Money and I have one of those bad relationships that magazines like to tut over. As far as I’m concerned, on the rare occasions when there’s money in my hand, it’s there to be wasted as fast as possible. Safeguard it, nurture it, help it grow? Not a chance. I wouldn’t know how. Big bucks and the people who make them live in a parallel universe to the one I’m in.
My New Year resolution was to learn more about how to be a millionaire. But not quite in the sober way of serious financiers. Instead I’ve been having a little flutter on whatever stocks take my fancy, each picked for a worse and more frivolous reason than the last - a flirtation with the Chinese economy (though at least everyone’s piling into emerging markets), and a wager on the company that just appointed my ex-boyfriend to run it (he was always keen on going Dutch so it will probably be well run).
Luckily I refrained from investing in the hot, hot, hot Bulgarian property company that “will make some lucky people very rich”, according to one tipster, for just long enough for it to crash by Wednesday to half of Monday’s value (though I’m still looking out for other opportunities). Because apart from that, even though I know nothing about the stock market and am just taking the cheekiest of punts on the unknown, I’m doing brilliantly. The general buoyancy of the stock market since New Year has sent my bets shooting up by five per cent in a month or so. Watching my shares move steadily up online has displaced emailing my friends as my top daytime displacement activity. I no longer worry about money. Instead I grin madly all day long, and my inner dialogue with myself goes between two blindly self-congratulatory phrases, over and over again. “I’m a top stock picker,” I say, and, “I am a Master of the Universe.”
So naturally I was delighted when my friend Pompey (who has a shady past in the City doing something to a bond or a pension fund and might be presumed to understand money if he hadn’t packed all that in long ago to write witty verse translations of foreign plays and live in Hampstead in a delightfully precarious flat filled with assorted beautiful naked lady painters and worrying about the price of dinner - though we all still think he’s incredibly rich) also admitted this week that he was getting into internet gambling.
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“Oh me too,” I said eagerly, ready to tell my tiny triumphs. But he turned out to be doing something quite different.
“Yes, internet poker”, he said, ignoring my interruption.
“You go online and join a league of players. I’ve been doing it every day. At the top there are good people playing - Victoria Coren, Omar Sharif, the kind of players you’d like to play like - but everyone except the stars is hopeless. They don’t know what cards they’ve got or what anyone else has, but they bet recklessly anyway.
“It’s incredible how few people display the least self-preservation or even caution. So this is my strategy. I’ve been waiting till I’m as sure as I can be that I’ve got a winning hand, then betting my shirt on it. Bet to win, that’s the secret. And I haven’t walked away yet without making at least £20.”
Absurd, I thought smugly on my way home that night. How can making your money out of online poker be anything but speculative madness? Poor Pompey - his solitary writer’s existence is finally getting to him. He should stick to shares. Perhaps, I may even have thought, I should have told him so.
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So imagine my surprise when, this weekend, first the Evening Standard and then the American magazine Vanity Fair devoted page after glowing page to the wonder that is online poker playing. Glamorous. Adult. Decadent. Thrilling. And hugely profitable (even if more to investors in the game than to players). The number of people playing online poker world wide was 1.78 million in January, and is growing by 10 per cent a month. In the past two years the industry has grown 15-fold. Will this be exposed as a temporary craze, will it plateau, or will the online poker market continue to grow?
If Hollywood has anything to do with it, it’s going to grow and grow, according to Vanity Fair. The magazine piece began breathlessly: “Brad Pitt, Ben Affleck, Tobey Maguire, Leonardo DiCaprio - it seems A-list Hollywood has got the poker bug, with a slew of poker-related film and TV projects in the pipeline. Checking out the home games, big-ticket buy-ins, and high-rolling history ... ” it revealed that Brad Pitt was so competitive he wouldn’t share winnings and George Clooney is “so convinced of his own bad poker mojo that he wouldn’t even ante up, preferring instead to keep his table supplied with drinks. As the stars fall in love with the game, the films are coming fast.”
A mockumentary about poker, starring Ben Affleck and David Schwimmer at the Golden Nugget in Las Vegas starts filming in March. Movies are being sold on the back of descriptions like “City Slickers meets the World Series of Poker” and “The Colour of Money meets the World Series of Poker”. In 2005, too, top LA lawyer and entrepreneur Reagan Sylber plans to launch EdgeTV, an entire network dedicated to gaming. Tobey Maguire will be among his advisers. “It’s a game of lying and deception, and actors are usually pretty good at that,” the story said. “Spouses who were tolerant of golf are now becoming tolerant of poker.”
Hampstead playwrights too, I realised, suddenly shamed into realising that I wasn’t quite a master of the universe yet and that Pompey might just have been on to something. Newer, bigger visions of sugar plums began dancing before my eyes.
When morning comes I’m going online again. But this time it’ll be to find out how to play online poker. No time for qualms about investing in whatever it will turn out to be without really knowing what the firm does. And no time to stifle the still small voice of reason (which sounds strangely like Pompey’s voice) saying that the only reason so many people lose is because they lack elementary caution and insist on playing recklessly.
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The stock market has got stuck now the FTSE-100 has gone over 5,000. It’s stopped being so much fun. This sounds like the one big one. I’m going to put my shirt on it. As Isaac Newton said, I can calculate the movements of the heavens but not the madness of the people. And when the rest of the world is mad it’s necessary to imitate them in some manner.
Slices of London: e-mail Urban Fox here