Located on All Hallows Lane, a place best discovered by finding Cannon Street Station and then walking the perimeter until a rather unassuming dark alley appears off Upper Thames Street, with a little sign pointing you in the right direction, lies the Loose Cannon Poker Club. Hosted by the loud and nearly iconic Roy Houghton, the place looks upon arrival to be an upmarket city watering hole and restaurant, but take Door Number Two and the high vaulted ceiling of yellow brick covers a spacious room filled to but a small amount of its potential capacity with poker tables.
The club has only recently been opened, and for the first few months will operate only Monday to Wednesday, but if it’s potential you’re after, the place has a great deal, as it were. The most innovative thing about the club is its rake, or lack of it. Neither cash games nor tournaments have any juice of any sort – 100% of the money is circulated from the losing to the winning players, returning poker to its pure zero-sum game status, and surely that in its own right will be enough to encourage punters. There is, however, a membership fee – for the early days it’s an initial registration of £25 for three months, with £5 payable upon each visit. It will undoubtedly rise as the club starts to open its doors all week, but what looks at first like a considerable price to get in the door becomes minimal if one were to play there even semi-regularly.
Many players, both online and especially live, have a blind spot when it comes to rake. It’s a real eye-opener to receive one’s first online rakeback deal – just how much is actually lost over the course of a month to the house is often quite a shock. A regular player at a club like Loose Cannon will make back their membership fee pretty quickly. And it has the benefit, according to their website, loosecannonpoker .com, of being “100% legal; we never breach Sections 3 & 4 of the 1968 Gaming Act (GB).” So there.
I went along a couple of weeks ago to play in a tournament, a two-tier thing with three £50 qualifiers feeding to a Final (the top 20% going through), to which VC had added £5,000. Considering there were only around four tables per feeder, this looked good enough to attract Paul Parker and myself to one of them. The tables were poker-shaped, if you know what I mean, and therefore ever so slightly tricky to self-deal on. But the final table was dealer dealt, as was the one cash game which was going from the time I arrived (7:00) until around 1am. Paul made the cut, I bubbled; he kept up a remarkable commentary on the table too, and here’s what I remember: “I’ve passed to your blind twice in a row, it’s only fair I get the same treatment you’ve raised like half your stack but if I come over the top you have folding equity I think we should all give £20 and give an extra seat for the bubble, or how about one of you go home and we all give you £20?”
Having been one of Roy Houghton’s dealers in the early days of the Gutshot, I know that he’s unrelentingly enthusiastic about live poker, and this venture, funnily enough, in particular. Shouting into a microphone, which he doesn’t need as the acoustics in the cavernous place are extraordinary, he ruled the small gaggle of players with the expected gruff benevolence of a TD who’s been there and seen it all. And he only sang two lines of “I Can See Clearly Now” the whole night.
The valet service was impeccable, and the bar and restaurant areas were only slightly less roomy than the poker oven. When I say ‘oven’ I don’t mean to imply that the temperature was uncomfortable – quite the opposite – the kiln-like building served to keep the cold out and the moderate heating in, plus I was informed that air conditioning was also an option. As for the food, I only had a tenner on me and neglected to order their steak sandwich, a decision I later regretted.
On taking my leave of the club (cars can, incidentally, be stowed in the nearby NCP car park at the discounted rate of £5 all night) it did also strike me that the combination of city bar and poker den might be a good one for cash players, once word spreads. A backlog of corporate events has put Friday/Saturday opening on hold for a while, but in the New Year I expect the Loose Cannon Club to catch on.
Details:
Loose Cannon Sports Bar and The VC Players Lounge,
13-16 All Hallows Lane,
London
EC4R 3UL
Roy@LooseCannonPoker.com
M +44(0)7966 143984 T +44(0)1322 342637
The club is located 2 minutes from Cannon Street Station, directly under Cannon Bridge, south side of Upper Thames Street next to the Fire Station.