Stephen Hendry aims to rule the green baize once more – this time on the poker table

Is excellence transferable? Few sportspeople have ever matched the iron will of snooker great Stephen Hendry, who drove all foes before him during his icy reign of terror in the 1990s. He won seven world championships, including five in a row from 1992-1996, and was famed and feared for his exceptional mental strength, determination and appetite for both work and wins.

Now 48 and retired, the Scot is turning his attention to matters on another green baize: poker. He was competing this weekend at the PokerStars Festival at the Hippodrome Casino in London, where £990 buys you a seat at the Main Event table, and there is a prize pool of £400,000.

“I got into poker in the early 2000s,” he told Telegraph Sport at the casino this week. “In snooker tournaments you are always looking for things to pass the time between matches, so we’d play together or I would play online. Sometimes you’d find you are going to 4am and that wasn’t ideal when you had a match the next morning.

“It never got so big that anybody was losing their snooker prize money. Snooker players are too tight to put up that sort of cash.”

He has played ever since, winning a few small tournaments, including £6,000 from an event in Cardiff. I suggest it must seem small beer to a man who earnt £9 million in snooker prize money.

“But when it’s cash in your hand!” he says. “It’s exciting. You go to the cashier and they give you actual notes. In snooker they give you a massive big cheque, that’s not the same.”

Hendry says he is not looking to replace snooker with poker, and that he plays cards “for fun”, but the glint of savoured victory in his eye is familiar to anyone who saw him break opponents down time and again in that Crucible Arena.

“People who say that playing is the enjoyment in snooker, that is just b------s to me,” he said. “The enjoyment was in winning, and when that was not in my game, I did not enjoy it.” Now he is one of just hundreds of hopefuls at events such as this, and competing “out of my depth, to be honest, against 95 per cent of the players here”, what can he bring to the table?

“In both snooker and poker, you have to play your best under pressure, I was always able to do that. I don’t think it is something you can teach. Your mental strength, your confidence, your self-belief has got to be very strong. That is the common denominator.” And how is his bluff? “I think I can keep the same poker face,” he says. “But when you get aces, inside, your heart is going. I hide it quite well because of what I have done in snooker.

“When I was playing Jimmy White in those finals I could tell when he was under pressure. He would start going like this with his hands [mimes clutching brow], he would sweat, he would start to hit the balls harder. And I could tell that. I tried to portray nothing. Nothing. I did not want to give my opponent any advantage whatsoever. It was partly an act, partly I developed it with my manager. Even as a boy, my dad always told me ‘don’t show emotion’. If I banged my cue, he would give me a row, and say ‘stop that’. Don’t show any petulance. It was developed, certainly, but I think you have got to have it in you.”

But a poker face alone might not be enough for Hendry, according to the experts. Dr Danielle Shore, a researcher at the University of Oxford’s experimental psychology department, studies how facial expressions affect social interactions and decision-making. She deals Hendry a mixed hand.

“There is such a thing as a poker face but it does not come without its costs. Suppressing our facial expressions is very effortful, it takes a lot of processing power. When we do it, there is a negative impact on things like memory, so in poker that could be problematic. We also become less good at recognising the facial expressions of others, we are slower to do it, and we are less accurate.” So the player too concerned with giving nothing away might be harming his own chances. What other skills should a newbie pick up?

Six other stars you might meet at the table

Liv Boeree has over three million USD career earnings, including her win in the 2010 European Poker Tour main event in Sanremo, for which she scooped 1.7 million USD. She also has a first in Physics with Astrophysics from the University of Manchester. Not surprisingly, she stresses the importance of studying poker’s numbers, and its theory.

“You need to know the maths and the hard stats [of percentage chances with a given hand] as soon as possible. And like any game, there is a mathematical optimal solution and your goal is to play game theory optimal. This means you want to create optimal ratios over how often you bluff. When you bet, you are betting with a good hand a certain amount of the time, and bluffing a certain per cent of the time, and the optimal strategy is to do that in a way that makes you completely unpredictable.” 

Barry Hearn, impresario of both snooker and poker, questions whether Hendry’s mental approach is suitable for the card game. “Hendry and Steve Davis are quite similar people and they play poker like a rock,” he says. “So they are relatively easy to understand. They are very patient, they have very good mental strength.

“When you play people like that and you’re fearing the worst, you are probably accurate. Because if they are in a pot they are not playing around. But they are not risk-takers, they are percentage players. If you take that into account, you can work them out. They are never going to win anything big. The entrepreneurial spirit, the risk-taking spirit lives in classic poker players, but not in snooker players.” 

One snooker player does spring to mind as a risk-taker, though. “I think I am the greater snooker player than Ronnie,” says Hendry. “Of course I am going to say that. I think when push comes to shove I would be stronger mentally. I am a different animal in terms of wanting to win and win. Ronnie is not as hungry as I was. He wants to win but not as much as me, or Steve in the 1980s.” No win for Hendry this weekend: he was knocked out on the first day. But would you want to bet against him becoming a tough man to face across the baize?