The Committee: How to Start a Poker Underground

Lahore, Pakistan, 2004. Gambling is illegal, poker virtually unknown. There’s a societal and monetary divide between those with disposable cash and high-speed Internet, and those without, and the culture of betting shops and casinos which UK players grew up in is nonexistent. But games have a strange way of spreading, Texas hold’em being the most virulent example since backgammon, and it only takes one person with a deck of cards and a pile of similar small-sized objects to introduce the virus. That person was journalist Jude Heaton, London-born and Lahore-based, and the group which started on a road trip with a few friends and ended up being spoken about in hushed tones in the city’s high society is The Committee.

The fundamental aspect of poker which has made it boom this decade is its apparent simplicity, with challenging minutiae waiting just under the surface to keep new players coming back and improving. The rules can be explained in a matter of minutes, betting can be done with or without money, and in countries which permit it, Internet gaming can quickly cement the new player’s knowledge and turn it into either a regular pastime or a couch-based method of self-employment. The carrot on the end of the stick for new players is twofold: the sheer joy of beating people at a competitive game, and the phenomenal amounts of prize money floating around at the top end of the game most of them will never reach. It’s the former which hooked the first of Lahore’s new converts, who placed their first bets on a trip to the aptly-named Home of Relaxation, in the mountains overlooking beautiful Kashmir.

This first game, as you might expect, was chaotic. As Heaton says, “It was a clumsy kind of a game, people raising out of position like it was an auction and calls so loose a telephone sex line would blush.” But the seeds had been sown, and upon return from the retreat, a home game blossomed in the house of one of the founding Committee members — one Hollywood Beej. He procured the first proper chips, had a custom table built, complete with green baize top, and turned a section of his house into their regular venue. What was to become the Lahore equivalent of the Hendon Mob joining Hollywood Beej and Heaton under some truly imaginative monikers were: The Great Kaul, Sam Goblin, The Pink Flamingo, UJ, Al Sheikh, and The Artist Formerly Known as Fraud.

Stakes went up, action went in turn, clockwise, and the reputation of The Committee started to spread. Slowly new faces started to drift in and out of the game, known as “random freakies” by the regulars for their tendency to arrive overexcited and proceed to play as their name suggests. Splinter groups formed, and the day he realised he’d formed a new underground in a city of nearly 10 million was the day he was at a fashionable party talking to one of Pakistan’s biggest rock stars, the country’s most successful fashion designer, and the head of an ad agency, and his group came up for discussion.

Heaton remembers this moment with the fond surprise of someone who thinks they’ve offhandedly introduced a simple convenience food and found they’ve invented the sandwich, “They asked who I was playing with. I said, “The Committee.” A nervous silence ensued, and they looked at each other: “I’ve heard those guys are serious players.” “Yeah,” chimed in another, “that’s a heavy scene.” Inside I was giggling like a little schoolgirl, but I kept a stony face and nodded earnestly.”

Every country seems to have at least one game which captures the popular fancy and is seen played in living rooms, backyards, coffee shops and, in Lahore’s case, all of the above plus driveways around bonfires. Pakistan seems to be fond of Pachisi (Westernised version Parcheesi), according to Heaton, who saw many a die rolled of an evening, and although it wasn’t as ubiquitous as backgammon in Turkey or poker in North America, there seemed to have been no lack of people ready to learn new games which may or may not need to have wagers on them to remain interesting.

By the time he left, in 2007, there were several independent groups regularly playing tournament poker or cash games for ever-increasing sums. The small but affluent class of “bored rich kids” in Lahore latched onto poker as, “Something to do, a competitive game with an added way to flash money around,” as Heaton succinctly put it, and this leads me to my final point. Although Internet gambling, and, more importantly, transactions from financial institutions to online gaming sites, might be banned in Pakistan, there seems to be exactly the right conditions in large urban areas to create a new force in poker. A computer literate society, with a small percentage of wealthy individuals with gamers’ love for winning money off each other, could probably create a boom in poker rivalling that in the UK.

That’s currently impossible, and because of the stigma attached to and current illegality of gambling, poker must necessarily remain underground. But remember how the game used to be viewed, within the last 20 years, in Britain — the glamour and the seedy yet attractive vision of secret back rooms filled with cigarette smoke and the clink of chips — this image is already attached to Lahore’s poker underground, under the banner of the renowned, mysterious, yet humbly begun Committee.

Jen Mason is a part of BlackBeltPoker.com. She is responsible for its live tournament coverage in the UK and abroad.