It wasn’t my first poker game, but it was the first one that, well, let me tell you the story…
Dad taught my brother and me poker when we were kids, sitting on the tile living room floor. We played five-card draw and five-card stud with red, white, and blue cheap plastic chips (if you're old enough, you'll remember them). No money was involved, but I remember instructions to not keep an ace kicker with a pair, or draw to an inside straight. I don't think my dad ever played poker for money, and I imagined him at the library, studying whatever book he could find on poker (wow, it might have been Yardley’s Education of a Poker Player) and trying to find a nugget or two to pass along.
Those three-handed games ended when we found more exciting and individual pursuits, and I really didn’t play again for a while, until The Game.
I was 14 years old, attending a fine arts camp at Mount St. Joseph College in Emmitsburg, Maryland as the electric bass player in the jazz group. It was my second year there, and in fact, my second session of the summer. Basically, I spent a month hanging out with friends, playing in a jazz band, and being away from home — it was glorious. We had strict curfews, with counselors (and a couple of nuns) watching our every move.
And while some of my friends were violating every possible rule (with varying degrees of success), I was either too square to step out or feared that, were I caught, I’d get sent home. A more unspeakable punishment I couldn’t imagine, so I went to my dorm room when I was supposed to, and stayed there. Until The Game.
Poker in the Inner Circle
I don’t remember the particulars of how I was invited, or even why. But somehow one of the counselors let me know that there was a little poker game to be played after lights-out and was I interested in attending? The poker would be fine, I was sure, but to be invited to a post-curfew gathering of the Inner Circle — I was in heaven.
There were 6-7 of us I guess — I was one of only two campers invited — the rest were counselors. I don’t even remember what variant(s) we played, but we were betting nickels, dimes, and quarters ($.05, $.10, and $.25, for the uninitiated). I'm sure it was stud and draw variants – this was many decades before Texas hold'em got a stranglehold on the game. I got to hear all the gossip, and confirmed my fears that getting caught for a significant transgression of the rules meant a one-way ticket home.
Know what else I remember? The Coke. I mean literally the sugary soft drink. They had liberated a case of the stuff that was used to fill the vending machine in the main hall and had put it in a washtub full of ice. As the evening progressed and the ice melted, the soda reached a near-freezing point. A slug of it from a can fresh from the tub created a glorious sweet burn down the throat. And this was before Archer-Daniels-Midland hijacked the American sweetener market with high fructose corn syrup. No, it was pure sucrose with no cloying aftertaste — just a carbonated sugar/caffeine high, as the people in Atlanta had intended.
I won some — I don’t know how much, though I remember thinking that my sodas for the rest of the trip were paid for. Maybe it was because I wasn’t keeping ace kickers to my pairs or drawing to inside straights. But of course, it wasn’t the money that mattered that evening. I had cleared one of the hurdles into adulthood, bonded with the counselors (including the head honcho), and stayed up well past the appointed bedtime. I slipped quietly back into my room where my roommate was sound asleep. I couldn’t sleep — either because of the caffeine or the excitement of the evening — and reveille (played by the lead trumpeter in the jazz band) came early and painful. But it was a small price to pay as I slowly made my way down to breakfast.
Little did I know that, decades later, I’d look back at that evening, thousands of poker games later, and think…Best. Poker game. Ever.
