Britain is awash with high- stakes poker tournaments at the moment and for the brief moments when you can't play live, there are hundreds of online sites waiting to relieve you of your cash. It's all your average poker addict could want. But it wasn't like that when I was making my name in the 1990s - that's for certain.

Poker was often only available two or three days a week, and casinos would have to put a stop to the poker games by 4am. When you consider that most cash games didn't start until midnight...well, it just wasn't enough. A Friday night poker player may have found himself £500 down at 4am on Saturday morning, having to wait until Sunday evening to get even.

Thankfully, wherever there is such a need, there is usually a local entrepreneur who will step up to meet it. And so it proved in Birmingham. Enter one Barry Hawkins: the founder of Barry's. This was the greatest game of all the 'private member' games in the 1990s, with a cast that included Mickey Wernick, John Shipley, Kevin Zyrandi, Derek Baxter and Lucy Rokach.

MAN ABOUT TOWN

Barry himself was a real character. He had a wiry stature, unkempt hair, missing teeth and a dress sense to rival Leonard Rossiter. He had a story for every occasion and he seemed to know everyone and know everything that was worth knowing about in Birmingham.

Barry's club was nothing special to look at from the outside. It was just an everyday front door just off Bearwood High Street, apart from the fact it was steel-plated on the inside! There were some pokey old stairs that led you up to a steel gate, which was always kept locked. Beyond the gate, there was yet another door. When you finally managed to get inside, you felt a buzz that was akin to walking into Money on the table: we're not sure Barry's pool table was in such good nick a football stadium; the atmosphere in there was electric.

There was usually a thick haze of smoke above the table as an extractor fan failed dismally in coping with players like Colin Butcher. He would light the next cigarette with the previous one before putting it out. It's no surprise that he later died of cancer, god bless his soul. I shudder at the thought of how many years Barry's game may have chopped off the end of my life.

After the smoke, the first thing you were confronted with when you walked in was a particularly average-looking pub pool table that would see some not-so-average high-stakes confrontations. The most spectacular of these matches was won by a guy called Chris Randall. Chris was a hard-nosed hustler and a hell of a pool player. So good in fact, that he offered any of the regular poker players odds of 7/1 to beat him first to ten frames.

Eventually, Zyrandi stepped up to the mark and dropped £7,000 in fifties on the table. This meant Chris had to stump up £49,000. Just to be flash, he put down £50,000 in twenty sealed bags of crisp fifties (£2,500 in each bag).

But the game didn't start according to Chris' plan. Old 'Kitty Kat' played very well and caught a couple of breaks to take an early 4-3 lead. However, before the game had started, Chris had cunningly asked for a half hour break just before the pub's closing time. So at 10.30pm he ambled down the road to The Bear without a care in the world.

He proceeded to stand at the bar watching some football highlights, surrounded by drunken chit-chat from the locals who probably couldn't muster up fifty quid if they emptied all their pockets together onto the table.

TRICK SHOT!

Chris, however, wouldn't have looked too much out of place as he stood at the bar calmly savouring his two pints of Guinness. He certainly didn't waste any gambling money on his attire and has probably never spent £50 on a single item of clothing to this day. Forty minutes later he strolled back into Barry's with his nerves steadied. He oozed even more self- confidence than his usual arrogant demeanour and wasn't in any mood for messing around.

Kevin didn't win another frame as Chris ran out an easy 10-4 winner with an added swagger. Another £7,000 was then coolly added to the Randall bankroll. Just another night at Barry's.