INTERVIEW: In her new memoir, professional poker player Victoria Coren tells the story of her life through the prism of gambling, with tales of table camaraderie, broken hearts and downsides to the game
THE WORDS “female poker player” have about them a visceral quality, calling to mind some very specific tones, colours and fabrics. One visualises Partonesque molls in diamante sweater suits, faces slathered in peacock blue eye-shadow, dice earrings pendulously suspended above ensembles which have been finished off with a diamond-studded watch, and perhaps a matching felt Stetson. So when I meet her outside a pub in Belsize Park, one of the world’s best-known female professional poker players manages to be both a huge disappointment and a pleasant surprise.
She is warm, chatty and very funny, but in appearance Victoria Coren cuts a classic English figure of low-key reserve, and she doesn't write much like a Vegas moll either. Leaving aside the journalism and the weekly column in the Observer, in her excellent new memoir, For Richer, For Poorer, Coren uses her love affair with the game to tell a much bigger – and at turns heartbreaking and redemptive – story. Though it might seem specious to bring up Sex and the City, that television show also tried to view the complexities of life as a single woman in the modern metropolitan world through the smallest of prisms. But Coren's book eschews the pursuit of footwear and tells the story of her life through the prism of poker, with unexpectedly moving results.
The first female winner of a European Poker Tour main event bats away the compliment, and lights the first of about 100 ultra-light cigarettes (“they’re practically good for you”). “It started with single-sex education. I was sent to an all-girls school. I know my parents meant well, they wanted a nice education for me, but I wonder whether the poker thing came from spending ages five to 17 in an all-girls environment.
“Initially my older brother played poker because it was a cool thing to do. Not like now, where 18-year-old boys play poker and think it’s a legitimate career option, and they play online as if studying for a medical degree. But my brothers and his friends played poker, they drank whiskey and they smoked, and I just wanted to be near some boys. Not to kiss them – I was too young for that, and the idea was revolting – but to be in the room.”
What did her girlfriends make of her love for this game? “I didn’t really have many friends. I was a weird tomboy. The girls in school were getting into lipstick, and I just wanted to get muddy and play games. I had a couple of friends at school, but not proper friends, not until university and the mixed environment. Now most of my closest friends are women.”
She argues that the gender imbalance in her life doesn't faze her any more, and this security among the other sex is delicately justified in For Richer, For Poorer, when compared with a card room. " don't write diaries, all sweetly floral and girlish on the outside, for you to be unable to resist flicking through at break time, which say things like 'I hope Vicky leaves school soon, we all hate her, the fat cow', and then smile at you across the tuck shop and ask if you want a Highland Toffee. Boys say what they think to your face. Bit harsh sometimes, but straightforward. This room feels, for all its billowing smoke and whisky fumes, safe and healthy."
Though she is close to her family (brother Giles, mother Anne, and late father Alan Coren, former editor of the Spectator, all receive frequent namechecks), in person she betrays a degree of fragility, which makes the way in which she writes about her personal life all the more surprising. It’s an elegant piece of writing as autobiographies go, but Coren still bares all, recounting what can be viewed as quite a lonely journey through life, from school days to the present, with eye-watering frankness.
Was it difficult to write? “It’s more autobiographical than I meant it to be. For years, publishers would ask about me doing a poker book. I always thought, ‘No, it’s got to be totally honest, and I’m not ready to be that honest.’
“I imagined that when my dad died I wouldn’t be able to write newspaper columns any more. I thought the world would be a different place, and that I wouldn’t be able to write jolly little newspaper pieces any more – of course, that’s not what it’s like at all. When someone dies life is the same. Every so often it’s terrible, but more often than not it’s just the same.”
Coren seems to have accepted the catch-22 involved in finding good company at the card tables. There’s this observation from the memoir, upon meeting a nice guy on the poker tour, after the conclusion of a bad love affair: “The only thing I really want and need is friendship. But he’s been in poker for years, and he’s popular, and he’s a man. Friendship is easily come by. He can ask anyone on the circuit if they fancy a meal without it looking like a come-on. I can’t. What he could consider rare and special in poker is a romance. For me it would be a real friendship without an agenda. We are both offering and asking for what we consider most meaningful, but we’re working with completely different hand values.”
Do the friendships forged and maintained at the table carry the same weight as those found elsewhere? “At my Tuesday game, there are a couple I might speak to on the phone – I see them more often than I see my brother, my mother and my closest friends – and yet I wouldn’t ever ring them up and say: ‘Do you want to go see a film?’ In the Vic I might see them two or three times a week, and it’s quite weird. I know them so well, and I see them in such a variety of moods, but you wouldn’t ever meet socially. Part of it might be that you don’t want to get too close to somebody’s real financial world. If you’re going to play poker with somebody, you don’t want to know that they’ve given his wife too much in the divorce settlement and he can’t afford to pay.”
