The Staffroom
Neil “Badbeat” Channing
I first met The Coach when I was eleven. Up until then I'd done very little gambling, but that doesn't mean he deserves all the blame for starting me off.
I was thirteen when I started playing Hold’em - I'd worked out the rules from reading Al Alvarez's excellent "The Biggest Game in Town". I introduced it to the home game that my sister's boyfriend held. The other guys were two years older than me but I always won by focusing on the game rather than illicit drinking and smoking.
Wednesday, 24 February 2010
When we reached legal age, The Coach and I started playing in casinos and I remember clearly our first visit to the Vic. It was a £10 rebuy tournament on a Sunday afternoon and despite the lessons we were getting in the tough Reading school, it was an expensive step up in class!
Poker at the time was just one of many gambling pursuits which between them filled almost every waking moment for the first five years after I left college in order to avoid having to get a real job. Dogs, golf, casino games, lots of snooker tournaments and endless days at the races came to a grinding halt when I first went broke at the age of twenty-seven.
I took my hard earned gambling skills to the employment market and started my new career as an odds compiler in the spread betting industry. Before I knew it, I'd built up my "tank" from a few grand to nearly a million. I then figured I knew it all and decided to fly solo. For a while I was a racecourse bookmaker, a horse punter, a blackjack player, a poker player, a stock market speculator, an employer and an employee. I learned it's hard to do everything and it can be better to specialise. It cost me more than a million to learn that lesson.
I therefore focused on sports betting. A friend lent me £20,000 and within a couple of years I'd turned it into £280,000. I paid back most my debts just in time to get seriously ill and have an enforced break from gambling.
Although I'd won a lot, it had all gone to my creditors. I came out of hospital, feeling frail and totally broke. I needed something to occupy the rest of my life and it had to be something you could do with £2,800! That something was poker and now I'm stuck with it as I've made myself completely unemployable in the real World.
I'm hoping some of the luck I've had in the game can go the way of the Withnail's Poker School in the Uruguay leg of the Latin American Poker Tour. I chose this leg partly because I've never been to Uruguay and partly because, with most of the glamour legs taken by the other guests, I feared I might end up in Luton.
Neil "Badbeat" Channing
