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Sometimes a column idea just falls on your head and sometimes you have
to go digging, I remember saying in answer to an interview question
posed on radio station WGTD. This one falls in the first category.
Everywhere I go, I'm bombarded with poker references. On an assignment
last week, I hung out with a group of guys looking through lockers full
of stuff they'd just bought. They found an old, butt-ugly table and
imagined it as a poker table. A bag full of old pennies turned up:
"Poker money." Every time I thumb through the on-screen television
guide, I find three shows on professional poker. Mount Pleasant just
voted to make it possible for bars to bring in video poker machines.
It's inescapable.
Obviously, poker is not a new kid on the cultural block. I won't bore
you with the history of the game, especially since nobody seems to know
for sure when it started. What is new is the level of interest and it's
all tied to one game: Texas Holdem.
No-limit Texas Holdem, to be exact. That's the game they play on TV, the
one where the pros can win hundreds of thousands on a single hand. Each
player gets two cards, then five cards are dealt face-up in the middle
and everybody can use them to make their hand.
High stakes are way over the head of Eric Miller, a senior at Horlick
High School, who still brags about a $6 payout. At school, his buddies
play for pride alone. Miller said he got interested around the time
cable TV shows like the "World Poker Tour" hit the big-time.
It's hard to believe the characters on those shows are real. Some of the
poker tables could pass for a reunion of "America's Most Wanted." The
art of bluffing and recognizing somebody else's bluff is a masterful
one. Maybe we should be recruiting these people for our intelligence
services.
In Racine County living rooms, the skills might not be up to par with
the pros, but the terminology is. The cards turned up all have names,
like "the flop," "the turn" or "the river." Poker regulars like the game
because it's easy for the momentum of a hand to shift from one card to
the next. Beginners dig it because it's easy to learn.
I had played the game once before, but Racinian Nick Contreras invited
me to join a game with a few of his friends - Jerrod Quinn, Chris
Reesman and Nic Savasta - to bump up my Texas Holdem savvy. Since
they're all either 20 or 21, I hoped my edge in poker-playing experience
would make up for my lack of strategy.
It was obvious pretty early that we wouldn't be making any appearances
on ESPN. Paying attention wasn't a strong suit.
"You guys knew you had flushes, right?" And Contreras seemed a little
too happy to be the first one out of chips. He got to go and spend time
with a female friend.
"So actually I win," he said.
When you're not playing for the price of a yacht, people are a lot
looser. The guys talked about motorcycles, women and, yes, selling their
plasma. Apparently everybody's doing it.
"That's my second job," Contreras said.
Without a bluffing bone in my body, I came in a respectable third.
Reesman and Savasta were fighting it out when I left.
Tom Kubenik doesn't need to sell bodily fluids. He's the general manager
of the GameMaster store in Kenosha and has seen a decent increase in
sales of chips, tables and other poker toys over the last six months.
The casinos have noticed, too. Potawatomi casino officials announced the
Milwaukee hotspot is devoting 10 tables to poker games against other
players (not the dealer). I'm sure that's making the Gamblers Anonymous
folks sweat. I can see it now. Fresh off an evening of cleaning out
their neighbors, a handful of casual Texas Holdem players will get cocky
and decide to start tossing around thousands of bucks at the casino.
It's a whole different league out there. That's one river I'm not
flopping into. |
