Continued from Part One...
In many ways, Mickey Wernick is an icon of UK poker. He may not boast dozens of bracelets on his arm or an EPT title on the mantelpiece, but for those within the industry, he is without doubt one of the most recognisable faces on the circuit. What has accrued Mickey so much respect isn’t his near million in tournament winnings, it’s his staying power. Amid a world of online super kids, Mickey is still fighting, desperate to prove that, despite his age, he still has what it takes to be a major contender in the game. Whilst many of the pre-boom veterans have fallen by the wayside, Mickey is still plugging away, grinding his way onto final tables and remaining a serious threat at the green baize. Like Rocky Balboa in the final round, he simply won’t quit.
However, although it’s hard to believe, Mickey wasn’t always the veteran of the felt he is now. Once upon a time in a galaxy far, far way, the man we now refer to as ‘The Legend’ or ‘The Worm’ was more commonly known as ‘The Kid’. Please, don’t adjust your sets, as back in the sixties and seventies it was Mickey ‘The Kid’ Wernick who was terrorising the table, showcasing a fearless, unrelenting attitude more akin to an offspring of the poker-boom than a face from the ‘good ol’ days’. What may be even more unbelievable is that Mickey was clean-shaven and fresh-faced, shamelessly three-betting his opponents with a vigour that only a newcomer knows, and internally smirking with content as the old guard looked on with disgruntlement and a sense of envy that can only come when you’re being pushed around in a game you’ve been playing for decades.
But that was Mickey’s style; he had plenty of gamble in him and he feared no one. But it was perhaps this gamble that made him such a lure for the house games. “I was terrible with the wheel,” he confesses, “a real fucking, mad gambler. If I see the kids playing the roulette, I tell them to stop. They might say, ‘I’ll just have a couple of spins, Mickey’ and I’ll reply, ‘No, don’t even have one bet,’ because I know how dangerous it can be.”
One need only look to the likes of Ali Mallu, Roland De Wolfe and Dave Smith to witness a correlation between fearlessness at the table and a fondness for gambling beyond the confines of the poker table, and back then, Mickey was of a similar mould. Perhaps the only difference may be that Mickey’s affection was a hereditary one, and a sense of gamble that was passed down by his father Solly. “My dad loved to gamble,” he recalls. “He was the oldest of his siblings, so left school at 16 to help support the family. Meanwhile, all his brothers went on to University and became politicians. They had no interest in gambling, my dad was the only one in the family. Poker and gambling wasn’t considered a crime, but it also wasn’t regarded as a credible way of earning money.”
This willingness to take on anyone that stands in his way is a characteristic that has stayed with Mickey throughout his career. Although he did regale me with anecdotes of taking on the best in Vegas (to be continued…), my eyes widened when he mentioned the name ‘Doyle Brunson’, two words that will forever be met with a nod of respect and approval. “He was over at a festival at the Isle of Man once,” Mickey reminisces, “and he said to me, ‘You wanna play some heads-up poker?’ Without hesitation, I said, ‘Yeah, Omaha,’ and he merely replied, ‘Omaha, huh?’ Well, we started playing some heads-up Omaha and I ran rings round him. I was playing the complete opposite to what he was expecting and he couldn’t work me out. After a while, I’d taken a few grand off him and he just stood up from his seat and in one word said, ‘Finished.’”
It was at this point in our conversation that I decided to ask Mickey about his encounters with Mohammed Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard, and, as the top names of their chosen sport/pastime, whether he had the same amount of awe for them as he did for the Johnny Chans and Amarillo Slims of the poker world. Somehow, I think I already knew the answer: “I met [Mohammed] Ali when he came over to England to do some charity work for underprivileged kids. I had a conversation with him, but we only met briefly, so it wasn’t as if we spoke for ages. I was a huge fan of Ali though, so it was incredible to meet him.
“Sugar Ray was someone who I spotted in the US at a fight. I used to go over a lot with my mates to watch the boxing, and he was at ringside during this one match so I went down to get his autograph. To me, these guys are stars. When I started going to Vegas to play poker with some of the best players, they weren’t really celebrities at the time like Ali and Sugar Ray were. They were just poker players. I was fearless too, so I didn’t give a shit who they were; I was prepared to take anyone on.”
