Grumpy punters and dodgy dealers – the legendary Barry’s had it all. Dave Colclough recalls more memories from the famous ‘private members’ club
In late November, the Dusk Till Dawn poker club will open its card barn doors for business in Nottingham. The venue will offer poker exclusively – on a scale not seen in the UK before – and will be run by poker players, for poker players. Hopefully, it will signify the start of a new era for the game in this country.
I for one am looking forward to playing in a player-friendly environment. Dusk Till Dawn’s state-of-the-art poker room, complete with 45 tables and fully trained dealers, will no doubt offer a slightly different feel to some of the back street joints I have found myself in over the last 20 years.
A couple of months ago I recalled some memories from one such ‘private members’ poker club at the legendary Barry’s in Birmingham – owned by Barry Hawkins. A far cry from what will be on offer in Nottingham, Barry’s had a poker room that measured about ten metres by five, and the dealers only worked for tips; they didn’t have the luxury of an hourly wage.
Because of this, there was no answering back. They would just sit there and take any abuse that was thrown at them – just so long as the punter threw them a £1 tip the next time a pot was shoved in the right direction.
Some players could be really tough. I remember one guy who would just sit there giving the dealer the iciest of stares when he lost a pot he deemed to be unlucky. He would refuse to release his cards. It was as if he was trying to turn the dealers to stone with his piercing look. You could cut the atmosphere with a knife and nobody dared say a word. It’s quite amusing to look back on now, but at the time, it was incredibly intimidating.
BOILING POINT…
Dealing at Barry’s was indeed a very high-pressured job. Dealing at the World Series can be tough, but try dealing at Barry’s and being surrounded by many angry and abusive punters while having to show perfect dexterity with your hands and great mathematical agility with your brains. The dealers were often expected to do this for 24 hours straight, without any real sleep.
I hear you ask why the dealers weren’t just changed after eight hours in the same way as you would in any normal situation. Well, this goes back to the fact that they were working for tips. As the action got deeper, the pots got bigger – and so did the tips.
I remember once seeing Mickey Wernick throw over a single £100 chip when he scooped a pot in the region of £5,000. Mickey was typical of what I am talking about. He would often blame the dealers. I remember him asking one girl, Bonnie, if she ‘was sleeping with me’, after I beat him in a pot for the umpteenth time. However, when he was winning, Mickey would stop referring to Bonnie as ‘a witch’ and was undoubtedly the most generous of tippers.
TAKEN FOR A RIDE…
Not to say all the dealers were saints, however. Years before the action got going at Barry’s, there was a story doing the rounds that a dealer was at the centre of a cheat storm in a private cash game, where high-flying ‘Jack the lad’ Chris Randall was the target of the table.
Alcohol had been supplied to loosen Chris up, and a couple of attractive girls helped to distract him. Unfortunately for Chris, he had a habit of putting as much money on the table as possible. He wanted to have every opponent covered so that if a large pot developed, he would win the absolute maximum possible.
The story goes that the dealer set the deck when Chris made a trip to the toilet. Chris was then dealt the obvious great hand and the table ‘fish’ the hand that needed to get exceptionally lucky to win.
Needless to say, the unexpected card miraculously arrived and Chris lost everything in front of him. Bemused at how unfortunate he was, he asked for credit, only for a similar occurrence to repeat itself in another huge pot.
Thank god these shady days are a thing of the past!
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