About a week ago a colleague of mine invited me to a poker evening at his house. "Shall I bring my chip set?" I asked him. "No" he replied, adding "I've got a guy coming to deal and he's bringing chips, a table and tournament software with him."
My colleague had been browsing on thehendonmob.com, the website owned by four very well known UK players - Ram Vaswani, Joe Beevers, Ross and Barny Boatman and had come across an offer from a London based company called dialadealer.com. They were offering a promotion, exclusively for users of the hendonmob's website. The service, usually offered for £130 ($210) an evening, was to be ours completely free.
At about 8pm a white van pulled up outside my colleague's house, unloaded a state of the art poker table and a chip set, carried it through the front door and turned the living room into a temporary poker den. Although three of our colleagues failed to show up, the five of us who did make it played a series of short no limit hold'em sit n go tournaments, for small stakes. The company, dialadealer.com, is owned by The Poker Events Company, which was set up a couple of years ago by stockbroker Michael Needham and IT specialist Matt Alford. However, it is now managed by Mark Briggs, the dealer who turned up to run our game.
Mark had been a croupier for over ten years, working first in casinos in the UK and then on cruise ships. Once the novelty of working on the high seas had worn off, Mark returned to the UK and chanced upon an advertisement for dialadealer.com. Having had a similar idea himself, but recognizing that the market place was not big enough for two competing companies, he went to work for them and a year later he is now fully responsible for the running of the company.
Dialadealer.com runs corporate poker events for larger groups in addition to the home game service and has over 20 freelance dealers on their books. They offer a national service throughout the UK; however the majority of their bookings come from within the London area. "Business has really picked up in the last three months" says Mark. "Until then we had maybe 2-3 bookings a week, but we are now busy six days a week."
"It's mostly city workers - stockbrokers, accountants and lawyers who hire our services, but as the popularity of poker spreads in the UK, our range of customers is becoming more diversified."
It was a most enjoyable evening and made a change from our usual home games. For once we could concentrate on enjoying the game and the good natured banter that goes with it, without worrying about who was dealing, when the blinds were going up and how to split the side pots when three of us were all-in. I ended up winning one of the four games we played and broke even. The only thing we had to worry about ourselves was whether there was enough beer to last the evening and who would answer the door when the pizzas arrived.
