GET PRACTISING YOUR POKER FACE: A NEW CLUB IS COMING TO TOWN
WOULD you believe it, but I hear London’s very first official poker club is only just preparing to open its doors to the public.
The venture is the brainchild of Chris North, a former captain of the Harlequins under-21 rugby team before he joined the world of online gaming 12 years ago. It was while working next to private members’ club The Fox Club in Mayfair that North gleaned the idea for the Fox Poker Club. He then applied for a casino licence, secured a partnership with gaming site PKR.com and roped in a couple of gaming veterans – former Rank Group finance director Brian Mattingley and Ian Hogg, the ex-chief executive of the At The Races channel – to get the venture going.
A couple of hiccups on the location front later, and they’re now happily ensconced on Shaftesbury Avenue, on the site of the former Teatro members’ club, all ready for the launch on 7 August.
Seating for 200 players, a memorabilia “Hall of Fame” and a restaurant are all available to poker enthusiasts, who can choose to go for either free membership or a choice of two souped-up membership packages, the “Full House” for £250 a year and the “Royal Flush” for £750 a year.
By City standards, that’s a dirt cheap option for schmoozing clients in style – no wonder the capital’s various dens of iniquity will be getting their knickers in a twist.
STROKE OF LUCK
To Stoke Park Golf Club in Buckinghamshire on Tuesday for a charity golfing day hosted by professional Justin Rose and sponsored by inter-dealer broker Tradition, which raised over £176,900 in aid of Cancer Research.
Brokers are pretty competitive lot, as we all know, so it must have been hard for Tradition’s five golfing teams to accept that not one of them ended up being placed – not even deputy chairman Bruce Collins’ squad, led by celebrity tennis star Tim Henman.
Still, client relationship manager Mickey White managed to salvage some respect in the individual stakes when he won a competition to get nearest to the pin in two shots, beating even Rose to the honour. Now there’s a claim to fame if ever The Capitalist heard one.
SITTING TARGET
Oh, how the analysts basked yesterday in the glory of having been right all along about the over-inflated price of grocer Ocado’s flotation. Shore Capital’s Clive Black, one of the most outspoken critics of the original 200-275p target price range, was one of the first to gleefully rub Ocado management’s noses in it when the price was chopped to 180p and subsequently sank to as low as 155p in conditional trading.
“Ocado’s rhetoric through this flotation process has been that analysts sceptical as to the
business’ true value, such as us, were somehow missing something, seemingly not fully
understanding the full story,” wrote Black in a mischievous note. “Quite what it was that we did not ‘get’ is still a mystery to us; we take some comfort that the market holds a similar view…”
This was from the man who previously dreamt up a number of corking acronyms for the firm: Over-Costed Average Daily Orders; Oligopolistic Competition And Dangerous Overvaluation; and Overvalued Company, A Disappointing Outcome.
BIG SPENDERS
Members’ clubs are usually rather picky about the calibre of their clientele, so it was with some amusement that The Capitalist chanced yesterday upon a list of “club commandments” drawn up for the new Searcys Club at the top of the Gherkin.
Alongside the usual tit tat about privacy and etiquette (read: ringing endorsements of afternoon tea and champagne) nestle a couple of gems. “Groucho Marx was wrong,” proclaims one, while another insists that “money might be vulgar but spending it should be fun”. Quite.
BACK HANDER
An invitation arrives to an event next week held by US billionaire Vernon Hill’s new high street bank, Metro Bank, which will be handing out water bottles, rucksack covers and reflective bracelets to hapless cyclists zooming past the Holborn branch on their way to work.
Yowzer, Metro really is taking its commitment to customer service seriously. Either that, or it’s stocked up on branded merchandise that will be worth a mint in free advertising when strapped to the backs of London’s herd of bicycle fanatics…
MAFIA BOOM
The financial crisis brought to its knees virtually every business sector over the past couple of years – almost every one, that is, apart from those outside the law. The Bank of Italy’s deputy general director tells Bloomberg that the crisis has given the Italian mafia food on which to thrive, since access to bank capital all but dried up. “Whoever holds large amounts of cash, like crime groups, can make investments that aren’t possible for others,” Anna Maria Tarantola said, adding that the central bank flagged up 15,000 suspicious deals in the first half of this year, up over 50 per cent from last year. Scary stuff.