When the chips are down

Of course, we should never have let 'The Elegance' come to our game in the first place. There aren't many house rules: table stakes; no professionals; and Jimmy's dog can't come in. My cat's disapproving enough about the poker game as it is (all that smoke, plus his puritanical dislike of gambling), so even Jimmy's dog, a lovely labrador, is banned. I say labrador: it might be an Afghan hound. Or a toy poodle. I don't know much about dogs.

But 'The Elegance' is not Jimmy's dog, he's a professional. A pro is someone whose primary income is from gambling. This is a fine line because I couldn't swear that any of us really has a proper job and we've certainly all had weeks when we made more money from poker than anything else.

We relaxed the no-pros rule because we get short of players in the festive season. Regulars have to do irregular things, like go to parties or see their families, so the net must be cast wider. On one occasion in December, we even let another girl play. And, on this fateful night, 'The Elegance'.

Strictly speaking, he is not 'The Elegance' when travelling alone. He is part of 'The Hendon Mob' of British poker pros, and his three counterparts go by the slightly ironic handles of 'The Looks', 'The Humour' and 'The Glamour'. These are obviously light-hearted nicknames when the four play in tandem, but the joke doesn't work on an individual basis. So, for the purposes of our Tuesday game, 'The Elegance' was just Joe.

I didn't think it would really be a problem. Amateurs we might be, but very experienced amateurs. We've all been playing for years, we've competed with these people in casino tournaments, and in fact Joe was recently knocked out early from a HoldEm tournament which our Harvey went on to win. So we're not idiots. But to my surprise it soon turned out that we are, in fact, idiots.

It's a dealer's choice game. This means that whoever's dealing may choose any game they like. Except, you know, Monopoly. Mostly we play straightforward HoldEm and Omaha, with the occasional hi-lo variation (splitting the pot between the highest and lowest hands). So when Joe snapped the deck together and said 'Right, we'll play six-card draw, hi-lo split with no qualifier and a 6-4 low, two changes, pairs wild for the low and leaners for the high', I raised an eyebrow. I'm aware of these poker concepts; I know what they are; I just don't play them.

So what do you not do, when a professional poker player introduces you to a new game that you've never played before? I'll tell you what you don't do. You don't call every bet, get involved for several hundred quid, turn over a straight flush, get beaten by five aces, and say 'That was fun, I think we'll play it again.'

It would seem to me obvious that you don't eagerly embrace this dark stranger's new game and play it right back at him. Particularly when you've beaten him at HoldEm. But suddenly my Tuesday game seemed to have become a 'six-card-draw hi-lo leaners and pairs' school.

It is a poker cliché that mugs love a game where everything seems possible. The more cards you're dealt, the easier it is to throw money after a dream. If you pick up 7-2 offsuit in HoldEm, you just put it back down again. But pick up 2-4-7-9-9-J in this new game (an equally terrible hand) and your brain says 'I might change them for better ones! I might hit some wild cards!' So it's hello cards and goodbye money. I thought we weren't mugs. But I was wrong.

'The thing is', Harvey told me later, 'we're getting bored of normal poker. It was time to try a new variant.' Like a bride jilted at the altar, I thought 'Is this not something you could have mentioned last week?' But oh no, we had to try a new variant with a professional in the house. As Joe folded all our money into his pocket and the broke players shuffled off into the cold dawn of Wednesday, I looked at my cat and said: 'You know, you're right about this gambling.'