Chapter 4/ Employing Half the Glamour Models in London - The Disastrous ‘World Cup of Poker’ Tournament

Hosting a poker tournament online is easy. You just type in the prize money, the rake (the amount you want to collect from each winning pot) and the minimum number of players and hit enter. Hosting a live poker tournament is hard bloody work and should only be attempted by an industrious team supported by a decent pot of money. We had the first part in hand, but we had little certainty of the latter, which was problematic when the CEO told us he wanted to host ‘The World Cup of Poker’, a tournament and party designed to put Goalpoker on the radar of players across the UK.

The best thing that can be said about the CEO’s strategic vision and work ethic was that he was never predictable. He’d already had a trophy custom made with a dog called Pickles sat atop of our ball logo, which in turn was mounted on an Astroturfed wooden plinth. ‘Pickles’ was the famous Collie dog who’d found the stolen Jules Rimet Trophy in March 1966, four months before England won the World Cup.

So far, so normal.

While he obsessed over the trophy (that was his only contribution) it was left to the rest of us to find a venue, get a license, source some pro players, transport the branded poker table from our meeting room in Redhill and pull together a media friendly party.?

Being 2006, and being the bonkers patriarchy that was online poker, the CEO invited literally every glamour model he could find. Some of the more famous ones (I use that term very loosely) were paid a fee. I’ve no idea how much, nor where the money came from as we still hadn’t received a penny of the actual marketing budget from the investor. Others were invited on the promise that it would ‘raise their profile’ and that there’d be loads of celebrities at the party – brazen lies on both counts.

I ended up collecting the poker table myself with two of the team and driving a transit van from Surrey to the Embassy Club, a sleazy Mayfair haunt of some renown amongst lower division football players and thirsty gold diggers. In that respect, it was perfect for our low rent, high ambition operation.

The night was exactly as turgid as it sounds. D-list UK poker pros, our resident poker professional (a builder from Croydon who’d won a Million Dollar tournament the year before and who displayed literally every negative human trait it’s possible to exhibit whilst still breathing) and numerous girls wearing as little as is possible without going hyperthermic in a British winter. I think a couple of footballers turned up later on, but nobody of any note – think Accrington Stanley rather than Chelsea.

It's hard to describe exactly how disappointed the glamour models must have been to see A/ no millionaire footballers to ensnare and instead B/ a bunch of sweaty, overweight poker players drinking the free Prosecco like it was last orders on the Titanic and swaggering about like they were Leo DiCaprio's handsome older brother. ?

You see, this is the thing about poker – it’s a confidence game. Outsiders assume it’s all about bluffing, whereas its actually about maximising gains from strong hands and minimising losses from weak ones. Even the lowliest players like me can beat the best in the world if the cards go their way, meaning even the part time poker players at our party shared one irrefutable trait – unattributed bravado.

And when you add one measure of confidence and two measures of alcohol to a group of portly white men in a room full of attractive young women well – you can imagine how well that went…

I’d invited some close friends – in part as a jolly so they could enjoy the open bar but also, if I’m honest, to scratch my own ego, as I was still clinging onto the pretence that what I was involved with was pretty cool. The fact that they all left early suggests I was paddling in a sinking canoe.

The night descended, as all our parties did, into a fairly debauched mess, with gate crashers, hangers on and a few hammered journalists ensuring the investor’s credit card was royally exploited behind the bar.

The hugely expensive (and incredibly odd) trophy went to our in-house pro and at least one pair of glamour girl breasts were on display by the time I made my excuses. The sad thing was, I don’t think the event delivered a single new player to the site, and as I passed the intoxicated CEO draped over an inappropriately young model on the way out, I realised that this whole charade was for the benefit of his ego only, and as such was now, irrefutably, a joke to be ridiculed by everyone except him.

I think we managed to get the poker table back to Redhill but in all honestly, we may have left it there. Like most things at Goalpoker, there was very little that wasn’t deemed disposable, including poker tables and people. Nobody was too worried about it, since we were constantly reassured that “the money’s in the post”.

Anyway, there was no time to dwell, as within days we were escaping the chills of November and heading off to Dubai, where we had apparently sponsored an international football conference called Soccerex.

It’s not often you get to meet a Billionaire entrepreneur and a former leader of the free world over dinner, but by now I was getting accustomed to Goalpoker putting me in unusual - and often uncomfortable - situations.?