“CALLING” JAMES BOND Those of you who are regular online players can now look forward to shoals of wanna-be poker fish putting bow ties on their pyjama shirts and sitting down at the PC with a Martini (Aussie Lager more like?) for their first ever game of Texas Hold’em. Why? Because the latest James Bond flick, Casino Royale, manages to convey all that is glamorous and exciting about our favourite game and is bound to light a gaming fuse under thousands of young bloods stirred by the image of becoming overnight poker heroes. Daniel Craig himself is already a good poker player but the supporting actors all had to play Texas Hold’em solidly for weeks before a single camera rolled for the crucial card scene. All of us involved in the poker explosion can take credit for the fact that the film’s producer, Michael Wilson, chose to replace Ian Fleming’s original choice of Chemin de fer with the more up to date Texas Hold’em. The reason is simple. Fleming wrote the novel when Chemin de fer was the highest stakes game played on the Riviera at the time. These days it’s not that unheard of for an elite game of Texas Hold’em to involve a pot of fifteen or twenty million dollars. Just the kind of amount to suit a Bond plot. In tomorrow’s column I’ll be outlining some of the behind-the-scenes planning that went into the compelling Casino Royale poker scene.
007 STYLE “KILL POTS” Q: What is a “kill pot”? A: Some casinos offer this interesting concept to help losers get revenge on a constant winner. The normal scenario would be a player who wins two hands in a row gets the “kill button” and is required to post a bet (usually twice the size of the blind) on the next hand. The idea is to give opponents the chance of winning some of their previously lost money back in a raised pot. Opposing players will often try to take advantage of the situation by raising and attempting to get three bets into the pot against the player with the “kill button”, who has been forced to pay double for whatever random two cards fate has dealt him. Oddly enough I’ve seen plenty of these backfire as the guy with the kill button regularly finds himself with reasonable pot odds to call the raises, often leading to him landing an even bigger win than usual. Salt in the wounds indeed but the concept of giving opponents a chance to win their losses back is a time honoured poker tradition which losers should avoid accepting at all costs.
