I haven’t gotten around to writing up my last trip to The Crescent Lounge, which happened last Friday night. So, to anybody who has been waiting patiently, please forgive me.

Carpooled with Dan R. formerly of West Roxbury, now of Brooklyn, but potentially now of West Roxbury again. On the way Dan and I got into it over whether or not Hillary Clinton’s term as Secretary of State was successful or not. I’ll spare you the details of the argument, heck, I’ll even spare you who took which side, I just mention this to give you a mental image of two guys in a Prius flying along 95 north yelling at each other over something neither one of them knows much about.

Getting inside The Lounge, the basement glowing in neon hues, would have to wait for a bit as the players were out on the sidewalk smoking. It used to be that the players smoked in the lounge itself, then the smoking was pushed outside, so the players were smoking in the yard. Now the yard is off limits, and smoking is done on the sidewalk. A lot of this has to do with the proprietor of the lounge, Andrew T, having a new baby in the house. Probably the last thing you need as a young dad is having a bunch of degenerates skulking around your yard all night. I think about that at times when I am at the lounge and I say to myself, enjoy this little scene because it is not going to last.

Unless of course, Andrew’s kid grows up to be a card shark.

If there is one drawback to the lounge as a player it’s that the ride back from Waltham to Roslindale can be tricky, at least as Waze navigates me. You’re the only car on the road for almost the whole route, and this makes me worried that I’m going to be in the crosshairs of every Newton cop. So, aside from a couple Golden Halftime Hand Goldschlager shots, I didn’t drink at all.

I like to drink playing poker although I’ve read that I shouldn’t be. Most of the live poker I’ve played has been while drinking. I think it’s safe to say that my “winrate” for drinking versus not drinking poker is roughly the same. And, no, a feel player like me is not going to have stats to back that up.

Anyhow, the game was pretty lively and fun, as per usual there. I noticed that Jeremy was losing a bit and getting agitated. At one point, after rebuying, he was handing the chiprack back to Andy R, and as Andy tried to take it back, Jeremy wouldn’t let go. Later, Jeremy was taunting Mike A. over something or other as well.

A while back when I was there Jeremy told some story about falling off a scaffolding or something. I forget what the hell it was that he fell off of, I just remember the detail about him falling from a height of twenty feet or so and walking away from the incident barely hurt. Jeremy’s a tough guy, he told me he does 400 pushups a day along with a host of other exercises a wimpo like me couldn’t possibly imagine even the names of.

As he continued playfully taunting everybody else at the table I began to consider not the odds of the hand I was dealt but the odds on IF Jeremy decided to fight everybody else in the room at this given moment, how big of a favorite would he be?

Probably something like 4:5.

Joe B was there. I always consider Joe to be the most addicted of all the players I know. Around 1:45am, we were four handed and I said I’d stick around for another half an hour. Five minutes later Joe says he’s only in for the next orbit. I guess I am the one with the real problem now.