Buying a house in america is a lot like playing poker. The major difference is you can’t see your opponent and you can’t do that clever flippy thing with a handful of chips.

It’s all carried out through agents. Ours is called Maureen and it goes like this:

Monday. You see a house in Noe valley. They are “taking offers” on Thursday of the same week. You decide to offer over the asking price but you put a time limit (wednesday) on your offer.

Wednesday: you see another house (which you prefer) in the Inner Mission. You worry but you never blink. The time limit on your Noe offer comes around and nothing happens. You are free to offer on the Mission house. You do so along with seven other people.

Thursday: You hear about your offer. Because Maureen is a better poker player than you, you stay in the round.

The people from Noe valley call back. Your offer was second best and they’d like you to stay sitting at their table. You say no.

The people from the Mission tell you that they liked your offer best except for it’s size. Would you like to offer more? They say the same to two other people. You have under 24 hours (until 5.30pm today) to make a counter offer. You blink. Over dinner you drink too much and decide to make the bigger offer.

One of the other three people still in the game also makes and offer and it is even bigger than your offer. Maureen secretly writes to the vendors explaining what a nice English couple you are and how you have two sweet dogs (she’s never met them and is really very good at poker).

Friday. Nothing. You spend all morning on a conference call between a mortgage agent and various financial institutes in the UK persuading them to tell the mortgage guy that you are a good credit risk despite having moved country every two years since 1980.

At lunch, the people from the Mission call back and tell you what Mr X offered*. They really like you and if you just up your offer a little they say, they’ll sell you the house. You dither. You dither again and then realise that the mortgage is already 50% more than you wanted to have so an extra 1% isn’t going to break the bank any more.

5.30 pm today. The game is about to finish. Nothing is happening. You call Maureen. She assures you it’s all OK. She has some signatures and the house is yours. She’s pretty distracted as though she’s forgotten something. You blink a lot.

The winnings.

* How very un-British.