Happy days when poker reigned supreme as the most popular Fleet Street louche pastime

WINNER: Victoria Coren Mitchell at the poker table

My old friend Jon Zackon, late of the Daily Express, the Sun and, for all I know, the Mafeking Irregulars, remains at 88 a feisty and determined fellow. He is even now plotting a return to his favourite poker table in a West End casino.

A move to a new flat in a different town, along with a certain frailty, has made it inconvenient to get there. But I sense that won’t stop him indulging his passion for the cards.

What is it that draws journalists and writers to the green baize? Why does the blood rush when they engage in the mental duel with opponents in a poker school?

Victoria Coren Mitchell, a Telegraph columnist since the age of 14 (yes, really) and the first player to win two European Poker Tour titles, once said: “I was drawn to poker for the shadiness and danger and risk, as well as the fun of the game.”

Coren Mitchell, sister of The Times restaurant critic Giles Coren, has taken more than £2 million at the tables, including a single win of £750,000. “I’ve won quite a lot of money,” she said. “And I haven’t lost quite a lot of money.”

If that last sentence seems a little odd to your ears, any player will tell you that winning, in the long run, has a lot to do with playing tight, with not losing too much when your luck’s out.

Al Alvarez, the late poet, literary critic and contributor to The New Yorker, disagreed with Coren Mitchell about the motivation of a poker player. “Serious poker is no more about gambling than rock climbing is about taking risks,” he said.

Alvarez, a Londoner who died in 2019, aged 90, was familiar with both disciplines. He climbed seriously and wrote a book on rock climbing – Feeding the Rat – which was really about the lust for adventure.

And he wrote The Biggest Game in Town after William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker, sent him to cover the 1981 World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. It ignited in him a fascination, perhaps even an obsession, for the game.

“The next best thing to playing and winning is playing and losing,” Alvarez said.

To the elite players he met, who saw fortunes come and go, money mattered not at all; they had lost all track of its worth. “Money is no longer money to the professionals; it is like a wrench to a plumber – a tool of the trade.”

Alvarez thought poker players had a lot in common with writers – that both were people who turned a baleful, merciless eye on human weakness.

Fleet Street, where every louche and risqué pastime known to man was practised to excess, was always going to be a natural fit for poker, and several newspapers had a flourishing school. Foremost among them was said to be the Mirror, where the stakes were reputedly high for a friendly game.

Editor Mike Molloy would host it in his office and if anyone got cleaned out, the “bank in the sky” – the cashiers’ office where expenses and casuals’ pay were doled out – was conveniently close.

I was never invited to take part but it didn’t matter as the Express school was flourishing too. It consisted of a hard core of regulars, of whom I was one, and guest punters, whose identities depended on the shift pattern, the rota and who had been naughty enough to get the dogwatch.

One thing that poker unnervingly does is to subject a man’s character to pitiless examination. Like whisky, it exaggerates flaws; like praise, it disarms the defences. If you were playing five-card draw, holding a pair of sixes and contemplating whether to bet, you were about to find out who you really were.

Naturally, the game did not usually get going until the third edition had gone. Art desk stragglers might wander over and take a seat. Only the pubs that were entered with the discreet tap of a 50p coin on the window still had customers inside.

Everyone who found their way back to the office was tired or drunk or both. None of these states is conducive to good poker playing.

However, the reckless urge to gamble brought on by booze and fatigue was something for experienced players to be wary of. Wild cards such as Geoff Compton would bet with abandon, sometimes without looking at the hand they were dealt. The odds said he should lose and Steady Eddie across the table should win; but it was surprising how often Compton would rake in the big pots.

Another in the same mould, but without the same luck, was Colin Bell, often the late reporter, a rambunctious Scot with boyish good looks and a formidable thirst. I don’t know how much Colin earned but he didn’t hang on to much of it on poker nights. For the rest of us, if he was at the table it was like working two jobs.

One memorable night, I drew the best possible poker hand, a royal flush, and placed moderate bets so as not to frighten off potential investors. A sub called Paul McElroy, who went on to edit one of Conrad Black’s papers in Canada, called each time.

One by one, the others dropped out and then the real betting began. Remember, I could not lose, unless… well, unless some obscure convention were to be applied. For instance, if you both had the same hand and someone called, did he lose? Did a royal flush in spades outrank one in clubs?

We both carried on chucking folding money into the pot and it was clear that if we continued, I would go home with the deeds to his house, or at least an IOU in lieu.

I could not bring myself to do that, which might explain why I remain, if not poor, then far from wealthy. It took a long time to convince him to step back, with his hand of four of a kind, but eventually we agreed to split the pot.

I don’t recall Jon Zackon joining in the fun very often but he probably had bigger fish to fry in the West End. Now a published author, Zack would have made a good chronicler of the Fleet Street poker scene.

So would another old friend and colleague, Simon Young, former assistant editor (news) of the Sunday Express. He put his journalistic skills to work for the online gambling site PokerStars, played on the European Poker Tour and wrote How to Play Poker, published by the Sun, where he was deputy news editor.

He called it “the world’s coolest game”.

I’ll raise that. It’s an addiction waiting to consume you.

*****

The way children were abandoned to their fate at the hands of sexual predators in grooming gangs is a stain on our national conscience.

These vultures, many of whom we now know were Asian, were left alone to prey on troubled girls because authorities feared being branded racist if they intervened.

The girls were used as sex slaves and passed around to be raped and abused. Finally, Baroness Casey of Blackstock has exposed the extent of the scandal – first revealed by Andrew Norfolk of The Times – and forced Keir Starmer to promise a full statutory inquiry into grooming gangs.

Could it be that Starmer resisted such a move for so long because he is to blame? Right-thinking liberals such as him were responsible for the mindset that made it possible for the gangs to get away with it.

It became unmentionable that the gangs were mostly Asians. It was deemed unacceptable to collect crime statistics based on ethnic background that would have exposed the raw, unpalatable truth. The culture of cover-up was more Soviet Russia than Western democracy.

There is nothing wrong in a free society with telling the whole truth. Indeed, transparency is an essential element of a democratic society. It may be hard to swallow but it needs saying.

Thank God The Times is still a proper newspaper. And the late Andrew Norfolk was such a fine reporter.

RICHARD DISMORE

19 June 2025