WOMEN WHO PLAY POKER

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXX, Issue 21562, 5 August 1933, Page 3 (Supplement)

WOMEN WHO PLAY POKER

LONDON'S WEST END CRAZE LARGE SUMS CHANGING HANDS Poker is the latest craze among women at West-end card clubs in London. xliousands of pounds are changinp; hands every week. While luck and proficiency are buying a few new luxuries, poor play is making others short of money. The secretary of a Kensington bridge club told a journalist recently that since so many women had asked whether they might be allowed to play poker he had been compelled to arrange a few tables specially for the game. V N6w," he said, " even the most consistent bridge fiends will sit in a poker game for a few hands before they go home. " Poker is being played all day. In the morning and afternoon we insist on the stakes being limited to threepence. In the evenihg there is a shilling limit, but after ten at night there is no actual limit. Some tables keep to a steady half-crown limit, -but the more reckless members raise the bets by a pound a time without a quiver. After all, it is not our duty to discover who cannot afford to play for these stakes." At another club the woman secretary said that one room in the club was set apart for poker-plavers. " Many of our women players play until dawn," she said. " They have hot coffee and snacks from time to time, but the gambling fever seems to have gripped them, for they hate to leave the tables. We provide counters for play and cash them when it is all over.

" I sometimes sit in at a game when I am asked, and 1 must admit that it has more thrill than contract bridge. I am not very good at it yet, but I am trying—like all of them —to cultivate a ' poker face ' and memorise the draws before 1 bet.

One woman who comes here to play poker every evening has lost more than £3O on three occasions in the last week. But she says she expects to win it all back again. Women always believe that luck is as great a factor as skill. ' My luck is bound to change,' they say every time they get up losers from the tables. Thus we see the same faces every day—until their husbands stop them."