Nobody’s Fool

The Friday school at the Anchor is five-card draw, ten pence ante, no limit but a house understanding that you do not take more than a fiver off anybody in a night.

It has run since 1991. There have been eleven regulars; there are currently six.

Alf Bewick has won, on the estimate of everyone present, about seventy per cent of the pots he has stayed in for thirty-four years.

The consensus

Alf cheats.

This is not a suspicion. It is the settled and unanimous view of every man who has ever sat at that table, including two who are dead, including Alf's own brother-in-law.

Nobody has ever caught him.

What has been tried

New decks. Sealed, bought by someone else, opened at the table. No effect.

Different dealer every hand. No effect.

Mirrors. In 1998 Colin Frayne brought in a shaving mirror and propped it behind Alf. Alf played on for two hours without comment and won four pots. Colin took the mirror home.

Watching the hands. Everyone has done this. Alf's hands are seventy-nine years old and slow and entirely visible and do nothing.

A camera. In 2016 Dev's nephew set up a phone on a shelf. Forty minutes of footage. Analysed by four men in a pub over three weeks. Nothing.

Asking him. Done, repeatedly, in every register from joking to genuinely aggrieved. Alf's answer has never varied: "I'm just lucky."

Where it stands

The remarkable thing — and any outsider finds this the hardest part — is that nobody has ever stopped playing.

Six men, thirty-four years, losing to a man they are certain is cheating, every Friday, without fail.

Dev has explained it to his nephew like this: "If he stopped coming we'd have to work out what Friday was for."

The night in March

Alf did not come.

He had not missed a Friday since 2011 and had not missed two in a row since 1996, and by half eight Colin had rung the house and got no answer, and by nine Dev had walked round.

Alf was on the floor of the back room and had been for about a day and a half.

He was in hospital eleven days. He is home now, with a rail on the stairs and a woman who comes in the mornings, and he has been back at the Anchor since May, and he still wins.

What Dev found

Dev was the one who went round. He was the one who let the paramedics in, and locked up after, and came back the next day to sort the heating.

On the sideboard in the back room there was a shoebox.

He should not have opened it. He would like that on the record.

Inside there were thirty-four years of small notebooks, and every notebook was a record of the Friday school. Date, players, and the result of every hand.

Every hand. Since 1991.

Dev sat on Alf's sofa and read the 2016 book, and then the 1994 book, and then he stopped, because he had understood, and understanding took about eleven minutes.

What Alf does

He remembers.

That is it. That is the entire method and there is nothing else and it is not, by any definition anyone at that table would accept, cheating.

Alf Bewick has kept a written record of every hand played by six men for thirty-four years, and has read it, and has therefore known since about 1997 that Colin Frayne raises with two pair and only two pair, that Dev bluffs precisely once a night and almost always before ten o'clock, that Terry cannot fold a flush draw under any circumstances, and that Ken — who died in 2019 — used to touch his glass before betting a good hand and never once knew it.

He has been playing men who play the same way every week and who have never watched anyone but him.

They have spent thirty-four years looking at his hands.

What Dev did

He put the notebooks back in the shoebox and put the shoebox back on the sideboard and did the heating and went home.

He has told nobody.

He has thought about it a great deal, and where he has landed is this: five men would have to accept that they have been beaten for thirty-four years by attention, and by nothing else, and that the money is not the problem — the money was never the problem — but that every one of them has been sitting at that table for three decades in the presence of a man who has been paying attention to them, closely, weekly, in writing, since 1991.

Colin's wife died in 2004. The notebook for 2004 has, in the margin of the fourteenth of May, in Alf's hand: C not right. Went easy.

Dev checked. Alf lost that night. It is the only Friday in thirty-four years where Alf folded eleven hands in a row.

Friday

They played last week. Alf took about four pounds off the table and Terry said what Terry says, which is that the deck was got at, and everyone laughed, and Alf said, "I'm just lucky."

Dev looked at him for slightly too long.

Alf looked back and, for about a second, did something with his face that was not quite a smile.

Then he dealt.