/ Editor / 05 October 2007 /

Poker is for champs, not just chumps.

The well-worn saying goes: If you look around the table and you can't see the mug, the mug is you.

This is true only to a point. Not every table has a mug seated at it, just as not every table has only one mug player. But you get the point: it's hard to generalise about who plays poker.

Unless you are a non-player, in which case it is OK to form a table from the usual suspects: priapic teenager, feckless father, waiter of unspecific European origins holding a tips' jar; a cocksure pro; a fantasist and the idiot savant dressed in man-made fibres.

I was minded of this when I went to the theatre to see Patrick Marber's Dealer's Choice, a play set around a poker game in a restaurant.

You know what happens. Poker is just the stage, the back story against which the tale of male angst is projected. Annette_15 might be WSOPE champion, but in fiction only men play the game.

Notes the Guardian's theatre critic: "I am less sure whether Marber is extending his critique to any all-male gang but the play combines a quicksilver wit with an intimate understanding of the psychological flaws of even the part-time poker-addict."

Hey, no-one wants to be perfect (unless you're a dreamer, mad or Pa Larkin); even a theatre critic who spends his evenings sat in a dark theatre in the company of a pen with a light on the end and green ink spouting out the other might be less then whole.

The play, in truth, is terrific. But what is it about poker that attracts writers to see it as a game for losers and broken souls?

Answers on the form of an IOU to the usual address...

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