A square with a gaming past
Number 44 Berkeley Square, the William Kent house with the celebrated staircase, became in 1962 the Clermont, a gaming club founded by John Aspinall for friends who played for serious sums. A year later Mark Birley opened a nightclub in its basement and named it Annabel's. For the rest of that decade and well beyond, the square was where a certain kind of Londoner went to dine, to dance and to play, frequently in that order and sometimes until breakfast.
The stakes of that era are no model for anyone, but the habit behind them is worth keeping. A game after dinner gives the late hour a shape. It gives the hands something to do and the conversation a rhythm, and it lets two people who are still learning each other discover something true very quickly: who counts, who gambles, who laughs at a bad roll and who does not.
Why backgammon suits the small hours
Of all the games that survive in London's clubs, backgammon suits a late evening best. A single game lasts perhaps fifteen minutes when nobody is hurrying, so it can be abandoned without regret. Luck keeps a beginner in the contest and skill rewards patience, which means an expert and a novice can enjoy a genuinely even game for a while. And because the moves are quick and the board is small, talk carries on across it without a pause.
It has a London history of its own. The doubling cube arrived from the clubs of New York in the 1920s, and in the 1970s backgammon became the fashionable game of Mayfair and the Riviera alike, played in clubs, hotel lounges and private houses on boards of leather and inlaid wood. Several of the newer members' clubs still keep a board or two, and a good concierge can usually find one.
Openings worth knowing
Nothing flatters a player like a confident first move. A handful of standard openings covers most first rolls, and learning them takes ten minutes over a drink.
Cards for two
When no board can be found, a pack of cards will serve, and the two-handed games are the ones to know.
Stakes that cost nothing
A game with nothing riding on it is flat, and a game with too much riding on it is no longer a game. The Society's guests usually settle on stakes that cost nothing and mean a little. The loser chooses the next record. The winner names the pudding at the next dinner. Whoever loses the match tells a story that has never been told at a table before. Money stays off the board, and so does anything else that would turn a gentle contest into a serious one. Poker and its cousins belong to the casinos, which are another kind of evening entirely and not the subject of this note.
Showing off is permitted, even encouraged, provided it is the good kind: explaining a clever move after it has worked rather than before, conceding a lost game with a smile, offering a rematch instead of demanding one. Your companion will enjoy being beaten well far more than winning against somebody who sulks.
Where the board comes out
In a members' club, the games room or a quiet corner of the drawing room after dinner, with the member's permission and the house's board. In a hotel, the lounge in the last hour before it closes, once the pianist has gone home; a concierge asked in the afternoon will often find a set. Best of all, perhaps, the suite itself: a travel board opened on the coffee table, a pot of mint tea or a last glass, and nobody watching the clock. A visit of two hours, at £1,100, holds a best of three match with a proper conversation around it, and hotel and residence calls describes how the Society arranges one.
For a larger party, backgammon has a form made for company, the chouette, in which one player takes on a team led by a captain while the rest of the room offers advice, most of it bad. It is the ideal game for the suite gathering at one in the morning, and it has ended more than one argument about who in the party is really the clever one.
Players worth a rematch
Roxi has never knowingly let anyone win at anything, pub quiz or otherwise, and she plays backgammon the same way: fast, cheerful and quite without mercy, with a running commentary on every roll. Violetta plays cards with a stillness that gives nothing whatever away about her hand, and when she wins, which is often, she marks the moment with a single dry line that the table remembers for weeks. Both belong among the raven haired companions, and both are happy to teach a guest who has never held a doubling cube.
Mention the game when you write through booking, and whichever companion Cressida suggests will arrive knowing the rules and expecting a match. Berkeley Square, where all this began, is still the place for the walk home afterwards, under the plane trees, arguing about the last roll.
Asked at the table
It helps, and several do. If she does not, teaching her is half the pleasure, since the rules take ten minutes to learn and the strategy takes a lifetime.
The Society prefers stakes that cost nothing: the next record, the choice of pudding, a story. It keeps the game a game, and the evening what it is meant to be.
Roughly ten to twenty minutes at a relaxed pace, so a match of three or five games fits comfortably into the hour after dinner.
Written by Cressida, Membership secretary at Berkeley Square Society. To turn any of this into an evening, write to the desk.
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