The Poker Report
8-15-03
"A Special Kind Of Genius Since 2001"
Where's Ben?
It was a short, quiet night at the poker palace.
Ben was out of town this week and when he's out of town most
people won't show up at my place to play poker. Basically, Ben is the draw, or
the glue, or the rake, depending on what you're trying to describe and why
you're trying to describe it. If Ben isn't there then Wendy isn't there. And if
Wendy isn't there then there's no free cookies. You can forget about Abby and
Abby's brother Eric. Donahue won't even return my phone calls if Ben's not in
town. It's like, when Ben's gone, people aren't even nice to me.
So it was Tuesday, and Andy and I had what could have been called
a stroke of genius, if it had worked out. The idea was we would have a ladies
night at the poker palace. We would schedule a poker game and invite only
women. We're both recently single, I broke up with my girlfriend when she
called her other boyfriend from my apartment, and the idea was that we would
get eight women to come over and play poker with us on Thursday. Genius, right?
Anyway, it just didn't work. The response of every woman we
invited over was the same, a sneering kind of "what's in it for me?"
thing. It's a complicated question with a lot of possible answers. I guess what
we were going for was the the old maxim of Nirvana, where after hours of
fantastic sex the woman turns into eight guys at a card table. We were trying
for that in reverse. We were going to start with the card game. But where
there's cards there's beer, and sometimes chips or salted almonds. I mean,
would you really want to follow a card game with romance? Only if you win is
probably the answer to that question.
It ended up with Jensen, Andy, myself, and two new comers. Komal
has long hair, but he's definitely not a girl. Or if he is a girl then we're
all in trouble. And Jane Ransom showed up, which should have been a pretty hot
event, since she wrote perhaps the best erotic novel of the 1990s. But, you
know, four men, well I mean, just look at us.
Jane pulled a full house early but bet soft. Andrew retold the
story from last week of how Eric Martin once killed a cat that was dying on his
stairs after being hit by a car. A mercy killing with a baseball bat if you
believe in such things. "But if the cat was dying," Komal asked,
"how'd he make it up the stairs?" The whole story hinged on whether
or not you believe Eric Martin's version of things.
Komal, playing here for the first time, lost everything, ten
dollars, in two hours. Despite that he's been playing hold'em for years. I
didn't really see what was wrong with Komal's play. He played tight/weak, which
is to say close to the vest. He only went in when the cards were worth something
and he got blinded out and then once he was on the felt he didn't know how to
get off. Komal has twice started companies that have gone bankrupt. I decided I
wouldn't let him start a company for me. And Jane lost fourteen dollars,
slowly. "I'm here to lose," she said.
Jensen almost broke even. It was the end of the night, he had ten
dollars and twenty cents on a ten dollar buy in. "I'm cashing out. I'm
even"
Jensen never cashes out even. "One more hand," I said.
Jensen lost four dollars on the last hand and cashed out for six bucks, more
bitter than when he arrived. "Your poker game sucks," he said.
Andy does low tech work for a high tech company and is waiting for
the day they pin an envelope full of sawbucks to the side of his small cubicle
and ask him to go home for the rest of his life. He won two dollars for the
night, despite the fact that he spends thirty hours a week playing poker
online. "Do you think you're a better poker player than me?" he
asked, because I won twenty dollars. I laughed, and said I definitely was.
"You don't really think that," he said. I looked into his sad
addicted face. It's a trick of poker, since the best thing for a player is if
other people don't think he's a good player. In theory it's what you want. But
in practice, people's feelings get hurt.
"No," I said. "You're definitely a better player.
Definitely." Everybody laughed, except Andrew. "You're up two
dollars," I said. "People like you. Your future is paved with
opportunity. What more do you want?"
Stephen Elliott
Editor
The Poker Report
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