partners in crime, I began to notice that a couple of them looked rather awkward when the pot had been won. Almost as if they were expecting to be exposed at any minute and this was the behaviour that confirmed in my mind not only that they were operating as a team but also what they were doing.
They were obviously signalling hands to each other by some method of which I had yet to find out and when they had done that, one of them who was weak helped the other one to escalate the pot who was holding a powerful hand. Shortly after an incident happened that made my mind up that the best course of action would be to leave this game. I was in a pot with two of the suspected team members and I had top pair top kicker on the flop in another hold’em hand and check folded the hand.
That was the final straw as far as I was concerned. They had totally and utterly affected my thinking and this was no longer a poker game but a battle of survival. I made my excuses and left the table fortunate enough to be around fifty pound ahead. Before leaving the casino, I decided to have another drink at the bar just to run through in my head what had just happened.
The waiting list for the one hundred pound game already had three names before mine so I didn’t want to have to wait several hours to get a game if at all. Even then there was no guarantee that the game was straight. If a team was operating on one table here then who was to say that they weren’t active on them both.
I had not been sitting in the lounge area for very long when Ishtaq came and joined me again.
“So much for your idea of sitting in the fifty pound game” I said.
“They only sat in that game because of Ken and Mally” replied Ishtaq
“Who?” I asked.
“The two players who were on your left with the big stacks” replied Ishtaq.
“Why did you play in that game if you knew the score?” I asked.
“It was the only game available because the one hundred pound game wasn’t open and I had already put my name down for it like you” replied.
I sat there thinking how stupid we had both been, just because both of us had travelled around forty miles each to a game did not mean that we should have sat down in a game as bad as that. I thought that poker players were supposed to be more sophisticated form of gamblers.
“How many people know about this operation Ishtaq?” I asked.
“I don’t’ know for sure, I only know of a couple of people who know and I don’t think the management know anything but they couldn’t give a shit anyway” replied Ishtaq.
“Don’t be so sure, they have these small poker tournaments to promote action in the pit area and they would not let a situation develop where bad publicity was affecting the attendance. If they suspected that something was amiss then they would do something I am sure of it” I replied.
Actually I wasn’t overly convinced of what I had just said as there had been incidents in the past where I had been involved in a heated argument with a card room supervisor and a casino manager about the use of the English only rule being constantly violated in their card room. Basically I had been told that they weren’t prepared to upset the locals for someone like me who only came every now and again. They didn’t quite phrase it like that but that was basically what they were saying in a nutshell.
“I know a few people down in Birmingham who know them but no one is prepared to do anything about it. The people who know either don’t care of they are involved with them or at least they have been at some stage. They even have a name for them and they call them “The Firm” said Ishtaq.
I had heard of that name once before years ago on the grapevine but surely this couldn’t be the same team. There used to be a pretty good player where I used to work who always did well in the cash games and his name was Tim. I always thought that I was perhaps the only member of staff who he would confide to with regards poker and some of the things that were going off in our very own cardroom.
Much of what happened in that cardroom didn’t even reach the ears of the managers of even the cardroom supervisor. In fact, they called him the card room supervisor but he was the pit boss for the rest of the week and he wasn’t even in the bloody card room most of the time. But I knew that an active and highly skilled mechanic used to deal the cash games up there on the nights when the casino could not provide a dealer. He was Hungarian and had once provided me and two other members of staff with an amazing demonstration of sleight of hand. Although in this case, his skills were actually common knowledge but that was one of the few things that were.
But Tim had once told me about this team some years ago but most of the story had gone over my head as it didn’t really interest me at the time. Our casino was a little too northerly for them to operate plus the action was not frequent enough. In fact with one of the biggest card rooms in England holding just one tiny poker tournament a week, I used to think what a colossal waste of space it all was.
But the name of “The Firm” had stuck and I had never forgot it. Little did I know that one of them would approach me to become involved a short time later but that’s a different story. They figured that as a poker dealer then I had certain uses for them and also the right personality and temperament.
If these were the same people that had approached me all those years ago then they had either expanded the team or they had got some new members because non of the three people in the fifty pound game were known to me although I did suspect that I knew one of them from somewhere and that was still niggling me that I couldn’t properly trace his face.
“There is a pretty good game in Bradford on Thursday” remarked Ishtaq.
“What size is it?” I replied.
“Hundred pound, five pound blinds. Only thing is that they play a lot of Paduki but the action is something else”
I hated Paduki, it wasn’t even poker in my opinion. A wild drawing game that resembled poker where you had three drawing rounds to try and finish up with four cards all of different suits and ranks as low as possible. The Chinese loved it but I hated the game.
I got up slowly from my chair and stretched and yawned. There was really nothing else to keep me here. The casino would be closing its doors in around an hour or so and there didn’t seem much point in hanging around and I was starting to feel somewhat tired.
“You getting off Carl?” enquired Ishtaq.
“Yeah, I will probably see you in Bradford. Let’s just hope that we get a better game than we did tonight. It would have served us right tonight if we had both been taken to the cleaners” I replied.
With that I walked out through the lobby and into the night with the cold fresh air being a welcome relief on my face. During the drive home, I got to thinking that certain things what Ishtaq had done in the card room didn’t make sense. The more I thought about it, the more I started to think that he was actually part of them.
Oh come on Carl stop it! Why would he bring the subject up at the bar in the first place if he was one of them. Maybe he already knew that I knew and wanted to know what I knew. Maybe he had tried to keep me from their table and inadvertently placed me on it. All conspiracy rubbish, surely Ishtaq could not be involved with these people…..not Ishtaq who I had known for years. But few things in life shocked me anymore and I would not have been knocked for six if I had found out that Ishtaq was a member. Wherever you find money, you will find people who are prepared to do whatever it takes in order to get it….very sad indeed!
