High rollers back at Crown Media Man Australia

High rollers back at Crown - 7th January 2003
(Credit: The Age / Fairfax)

With his rough smoker's voice, Crown Casino's resident poker expert, Keith "Bendigo" Sloan, goes around the green table and describes the nine players.

They look unremarkable, dressed in jeans, short-sleeved shirts and baseball caps; ordinary men and a single woman. The only startling thing is that most of them suck on Chupa Chups and the white sticks poke out of their mouths: the Casino banned smoking last year.

There's Tino Letich from Melbourne, "an extremely big gambler who plays this tournament for a bit of fun," says Sloan of the Australasian Poker Championship, now in its sixth year. There's Barny Boatman from London, a full-time poker player and promoter and "one of the best players in the world by far". There's Trudy Saltana, a real estate agent from Sydney, her hair up in a high ponytail, two gold bracelets on each arm.

And then there's Sherkhan Farnood, from Afghanistan of all places.

Sloan travels the world playing poker and running tournaments and he doesn't know Farnood, who won the competition on Sunday and pocketed $47,000. He's a money changer by profession and he peeks at his cards, then looks into the distance as though what's happening on the next table is more interesting. Poker is, after all, a game of bluff.

The 10-day championship finishes this weekend, with the "main event" costing competitors $10,000 to enter. The 10 finalists will play for $1 million, which makes the competition significant by world standards. "They all want to win it, not so much for the money, but for the trophy and the bragging rights," says Sloan. "They've all got egos as big as Mount Everest."

Poker is as ritualistic as any sport, its personalities as idiosyncratic, its tactics as intense. These ordinary looking men (there are few women) have nicknames as though they were wrestlers - Peter "the Poet" Costa, "Mad" Marty Wilson, Billy "the Crock" Argyros.

Argyros has a plastic crocodile in front of him, for good luck. Trudy Saltana has a small elephant figurine. She says poker is a macho world, and she tells the men on either side of her to stop talking about sport. They shut up for a few minutes, then resume. For Saltana, playing poker is relaxation after a hard year in business. She brought $50,000 to Melbourne, doesn't expect to win, but hopes to go home with $20,000.

It's a relaxed atmosphere in the early rounds. The players sip coffee, talk about the cricket, and say "well done" when a player wins a hand. They play with their chips, chink chink chink, putting them into little piles of $25 and $100.

Yesterday, Farnood was the first to fold, and Constantine Harach, owner of a hairdressing salon in New Zealand and the winner of Saturday's game, says "bad luck" as though he means it. At the bar, Farnood orders a black coffee and says he started reading books about poker after losing in Las Vegas two years ago. For him, poker is exciting, a chance to test himself against his opponents.

"I worry about losing the money," he says. "Otherwise playing is not interesting."

By mid-afternoon, Harach, with bleach-blond hair and wearing a holiday-style blue shirt, is on his feet, a big cigar in his mouth - "If I can't smoke it, I'll suck it." He's down to his last chips. He thinks he has the hand won with a pair of nines but he's beaten by a flush. He bangs his hand on the table.

Harach says he's disappointed, but that this was the toughest table in the room. Besides, he loves playing poker, he's good at it, and tournaments allow him to see the world. He reckons he has a reasonable chance to win the $1 million.

"I've got amazing stamina," he says. "You have to have the patience and stamina to sustain waiting for cards. You get rag, after rag, after rag, so without stamina and patience, you can't win a tournament."

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