We spoke to UK poker legend Victoria Coren and she told us “What I’ve Learned From Poker”
Author, TV presenter and EPT winner Vicky Coren tells us what poetry, Jesse May and her brother have taught her about poker, and why she hid her EPT fortune under the mattress…
…Playing poker has, as the kids say, ‘polarised my range’ when it comes to the value of money.
I’ll shrug off a £2,000 loss in a cash game, but then I’ll carefully run the knife round the edge of a tub of butter to eke out those last fragments of Lurpak. I’ve never been a hoarder or a spendthrift, but I’m capable of rattling between extremes.
I’m hoping at some point in the future to know how to win a WCOOP or SCOOP outright.
I’m always bloody min-cashing.
All poker players should read Rudyard Kipling’s If. Especially the second and third verses.
Everyone’s soul is exposed by how they cope with winning and losing. I hope that my table personality would reveal that I can do both calmly and without a fuss. But it would also reveal that I eat too many snacks.
I don’t find playing poker stressful at all. And tilt, fortunately, is not something I suffer from.
If I get horribly unlucky, I just try to remember the times I’ve got lucky.
I stuffed the money I won from the EPT London under the mattress and carried on playing the £2/£5 game.
The Vic regs were furious. On the plus side, my mattress is now much higher and I have a better view of the garden.
The best piece of poker advice I have ever been given is ‘don’t sneeze when you’re hiding’.
That’s what Adam Heller said when I asked him for a tip.
The biggest lie in poker is that the game is all about bluffing.
I’ve never tried it myself.
The single biggest influence on my poker career was my brother.
If he hadn’t got into it as a teenager, I’d probably never have played in the first place. The second biggest influence was Al Alvarez, who showed me that poker is one of life’s great adventures, to be embraced alongside travelling, reading, exploring and taking many other gambles. It isn’t an alternative. The third was Joe Beevers, who told me what a ‘professional poker player’ was, and how to be one.
If someone thinks poker is boring I won’t try to win them over.
If they think it’s boring, they shouldn’t play. I think Star Wars is boring. That doesn’t mean it can’t be enjoyed by millions of people all over the world. If, however, someone doesn’t think it’s boring but they think it’s ‘a gambling game’, I would encourage them to come to my house on a Tuesday night and bring as much money as they can get their hands on.
My biggest high in poker was writing For Richer, for Poorer: A Love Affair with Poker.
Obviously I’m supposed to say ‘winning the London EPT’, and of course that was amazing, but the writer in me says that the best thing about it was providing a good climactic chapter in my book! I was a voracious reader of Al Alvarez, Anthony Holden and Jesse May, and I always dreamed of writing my own poker book. A proper, true, gritty, funny, honest account, not some sappy PR version or dull strategy guide. I’m really proud of that book. As for the lows, they are spelled out on those pages in detail, don’t worry about that…
We love interviewing great players like Victoria in PokerPlayer magazine every month HERE
