'It aint over until you've copulated with the camel....'

You can call me Al

To see Al Alvarez, who, I'm ashamed to admit, I knew little about in advance of sitting 12ft away. He was a funny old stick, has lived a full life and spoke for a good 40 minutes on finding your voice as a writer, before he invited questions from the audience. It was interesting, mildly amusing, the looped mic/amp system kept breaking down. This poet-cum-poker player was very clued up, though lost his thread a bit (an addled style that added to the evening) and was a tad bashful about his own writing (yet not averse to reading a couple of his own ditties). Related to his life as a freelance ("that's when things start to get tricky") and listened in awe when he got round to talking of his friendship with Sylvia Plath (she relied on his feedback when Mr Hughes buggered off) and chuckled when he told us of his short spell as an Oxford don ("I dreamed of being an Oxford don and I was, for a year. Fucking hated it.") A healthy crowd, too, most of them looking like poets or poker players or both themselves. Indeed, I'm sure when the bulk of us buggered off the doors were locked and a high rollin' game started up.

From Dave Windass @ Killing Time

'It aint over until you've copulated with the camel....'

The turn card comes. The board doesn't look great, except for those two hearts, which might hold promise for someone with two of their own in the hole. With one more card to come, they would now have a four to one - 20% - chance of seeing another heart and completing their flush. Al Alvarez is, of course, aware of this. He knows he is ahead at the moment, but would lose to that heart, should it appear. Jim, the only other player remaining in the hand, checks. Al barely pauses. "I'm all-in," he announces, and pushes his stack of chips towards the centre of the table. Jim ponders this for some time. He has more chips that Al, so has the bet covered should he lose. Other players, devil's advocates, mischievously point this fact out to him, egging him on to call the bet. Eventually, he does. With no more bets to come, the players turn over their hole cards, the ones that only they can use. Jim has the two hearts, but no made hand, and Al, ahead with the highest pair, shakes his head. Mathematically speaking, he knows that Jim has made a mistake. In the long run, he would lose money in this situation. But one hand in poker is not the long run. The final card, the river, is turned over. A heart. Jim takes the pot - about £30. Al Alvarez fishes another £20 note out of his pocket and I count him out some more chips.

We are at a table tucked away at the back of Zest, playing no-limit Texas Hold Em poker. It seems that everyone plays poker these days, and our game attracts quite a bit of interest. But the global explosion of poker is a recent phenomenon, fuelled by the internet and multi-channel television. The main event at the annual World Series of Poker in Las Vegas (where else?) will this year attract around 10,000 players, the vast majority of whom will have won their $10,000 entry online. The winner will take home $10million. In 1981, when Al Alvarez wrote his seminal work on poker The Biggest Game In Town, 75 players competed for a first prize of $375,000. These were the very best poker players in the world, and Al Alvarez was there writing about them and, worryingly for the five of us at the table with him tonight, playing with them and learning from them. In 1994 he played in the $10,000 event himself. In fact, had he finished just two places higher in a tournament game in East London last week, he would have been £35,000 better off and instead of being in Hull tonight would have been playing a tournament with a £1million prize fund, so £20 was not too much to worry about, surely? And yet for the serious player, every game is important, whatever the stakes. Al Alvarez is a serious player (the cover of his autobiography, Where Did It All Go Right?, shows him at the poker table), and to be outdrawn is annoying, but as well as being a serious player, he is a seriously friendly guy, happy to sign books, tell his poker stories and even take bad beats.

Earlier in the evening, he regaled a somewhat larger audience (certainly larger than the "six men and a dog" he had told me he expected) with literary anecdotes and musings as he discussed his new book The Writer's Voice. For someone who describes The Biggest Game In Town as "the only book I have ever enjoyed writing" he is remarkably prolific. Three novels, eleven books of non-fiction (on just about everything, it seems; he has written about suicide, divorce, mountaineering, poker, sleep, and the art of writing, amongst other subjects) and four books of criticism have come from his pen or keyboard. There have also been four collections of his own poetry (some of which he reads for us tonight) and he has edited two other poetry anthologies. He credits his absolute disbelief in an afterlife with inspiring him to live a life so full of activity. After speaking about his work and life for a pleasantly rambling forty-five minutes or so, he answers some questions from the audience, revealing amongst other things a desire to have written a book about space, but of course he would have had to go there and no publisher seemed willing to pay for that. I buy his autobiography, a genre I despair of and usually avoid. Of course, he is happy to sign it for me.

Later, at the poker table, Al posts the small blind and I post the big blind. Everyone else folds back round to Al, who calls, and I check. There is 40p in the pot, 30p of which is in blind bets that have to be made before the cards are dealt, and only Al and I are still in the game. None of the five communal cards help either of us sufficiently for us to risk further bets, and we turn our cards over. My pathetic Jack high beats his even worse Nine, and I have won a pot from the great Al Alvarez. In fact, at the end of the game, four of us have made a profit, while Al has fewer chips in front of him than he started with. It's something for us to tell the grandchildren; the night we beat Al Alvarez at the poker table. Yet Al knows, as well as I do, that one night of poker is not the long run.

From James Russell