10,000 Blinds and Bluffing

Inside a chi-chi Diwali gambling party

Riding the overwhelming sweetness of raat ki rani and the acrid leftover smell of burnt crackers, the air in Delhi around Diwali is laden with the scent of hard cash. In India’s capital of excess, a city already infamous for its addiction to gaudy, over-the-top displays of wealth, it’s hardly surprising that a festival synonymous with the Goddess of Moolah should be inextricably linked with more money, more ostentation, more gaudiness, more, more, more.

As the monsoons abate, moods lift and the city’s rich return from their second homes in London and New York, they are prime for a season of meat, alcohol and raucous sin. So, just before wedding season engulfs them, Dilliwalas dig into their pockets with a prayer to their respective gods of luck. Astutely choosing them for this short passage of time over the proverbial gods of love. You know the saying.

Tentwalas are hired, party décor is decided (months in advance), dance floors are booked, the best carters are lined up, and mile-long bars are stocked with the best available in the country. Enter a typical Diwali cards party, and you’d be forgiven for thinking you’ve crashed a big wedding.

In a couple of sprawling palatial city farmhouses, typified by a Punjabi baroque-meets-clinical-art-gallery-meets Victorian-colonnade look, groups of 80 to 500 people congregate to gamble their (though more likely their father’s) money—hard-earned or ill-gotten, sometimes white but mostly black.

As poker has over the past few years captured the minds and wallets of Delhiites across age groups, economic classes and co-curricular interests, groups of my friends have fallen victim to the game. Poker is now played through the year, not just November/December, and Teen Patti, though still popular with its old faithfuls, has become somewhat of a pariah among the swish set of Delhi. Like the latest Birkin handbag, poker is the social skill to have.  

Much as I have abhorred poker nights for stealing various circles of my friends, I’ve also realised that there comes a time every year, around now, when turning your nose up at card parties threatens your social life with wintry isolation. So, begrudgingly I’ve slipped on my gold stilettos, dug out my clutch and pulled on a sari appropriately au courant for a Diwali party. Not too dressy, nor too little—it’s a thin line, and I have often erred on the side of being scandalously under-dressed and under-blinged.  

Yet, amid all the glitz and glare and bling, nothing ever falls short. As I totter in, stumbling on the mandatory red carpet, the bar beckons like the friend you know you can always lean on. With a sigh of relief, I head in the direction of the only refuge of the non-card-playing, away from the grim rows of card tables stretching away into the neon haze.

At this rich business family home, in the company of my first bubbly friend of the evening, Dom (you know, last name Pérignon), I see people just beginning to get into the swing of things. About a hundred tables stretch out as far as my eye can see (and with my newly acquired status as lens wearer, that’s pretty damn far). Like a sweatshop production factory, people have, after much shuffling, settled down at tables brightly lit from above. Soon they are hunched over their cards with the intensity of workers making Louis Vuitton knock-offs in a rural China factory. The long night has begun.

Words like ‘pocket 7’, ‘pre-flop raise’, ‘blind’, ‘open 5, 5, 7’, ‘full-house’ drift up to me. Even as I gamely try to tune out, I realise, despite my ignorance, that the tables closest to me are already knee-deep in Poker. A throaty voice hollers across at the bartender, “Grey Goose lime cordial, ice! Jaldi boss,” as I quickly sidestep her diamond-dripping red talons reaching for the bar. I catch a glimpse of her face, hidden under a perfectly blow-dried wave of peroxide blond and gold streaks, and a memory creeps up on me. I know that sexy, deep, throaty voice. From the recesses of my Diwali party memory bank, I pull out a slide.

The most recent, most minimally botoxed wife of an entertainment moghul. Men hated playing with her because her gamesmanship involved much seductive moaning. As she called her cards, her aaja aaja would resonate in their ears. The oldest distraction trick in the book hadn’t failed her either.

The serious male gambler is wary of playing with women. And it isn’t just that they can cripple his inherently challenged ability to multitask. It’s also that women are luckier and safer than men; they don’t like playing blind and you can’t bluff them. “Women are such killjoys!” says a friend, helpfully explaining the sexist undercurrent to me in between tables. “It takes away all the excitement in the mystery of your cards.”

I mumble something about his chauvinistic ego. “Ah! My Ego? The one thing that destroys gamblers in Delhi is their ego! But, honey, I’m too smart for that,” he says, as he shuffles off to the next free table. Although ‘The Ego’ is the reason much of Delhi is ever ready to erupt, I can’t really see how this Freudian thing plays out in a card game.

Another friend breaks it down for me. “A good gambler always knows when to leave a table. In this city, people don’t understand this, so they keep borrowing to recover their losses, and don’t realise, probably till the next day, that they’ve dug themselves into a deep hole.” All too common are tales of people selling cars to pay off debts. They just about hold off selling their houses and wife’s jewellery. Which, one would have thought, was a better way to pay off debt, considering she lands up dripping enough carats to buy an African country and the host and his house thrown in for good measure. 