As a former amateur boxer (“My last fight didn’t go too well, so I decided to finish when I was 19”), Mickey will have been accustomed to trading blows on a one-on-one basis, but before he even set sights on the likes of Bobby Baldwin and Stuey Ungar, Mickey was busy earning his keep in the UK, co-owning a casino with his father while playing in his spare time.
“I was working for the family busy during my teens and early twenties when one day my dad came into the office and said he was retiring from the business. He gave me the option of taking shares or opening up a poker club with him. So I thought, ‘Why not?’ In the end, we took on a casino and nightclub and I began running the games in the cardroom.”
Our conversation then turned slightly surreal as Mickey claimed that they’d called the joint ‘S&M’, as in Solly and Mickey. At this point, I felt it slightly odd that they’d opt for this particular term (although M&S had obviously already been snapped up), despite the relevance to their names, but Mickey alleviated any fears by emphasising that it was written ‘Essenem’, perhaps to confirm a disassociation with a term usually associated with the adult entertainment industry. But whatever the club was called, the two had a new father and son venture, and one which centred around a game that they were becoming increasingly enthused by.
“My dad wasn’t a very good player,” admitted Mickey with a slight grimace. “I’d be dealing the games, and the hustlers would be outplaying him all over the place. There were times where they’d raise him all-in and I’d be thinking, ‘Don’t call dad, please don’t call.’ Fortunately, I was a pretty decent player right from the start and picked up the game relatively quickly.”
As I imagine you can guess, Mickey didn’t spend his days tucked up in the dealer’s chair, tightening his little bow tie as he dealt out the cash game. Mickey was an action-junkie, he wasn’t content to watch play unfold from the central seat, and so, on the few days when the poker club wasn’t open, Mickey would be frequenting the others card rooms spread across the Midlands.
Although Mickey used to play in a game at the back of a bridge club, one of the venues he initially frequented was a place that still boasts poker even today: “The first casino I think I ever played in was the Rainbow [Casino in Birmingham],” he declares, mentioning a popular venue that inexplicably closed their cardroom down during poker’s peak period before re-opening its doors a year or two back. “There weren’t many people playing then that are still around today. Maybe someone like Derek Baxter, and later Surinder [Sunar] started making an appearance. I’d also go down to the Vic too when I could.
“The standard in the old days was nothing like it is now. The games were pretty easy with plenty of tourists looking to give away the money. My problem was that I thought it would never end, and that I’d be picking up their money forever. Stud was the main game, Five-Card Stud. And draw was also played a lot too. No one was playing Hold’em, we’d barely even heard of it; Hold’em only really came in during the eighties. As for tournaments, there were none of them around, that was an American thing.”
If there’s one trend that hasn’t changed over the years it’s that running a poker club is never a smooth ride. Even today, places are still being raided, and back when Mickey was managing his club, things were no different. “Nobody was really sure what the rules were back then,” he explains, “it was a really grey area. We were in trouble with the law now and then and even got raided a couple of times. It also didn’t help that I was spending so much time playing in other casinos. They really frowned upon that, but I kept playing anyway.”
When the laws on gambling changed, Mickey and his father were put in a position where they had to choose between the nightclub and the casino. Their love for gambling was clearly a factor, as not long after, they opened up a casino sans nightclub. “The new law meant we had to pick one or the other, so in the end we picked the casino and relocated away from Essenem. This time the place was called the ‘Polynesian’.”
Since the days in the club with his father, Mickey’s life has gone in a number of different directions from the constant trips to Vegas, his time as a bookmaker and the golden year in which he became a Blue Square sponsored player. I didn’t want to stray too far away from the world of poker and swamp him with questions about his father, but whatever he’s achieved in the game over the years, it’s clear that the time spent with the club/casino was an important one for him, and shaped his future in a variety of ways. Given that his father was accustomed to the odd spin of the wheel and the shuffle of cards, it was almost a given that Mickey would somehow end up either working or playing in the industry. Right from the off, he was doing both.
Next up, the Wormhole hops on board a Virgin Atlantic and heads to Vegas…