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.