The other anathema for poker fiends is drunk players and cheats, both fixtures at Delhi cards scenes. Both find themselves in the thick of some serious Delhi-style let’s-talk-with-our-fists kind of rows. The drunk is merely exasperating: his worst crime, other than being obnoxious or disrupting the rhythm of a table, would be to play loose on a bad hand, lose Rs 30,000 in seven minutes, borrow from others at the table, and then forget about it the next day. A situation usually fixed by calling in witnesses.

The cheat, on the other hand, is a serious offender. Shit really hits the fan when ‘pals’, ‘friends’, ‘very good friends’, and friends of ‘friends’ are caught swindling the table. Most commonly, he will hide some good cards under the table, and keep pulling them out to make trails. Until greed gets the better of him. By the time he has his fifth trail in two hours, everyone is thinking waddafuck. Others play farzi chal, where they pretend to have put in money, but don’t.

You can’t really blame them for getting confused with all the thousand rupee notes pretending to be the tablecloth. Still others know ways to pick up, deal and shuffle their cards. And will either bet after a certain number of cards, play a certain number of blinds till they pick up their cards, or just manage to deal themselves higher sequences. Some of these guys would be the envy of illusionist David Blaine. Obviously none of this goes down well with testosterone-filled North Indians, the helpful lubricants at hand notwithstanding. The seasoned host will know when it’s time to politely escort the offender out.

“People are so stupid,” says a harrowed, exasperated voice to my right. As she dumps her Fendi and fur to the ground next to me, I realise it’s a prominent business family’s daughter, a friend who also hosts an annual, if more low-key, cards shindig. She’s complaining about how long it took her driver to manoeuvre her Audi A6 through the rows of Mercs, SUVs, Beamers and other Audis parked in the tiny lanes of this farmhouse colony. She rambles on in the same breath about the long wait, her freeloading cousins and ass-kissing friends, who suddenly appear around Diwali to get invited to her party.

Ah! I spot the best person for some gossip and voyeurism. Signal time to stop vegetating. The alcohol, now whisky-paani-ice, has warmed my feet enough for the excursion. A fog of sweet charas now hangs over some tables, and a raucous medley of loud Punjabi guffaws and clipped NRI tones emanates from the far end of the shamiana.

I see people kissing their cards and sending prayers heavenward as I shuffle along. Gamblers add their own varia­tions to the already impressive list of Indian superstitions: from adorning themselves with nakshatras and six-car­at diamond rings, to totems and bells, to staying away from lighters and phones, to never playing the first hand… it goes on.  

The host is sitting near the last few ta­bles, not playing, just making sure his guests are comfortable and aren’t miss­ing anything. A maalishwali is at hand, working away on the shoulders of play­ers. As I make my way over, I realise he’s already moving on. Towards a seeming­ly closed sheer enclosure, through which I can only see the silhouettes of people sitting upright at a few tables.

These really high rollers of the 10,000 blinds and 20,000 moves hate the extrav­agant mela of these 100-table parties. They play big and want to play with peo­ple who play big. For this lot, to be up or down Rs 7-8 lakh per hand is de rigueur. And while winning or losing Rs 10-15 lakh in a night has no real bearing on their lives, they play like their lives de­pend on it. At tables like this, an escrow pool is formed to avoid bad debt; each person puts in a minimum of Rs 5 lakh. The rest is either carried forth on paper or the host plays bank.

It’s common to see some industrialist’s son at a party, behind whom beefy men are already standing with shiny suitcas­es filled with cash, asking the host for money. The host writes them a note, ob­viously knowing that the borrower is good for it, and he gets the money.

The host, it turns out, has a surprise in store for us and beckons us towards an­other tented section. Here, we walk across a plush shaggy carpet into what looks like a recreated casino. Blackjack, roulette and baccarat tables have been set up in a Vegas-esque couple of hundred feet. Echoing casinos frequented off the shores of Goa and in Kathmandu, here the owner actually becomes a bank. He is the casino.

And like everywhere else in the world, either he—‘the House’—wins or the players win. And like casinos all over the world, he usually does.
One of Delhi’s best-kept secrets is hid­den casinos in the houses of people who do this for a living. Groups play here for superhigh stakes, with minimum buy-ins of Rs 1-5 lakh. In a night of baccarat, the whole house (i.e. the group playing the game) can lose about Rs 50 lakh just like that. Of course, it’s all undercover and super hush-hush.

Speaking of undercover, rumours abound on how the whole cards scene is just a cover for the sexual capers of Delhi’s adulterous beau monde. Every one of this city’s nouveau riche, says a friend, is out to bonk someone else’s wife. There’s some kind of justice in this: while the husbands get drunk and lose their excess cash at poker tables, their bored wives also cut loose. They choose their own cir­cle of card players. Naturally.

About The Author

Isha Singh Sawhney