She returns to gender as a way to explain how she feels about her life as it stands. “To this day, if I’m in a poker room and someone says to my face, ‘I don’t know why everyone talks about you like you’re a sex symbol – to me, you look a bit fat’, or ‘you’re a terrible player, how do you get to be in the TV games, you don’t know shit’, I’m fine with the upfront, I can answer that. I don’t have false modesty or false vanity. I’ll agree if they’re right, and argue if they’re wrong. What was terrifying about school was that everyone was friendly to everyone’s face, but behind the scenes there was a Machiavellian web of intrigue and gossiping. People think of poker as a place of lying and dishonesty, but to me it felt like the most honest place I’d been.”
Anyone who loved things the way they were back in the day wants you to believe that everything has gone to the dogs altogether. Nothing is as good as it used to be. When, in 1951, Nick the Greek stood up from his five-month marathon game in Benny Binion’s casino against the best player in the world with the immortal words “Mr Moss, I have to let you go”, he was announcing the beginning of the end. Many would have you believe that the romantic era of gunslingers in Vegas and Texas back rooms is gone from poker forever. Within 50 years, the game has become a place of Scandinavians with iPods, and this year thousands of competitors will play in a chilly, air-conditioned hangar in Vegas, most bedecked in corporate logos, fit and young, with 24-hour masseurs on the payroll, and not nearly enough of them knowing how to discharge a .45 into the gut of a lying sack of shit.
In Coren’s world, there’s a difference between nostalgia and real romance. “I felt about poker books since this explosion that it’s been a bit too advertise-y. The books have been too glossy. It’s all been about driving a Ferrari and being in a hot tub with 18 models, and that’s not poker. I’m sure that’s what it’s like for a lot of pros, but what about the arguments, the disappointments – the old poker books were full of that, the ones in the 60s and 70s. With millions more people playing it, we need more honesty. Now it exists, I’m a bit nervous about how honest I’ve been. There is a lot of travel, and money and glamour, and that’s fine. But if you look at a lot of what they are selling, there’s a downside, and I’ve been pretty upfront about losing money, getting my heart broken and arguments with friends. It’s the dream of being naked in school assembly.”
She can keep her dreams about going to school without wearing trousers. For most of us, the idea of sitting down at a table of professional poker players and trying to take their money, using your own money as bait, is nothing short of a nightmare. Coren insists that bravery – like fear – is subjective. “People are brave about some things and not others. I’m a terrible coward in other ways. I’m a commitment-phobe and I’m pretty cowardly in relationships. The other day I went to have a blood test and they came out with a syringe and I screamed like a six-year-old. I’m terrified of a cocktail party, terrified of anything medical, and yet if you asked me to walk down a street in a strange city with £5,000 in my pocket and go into a casino to play with complete strangers, I wouldn’t be scared at all.”
“The game is tougher. The romance has gone, but I’m sure people say that about . . . snooker. Broadly, I think anyone who calls themselves a professional player is happier. It’s properly legal, there are more games, and so on. But there is jealousy. Sponsorship is a big issue. You get sponsored players who wear a logo for a website, and they don’t have to pay tournament entry fees. And you get a lot of perfectly understandable jealousy from players who are good and have to pay. You know, I’m a sponsored player, and it’s as much to do with the sort of human face they want on their product as it is the skill.”
What next? “I’d like to write a novel. I got 40,000 words into a novel a few years ago and never went back. I found fiction scary. See, there’s something I am scared of! That’s because I revere books – they matter, they are the most important format. I’ve got the hang of writing non-fiction now, because I’ve done three, but fiction I find terrifying. I want to conquer it.”
When I mention to her that the subject of fear recurs a lot in her work, and in our conversation, she readily agrees, and mentions the grimly hilarious fate of her fear-of-flying instructor (he died in a plane crash). “Once you pick one person in the world whose only job is to persuade you to fly, and they die in a plane crash, what do you do when you’re sitting there with top pair and a flush draw? In theory I should be three-to-one, but what does it all mean?!
“If I could go back in time, the one thing I would say to my 13-year-old self is that everyone is terrified. That’s the key to life. Everyone wants to have friends. Everyone wants to have a romantic partner. Everyone is terrified that they’re not good enough, that the whole world is part of a club that you haven’t been allowed to join. If you try to make friends they’ll want to be friends. Just don’t be scared of it.
It applies to the workplace as much as anywhere else. Be confident and act super- confident. If you do that, people around you will be relieved and grateful. Everyone is desperate to see confidence around them, because everyone is terrified. The biggest players in the world are all nervous all the time. What if no one likes me? The ones who make a lot of noise are just insecure. I wish I had known when I was a kid that everyone was nervous, but I do know. People I’m never frightened of. They’re like spiders in the bath.”
For Richer, For Poorer: A Love Affair with Poker, by Victoria Coren is published by Canongate Books, £16.99