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Poker tournament? What poker tournament? |
Notice to readers: The following article is fictional and is in no way intended to promote illegal activity as regulated by the statutes of Alabama. Any similarity between the events described hereafter and any events that occur in real life are purely coincidental and definitely do not take place at my house on a weekly basis.
WSOP.
No, not wussup! ... I said WSOP.
For many, those four letters alone tipped my hand to the subject matter of this article (unless I'm bluffing, of course).
For the rest of you readers, I am talking about the World Series of Poker. You know, that out-of-nowhere television phenomenon that is sweeping every network from ESPN to Fox Sports (Late Night Poker) to even the Travel Channel, which airs the World Poker Tour.
You can't go a week these days without seeing Chris Moneymaker catching cowboys on the turn and the river after getting Big Slick in the hole.
Which brings me to another point: No Limit Texas Holdem lingo. The game the WSOP (and to a lesser extent, the movie Rounders) popularized has brought an entirely new vocabulary to the table, so to speak.
Those aren't aces; they're bullets. You're not a winner; you've got the nuts. You don't get dealt King-Nine; you get dealt Turner and Hooch. This ain't your grandpa's card game; it's a face-twisting, bluff-inducing exercise in mind over mucker that forces you to play your opponent's nervous twitch as much as your own hand.
And most importantly, playing No Limit Texas Holdem, you don't play for a certain number of hands or to a particular score; you play until you have all the money or absolutely none of it.
You want to sit down and give it the ole' college try? Be prepared to lose all your hard-earned cash on the first hand because it can happen if you're careless enough to let it.
Of course, because gambling is illegal in Alabama, no one within state lines has had the opportunity to experience the thrill of surviving an all-in or the agony of a bad beat.
I haven't been able to conglomerate all the tables, chairs, stools and beanbags into my living room and use it as an underground gambling ring. Not once.
And fraternity houses don't put together $25 entry fee HoldEm tournaments that last all night and into the next day, pausing just long enough for someone to run to the local beer store to refill the keg. Nope, not on this campus.
Maybe one day the gambling laws in this state will change, and I'll be free to have a boat after the river while sitting in my boat on the river. Maybe then, I could sweat out an ace on 5th Street while in my house on 13th Street.
But until then, I won't give into the innate evil that comes along with gambling. I refuse to waste my money betting on the luck of the draw. Instead, I'll stick with only the most reputable ways of earning income.
Which reminds me. Someone still owes me five bucks for having Georgia Tech in the finals.
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