Why Poker?
I sense that the craze over poker as exemplified by all the celebrity poker on TV and the televising of The World Series of Poker, has come down of that high and has settled back down to more normal level of popularity. When I go to Las Vegas, I know a game of poker is a sensible way to while away my gambling hours since I can more or less control the rate of loss to the house rake and might even be able to win if I stay disciplined and get lucky with some cards. When we last went to Las Vegas in November, I did not play, mostly because it is so much easier to find a seat at a Blackjack table than to find and then enter a poker table that is playing at the right level of betting for me. With Blackjack, I can sit down at a table of my choosing with a betting minimum also of my choosing. Since I tend to bet $25-$50 per hand, I rarely find a table that is too rich for my blood. That is not to say that I can’t look se a modicum of money faster than I like, but just that I can pretty much always find a seat to play.
Also, at Blackjack nobody gets concerned if you abruptly leave the table with your winnings or your loses since you are playing against the house. But at a poker table, you are walking away with someone else’s money and the only thing they like less is seeing someone who has been losing leave and cut off an anticipated source of income to them. Since I rarely go to Las Vegas to gamble and just gamble to fill in the time gaps, its important to me to be able to come and go as I pleases. On this most recent trip, Mike tried to find a poker table at which to play and was unsuccessful. Its no wonder. The house makes a lot more money of other table games and slots than it does on a pay-by-the-hour poker table. I guess they feel they have to offer it somewhat, but it seems to be at a minimal level these days. They probably figure that if poker is your game, you. Can always find the video poker machines and then they will get their much better 5% or more payoff, limited in scale only by how much money you choose to pump into the machine.
So while great movies like Rounders (admittedly make in 1998 when the poker craze was hot) show us that there are plenty of illegal poker rooms in the dark side of the city, I have no idea how I would go about finding one. Also, from what I see of them in the movies, the crowd is a lot more hostile to a players eccentricities and comings and goings than seems generally comfortable. I feel like I would likely be sitting across from some Russian mob guy rather than a nice local accountant. When my oldest son, Roger, was going to those sorts of places in NYC, he used to tell me that lots of the guys were Bear Stearns guys from some part of my very own bank. I guess you never know what you don’t know.
I learned poker at a very young age for some reason that I can only attribute to my early working days in the men’s locker room at the gold course I used to work out of in Maine. It was a pretty seedy place by local standards and always seems danker and dirtier than it should have been. For a time it was my job to keep it clean so maybe I have no one to blame for that except myself. What I do remember is that after a long, long day of caddying two 18-hole loops on a very hilly golf course, usually with a double bag load of the old bulky and heavy leather golf bags full of clubs that were anything but lightweight, I would sit down with my hard-earned $20 and play whatever the older, grisly caddies wanted to play. Sometimes it was Acey-Duecy, which I remember was a very fast way to lose your money, but sometimes it was poker. But poker comes in many different forms as any serious player knows.
The history of poker is about as shady as those city poker rooms. Some say it dates back to a domino-like game in China thousands of years ago. Other take it back to Ancient Egypt. But most people settle for the most common story, which that it started in the southern United States in the early 1800’s. That version appeals to me because it sort of jives with the romantic image of the riverboat gambler like the old Maverick tales. The poker played in the old west seems to mostly be of the five-card draw type. There is the legend of Wild Bill Hickcock and his Dead Man’s Hand of black aces and eights as well as the gambler who draws to an inside off-suited straight as part of a bluff. The thing that everyone seems to like about poker is that it involves just the right amount of luck of the draw and skill in reading your opponents and their various “tells”. That all makes it a fun game and a very social game at the same time.
The current trend is to play Texas Hold’em where everyone at the table is dealt two cards into their blind (hole cards) and then eventually five more cards are turned in sequence, first the “flop” of three cards, then “Fourth Street”, and finally “The River”, so that everyone who has stayed in has seven cards with which to make a five-card poker hand. The hierarchy of poker hands is always the same, but the betting and revealing methods vary with each different variant. The trick as far as I can tell about Texas Hold’em is first in the two cards you get in the hole. There are some like a high pair that are undeniably a good starting point. Other times the two are only continently good like a suited Ace/King, which can be called a good start, but can also lead to a nothing hand. The thing that makes the game so popular is that there is betting before the flop, after the flop, before the River and again after the River. In other words, there are lots of opportunities to bet and lots of opportunities to fold or get out. The manner of betting is the big psychological play and is usually a combination of psychology and probabilities unless you have “the nuts”, which is the clear winning hand based on the cards that can be seen and are shared by everyone in the hand. Bet too much and you scare people out (purposefully or by accident). Bet too little and people will play you for trying to sucker people into the hand and possibly wind up winning a lot less than you might have when some players were still hopeful of a good flop or Fourth Street or even River card.
Mike like to play poker and has now set up several games over the past two years, all of which I have dutifully attended. We are always looking to get a group of six or seven together for a game and the vagaries of people’s schedules always seem to intervene inconveniently and sometimes at the last minute. I’m pretty sure that’s way it is in most suburban neighborhoods, but I know some people are very religious about having there weekly poker game. At the moment I would say we have, at best, a quarterly poker game. And so far, they have always been at Mike’s. Melisa doesn’t seem to mind feeding us but I still be Mike would like to see someone else step up to host. Maybe I’ll offer to host the next time. If I do, I assure you I will not flake out like some others have. Win or lose, a nice poker night is almost always a lot of fun and I guess that is ultimately why poker gets played so ubiquitously.