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Last night's £30 freeze-out at Aspers was not so much a poker game as an interpretation of Jean-Paul Satre's "No Exit," just with a poker theme. Three people; myself, Ian Dowie's ugly brother, a hairy South African woman called Tyrone and a dealer together in a room with no windows and only one door, tortured for what seemed like all eternity by our own unpleasantness.

Now I don't spend much of my time reading Existentialist plays written by French philosophers, and an Existentialist play is a contradiction in terms ain't it? Eeeek..that's now doing my wee head in thinking about that....did Satre ever wonder about that? A person is defined by his own actions, you illustrate this in a play, but in a play he's an actor. Weird no? That's easily too much thinking for a Sunday already so let's move on shall we?

Anyway, I'm telling you, as this game progressed last night I couldn't help but think if I was a really poncy writer with very little talent instead of being an awesome writer with oodles of the stuff, and if I had nothing better to do with my life, and I wanted to put on a poker adaptation of "No Exit," then this was how it should look.

There was initial politeness but that soon evaporated. Ian Dowie's ugly brother trapped me in quite embarrassing circumstances in one hand and then called me a sucker as he scooped up my chips while Tyrone the hairy woman giggled away. He seemed unsure if I had heard him so he repeated it.

I suggested to him that that wasn't necessary. He apologised, I told him he didn't need to apologise, just don't do it. He then told me to "fuck off then." I wondered for a second if he might, with his ape like arms, reach over and chin me, but I think he forgot about me. With a brain the size of a ping-pong ball I think he was struggling just to remember to breath let alone play poker and argue at the same time.

I didn't think our dealer had been in a casino before, let alone dealt a poker game, but in hindsight it's clear he was a manifestation of Satan and was doing all he could to create as much bad feeling, tension and distress as possible. No matter how many attempts were made at Tyrone the hairy woman's tournament life, he would not die. Several unsuccessful attempts were made on my own life also and Ian Dowie's uglier brother as the blinds represented a bigger and bigger proportion of our stacks, but we were kept alive by the Satanic dealer with his silly spiky hair and red face.

As the final table progressed I had assumed by this point that we were destined to become the final three players and would then spend all of eternity passing chips between ourselves while the Satanic dealer cackled wildly as all three of us slipped deeper and deeper into an infinite insanity.


As it happened though I ended up busting out in fifth, the first money place, phew! Having shared in the neuroses, unpleasant eccentricities and drunkenness of my table mates, busting out came as something of a relief. I had feared my feeling of salvation was premature and I was still entombed in my own personal hell on the way back as the A43 was closed, but eventually the lord our god in the shape of the A5 delivered me from evil. The night may have ended differently to Satre's play and he may have been a beret wearing ponce (how appropriate the French word for think is, 'ponce'), but hell is definitely other people.