Maybe I Belong On Stage - Part I

So I’m quite a sensitive guy. I don’t mean in the sense of wanting to set up animal shelters, or wanting to take a girl clothes-shopping on a first date; I mean that stuff affects my mood a lot. I’ll go from normal to massively excited by life to fairly depressed very easily.

On Friday last week, I was mildly happy. I’d worked up a 115k stack in one of the bigger tournaments in London, the GUKPT Grand Final, with the average around 45k, and blinds of 500-1k. Several hours into day 2, however, I was busto, despite having played quite well.

I’d told a girl I’ve been seeing that I might be free, but that I couldn’t promise to be. As soon as I bust, I called her, but she’d already made plans. I was, however, with my housemate, and we could always find stuff to do!

Unfortunately, we dithered, changed plans a little too often, and couldn’t be bothered to go to the other side of London from our place. The result? Out of the top three options for a Saturday night – get huge stack in big tournament; go out with girl; get drunk and go to a club – I went for the less attractive fourth option – get drunk and browse the internet.

As is entirely expected for me, I woke up on the Sunday a little – well – unhappy. Tournaments in general weren’t going my way, so I decided to take a break from the likely despair that always rolls around at about 3 a.m. on the monday morning. Gavin, my housemate, had tickets to see Jimmy Carr, a well-known English comedian.

Around an hour before he was due to leave, he was told that one of his friends had dropped out, and ‘would you like to come with?’ ‘Yes. Yes I would, that should cheer me up!’

On the way, I mentioned that comics seemed to have trouble with poker players as a profession. You know, when the local comedians ask members of the audience what they do, and they rip them a new arsehole. Two local comedians had asked me before, and instead of making me look like a complete prick, a laughing stock, as you’d expect them at least to try to do, they ended up having almost a conversation with me in front of the audience – ‘oh, that sounds really cool. So do you play at home? Nice!’ and then afterwards they come up to me and ask me more questions!

We combined that subject with the recognition of my tendency to desire attention in all forms. We specifically wondered ‘will Jimmy Carr get me on stage and ask me questions about poker?’

About an hour into the gig, he asked if anyone had an interesting job. Being right at the back, on the top level, I knew there wasn’t much chance of getting picked, but Gavin nudged me anyway, as if to say ‘this is what we talked about! You know you want to get up on stage’ I let other people have their chance, but no-one appeared to have an interesting job – someone even mentioned ‘stationary salesman!’ After a couple of minutes and eight or nine rejections, I got very, very nervous. I knew I was going to end up on stage. The crowd seemed scared or boring, and I was the only one out of 2.5k people with both an interesting job and the balls to get up on stage.

‘POOOOOKER PLAAAAAYER!’ that ought to be loud enough from the very back. ‘Poker player? OK, that sounds interesting enough. Come on down!’

To be continued…