Was that after youd started going to casinos to play Seven Card Stud?
Oh yeah. When I first went, I was a bit nervous of the Vic. I would go in and see this card room full of men, and they were all smoking and swearing and I was a bit scared of it. In fact, I developed quite a roulette problem for a while – I’d go into the casino and be too nervous to play poker, so I’d play roulette. In those days, because the American influence hadn’t really happened yet, it was etiquette not to talk too much about things away from the table. You wouldn’t have had conversations back then about “What do you do for a living? How do you make your money? Are you married?” You just didn’t talk about that kind of thing. You would sit and chat with the people and get to know them in the sense of laughing about things, talking to them about poker, talking to them about travelling to play, but you wouldn’t get their full personal CV. That’s something that only happens now because everything has been quite Americanised and personalised and a lot of the stigma has gone away. [*]W
