Monthly Archives: April 2017

That Poker Game in Watertown the Entire World is Talking About

Picture the scene, sometime in the distant future, maybe a decade from now, in a Wynn Casino whose interior design has begun showing its first signs of age… There’s Joe B_rns buying into a 1/2 game for $60 at 3:42am on a Wednesday morning. He arranges his chips in three neat piles of four and then looks up, and there across the table from him is Andy R_odgers, behind a mountain of 32 white chips.

“Excuse me, sir,” the dealer tells R_dgers, “you may not raise with those chips,” pointing out that R_dgers, a long time suspected angle shooter, has once again tried to raise with chips from the old Crescent Lounge, which was bulldozed to the ground back in 2019 for repeatedly violating the town of Arlington’s Tom Fogerty ordinance.

“Haha, oh right,” Rodg_rs responds, feigning a passing moment of dementia. With an embarrassed shrug of the shoulders and apologetic smile, he removes the Crescent Lounge chips from the table.

“Well, I’ll be,” J_e Burns exclaims, “if it isn’t good old Andy _odgers!”

The dealer, misinterpreting Burns_ “I’ll be” for “all in,” informs the rest of the table he’s in for sixty total.

“Joe Bur_s! How the hell are you!”

They reminisce about the good old days before the opening of the giant poker room at the Wynn Casino put an end to region’s glory days of home poker.

A ninety-seven-year-old woman, who, unbeknownst to either Joe or Andy, was the nine of clubs in the deck of naked lady cards which Andy had embedded in the lucite railing of the old Crescent Lounge’s poker table, re-raises Joe’s “all in” for sixty up to two hundred.  Although she’s folded every hand for the past three hours, Joe’s already looked at his hole cards, a pair of red sevens, and giddily tells himself he’s a sure shot to at the very least, double up.

“Good luck all in,” Andy says to Joe, but Andy doesn’t even look at the flop, instead a flood of memories overtake him, memories of those glorious nights of yore enfold him, and what he sees is not an ecstatic Joe hitting a much needed seven of spades on the river, but the glorious past,  the golden age.

All I can say is that we’re living in it, and a failure to recognize it as such is cheating yourself out of a lovely sense of nostalgia down the road.

I’ve been on a super duper heater lately, the likes of which I’ve only been through once before, and that maybe that is responsible for my starry-eyed thoughts regarding playing cards around here over the past few weeks. Since I am so great at poker all of the sudden, I think I am within my rights to dispense a little poker wisdom to my massive following of just ok to slightly above average poker player readers.

Sure thing…

Poker Advice Column Section of this Blog Post

Ok, preparation. It all starts with what? Why, when you buy into the game, of course. Where do you find your edge in this cash for chips transaction? Here’s what you do. Let’s say your name is Stevie. Take a $20 bill and with a sharpie marker write on it “Happy Birthday, Stevie. Love Grandma.” Nobody who plays you will want to win that off you, it’s so pathetic and sad, and believe me, everybody will know it’s in circulation soon enough. I do this all the time. It’s the best getting felted insurance out there.

 

 

The Fancier than Poker Basement Game in Watertown

Sometimes people ask me to help them throw a poker game at their place. There are pluses and minuses to this. For one thing, people like a familiar setting, they like to go to a place where they know what the deal is, where they know they’ll be comfortable. Usually, when I bug my group about a game someplace other than my basement, I have a harder time gathering people together.

On the other hand, poker basement, by virtue of being two flights of stairs from the nearest toilet, isn’t the greatest setup. Some people have also commented that poker basement is a little bit dingy, is freezing cold in winter, is way too hot in summer, is way too depressing year round, has way too much mold, et cetera, et cetera. Personally, I wouldn’t mind playing cards in poker basement any night of the week, but some people have high expectations like not being pelted by falling plaster when the neighbor upstairs walks across his floor.

File Apr 07, 9 57 11 PMMy buddy Eric had mentioned a few times that he’d recently moved into a new place in Watertown and they had a great rec room to play cards in. To be honest, when he mentioned a rec room, or however it was he described it, I thought it would probably be a slight upgrade over poker basement, but enough to travel all the way to Watertown for? That I didn’t know. However, he texted me about it recently, and I thought that this would be a good way to have a game with higher stakes, that wouldn’t make it seem like Sherwood Casino was now becoming a game for big shots. I’d like to keep poker basement .25/.25 for a little longer, but if other people are hosting, and I’m recruiting slash providing chips, for some reason I don’t feel as bad upping the stakes. Hence the 1/2 games at Rog’s and the 1/1 game in Eric’s rec room.

On my way to the game it was pouring rain and my Waze app was acting up. I got lost in a very tony section of section of Newton. It was a little frustrating, as every time I made a wrong turn, instead of finding a main road, I’d end up on another darkened street of giant homes. I thought about the poker games the people who lived in them must have. Probably something like 5/10 no limit with an automaton dealer bought in a Hammacher Schlemmer catalog. It was tempting to pull the car over, run through the rain to one of the windows, and rail one of these games peeping Tom style, but then I remembered that this was just in my imagination, and even if it wasn’t, surely not everybody in Newton was hosting such a poker game. Probably only about 12 to 15% when you really think about it.

When I finally arrived at Eric’s place in Watertown, however, any notion that fancy pants digs were solely the domain of Newton multi-millionaires, was set aside, because holy moly were we grinding in style last night. The place was a brand new luxury condo/apartment complex that according to Eric is presently only filled to something like 10% capacity. It had a very swanky hotel vibe to it. With the exception of us having to use a pool table as a poker table, it had the feel of being in some private game in Vegas, or at least what I imagine a private game in Vegas to be like. Well, without the automaton cocktail waitresses, but you catch my drift.

I had a good night, thanks to getting hit with the deck, which was nice because it means I bounced back into the black for 2017. I am now, thanks to poker, $232 richer than I was on January 1st. If this keeps up I’ll be able to buy an automaton dehumidifier for poker basement.