Poker
However, I'm sure I ended up with some black market money
won in poker games. The best poker
players in the outfit had our own elite game, but first we plucked the
pigeons. I was not the best poker player
in the 31st Station Hospital --John Day was the acknowledged possessor of that
crown -- but I could hold my own with him and the rest of the hawks. I had been playing "Table
Stakes", which is no limit except you can't bet more than you have on the
table, in family poker games since before I was a teenager. Learning from my brother, brothers-in-law and sisters,
especially Ruby, in marathon weekend games, I had found the quality of poker
unsophisticated at Texas A&M.
On payday,there were dozens of
games, but never more than a couple of the hawks in any of them. The new replacements, none of them old enough
to vote or legally buy liquor, eagerly invited the "Old Timers" to
their games and we graciously accepted.
They were universally ignorant of odds
and routinely did the most stupid things imaginable in poker games.
I once bet a kid who had been assigned to our house $100 that
I could cut the cards three times in a row, with him shuffling and holding the
deck, without turning up anything smaller than a nine. (I was trying to counsel
him on not gambling with the veterans).
He said "That's a bet I"ll take" and plunked down his 300
Yon. I won, of course; I wonder how he
felt when he was introduced to the game of
Pinochele ; he didn't even check the deck to see if there were any cards in it
lower than a nine.
Within a week or less, all the gambling money was where
it belonged, in the real game. It was
the best poker game I ever played in: dollar ante and table stakes. The mores were interesting. We started every game with several decks of
cards still encased in their plastic wrappers; stacking the deck was perfectly
acceptable if the player to the left of the dealer was dumb enough to cut to the
crease, but marking certain high cards by "finger-nailing" was
cheating. Several times a night the dealer
would raise and everyone would suddenly realize he had got a cut to the crease
while telling a good story and throw in their hands. More rarely, John Day would stop the game,
spread the deck back up and identify every face card: jacks, queens, kings and
aces. That deck was torn up and
discarded.
I saw no evidence of collusion, such as one person
stacking the deck, another making the right cut so that one of them or another
partner would win. We had been together
too long for
that, but if we had ever caught
the "finger-nailer" we would probably have pulled his fingernails out
with a pair of pliers. John Day always
contended he didn't need to stack the deck to win; he could memorize the
order of cards while they were being shuffled and remember where key cards were
after the cut. I'm sure he was right; I
saw him call for a specific card on many occasions in stud poker and
either get it or miss by one or two.
But one time I watched him pick up the cards when it was
his deal (for the innocent, that's when you stack the deck) and said to myself,
"if John gets three fours on the deal, he's not above mechanics if the
opportunity presents itself. Sure
enough, he raised the opener and drew one card.
I drew to a high pair, caught a second pair on the draw and folded. The opener, who had also drawn one card,
checked to the one card draw; John Day bet a bundle and on the call laid down
his hand. The opener had two pair, but
guess what, John had three fours; I had him but I never told ANYONE, especially
John. That was knowledge too valuable to
share with anyone.
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