Poker

Last week, I hosted a poker session in my house. There is a group of us that play poker together every so often. We hadn't played for a while, and I wanted to have a game before going back to college, so I decided to host the evening. It's more suitable during this time of year anyway, when the evenings are darker and the weather's getting worse.

We basically all sit around a table and have a few beers, an occasional cigar, and play some cards. We have a pool of about ten players, but there's always one or two who can't make it, so we usually play with six or seven. On this night there were six of us. One of the missing regulars is my brother Alan, who is travelling at the moment (alanbaynes101.blogspot.com).

We play with chips rather than cash. The thinking is that people can't lose more than the amount of chips they buy in, so it means that everyone can keep track of their liabilities and nobody ends up betting more than they can afford. Basically, everybody buys in €30 of chips, and we play cards. But on this night, there seemed to be lots of people buying in extra chips, so there was a fair bit of money on the table - more than €250. (They aren't huge stakes, but most of us are lowly civil servants...)

I didn't manage a Royal Flush...

I think this probably was due to the fact that we played for half an hour or so with only five players, because one guy was late. With only five players it was difficult to get openers (if you don't know, google it), so the pot kept building and building. This cleaned a few people out quite quickly, as there was some lunatic betting on some huge pots in the early stages. This created quite an imbalance in the chip distribution. For a while, one corner of the table housed the 'superpowers', who had huge piles of chips from winning these big pots, and the other side of the table was populated by the bankrupt 'axis of evil'. (I was briefly one of these superpowers).

In the final analysis, I just about broke even (I finished with €23 in chips). I wasn't getting good hands throughout most of the dealing, so I didn't get much of a chance to bet. But the few good hands I did get I made quite good money out of, so I was happy enough with that. I got a four of a kind at one stage, which was the best
hand of the night. I also had the 'Dead Man's Hand' at one stage - two aces and two eights - which is supposedly the hand that Wild Bill Hickok was holding when he was shot dead. That must have been a bad omen for me, as I lost a few bob on that hand.