my my my my poker face

Foxwoods Saturday.  It falls between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.  Easter Sunday belongs to the in-laws up in eastern Connecticut. Foxwoods Saturday belongs to the poker room down on the reservation. 

Flashback.  My first real experience of poker came in a Hell's Kitchen apartment, at The Thursday Night Game.  Sure, I played poker before that, in high school and college, but it was just a thing involving nickels, dimes, quarters and playing cards...Go Fish with change.  It wasn't until The Thursday Night Game that I  discovered what poker is all about:  behavior control, method acting, role playing, screwing over your buddies and making sure they know they're being screwed. It's about lying and laughing about lying.  Kind of a cockfight between friends—cops, actors, lawyers, writers, comedians, bartenders, all the usual suspects.  It was a male thing.  Not to say they're weren't women players, it's just that Thursday nights they were honorary men—subject to the same room full of smoke, subway sandwiches, nitwit thumb-pulling, beer, flatulence, and porno magazines that we all were.

Flash forward.  Foxwoods, a scenic half-hour drive from the in-laws house.  Go past the barn sales, Christmas tree farms, and white wooden churches advertising chicken pot pie suppers.  Continue until you see the Pai Gow poker tables and mini-baccarat games, then take a dive into the Foxwoods basement.  The poker room.

It's Foxwoods Saturday.

I play five-dollar Stud.  I know Texas Hold-Em is the game now, it's just not my game.  I buy $100 in chips.  Hand #2.  My queen-high stud falls to an ace-high stud, and my stack is cut nearly in half.  Good, I say to myself, get THAT out of the way early. I scratch and claw my way back to even, then start falling back again, a slow bleed of non-starters and second-best hands.  I'm down to $30, no relief in sight.  I pull out another hundred and put it under my chips.  Don't want to get caught with a killer hand and nothing to bet.  I've got $15 in chips and I'm sitting on Aces up.  I start betting, throw in the hundred for chips, and win a fifty dollar pot.  Suddenly I start winning, something psychological about having a pile of chips in front of you.  I'm back to even.  I'm up $30.  I'm up $80.  It's like I've come back from the dead.  Now that's a resurrection story I can get behind, cashing out at 1 AM Easter Sunday morning, still some $40 up.

But I don't consider poker a religion.  Golf is a religion.  Poker is a business.

The secrets to winning at golf and poker

Full disclosure: I don't know the secrets to winning at golf and poker.  Seriously, would I be here if I did?  No, I'd be off in Vegas or out on the PGA tour right now, and not divulging my secrets on the internet.  So, if you're looking for magic formulas, the keys to winning at golf or poker or anything for that matter, please move along, there's nothing to see here.  I suggest you try the Great Secrets of the Universe section of your local bookstore.  And that's the last piece of advice I'll give you.  Why?  Because, again, full disclosure: I suck at golf, and as for poker, I can hold my own in a small stakes game, but if I had to make a living at it, I'd be dead by now.

So what do I do for  a living?  I write.  For  a living.  That should tell you something...namely, that if I ever do offer any advice, you'd probably want to ignore it, anyway.  Got an inside-straight?  Pay for another card.  240 yards to the green protected by water? Grab your three-wood and swing for the fences. Money to invest?  I know a guy named Ponzi I can hook you up with....  You get the idea.  If it's a question whether to use a colon or a semi-colon, I'm your guy.  The rest is up to you.

Having said all that, it now occurs to me that there is one game in which I can help improve your score.  I learned the secret this last weekend, on a very rainy Sunday.  It's another Alex story.  For those of you not taking notes or committing my blog to memory, Alex is my seven-year old.  Here's a recent picture of him:

Anyway, Deborah, Alex's mom, was out of town, meaning I was appointed chairman of the Alex entertainment committee. Committee notes, Sunday March 28:

Alex:  What are we going to do for fun today?

Me: I don't know.

Alex: FunPlex?

Me: We did FunPlex yesterday.

Alex: What are we going to do for fun today?

Cut to Eagle Rock Lanes, the bowling alley three minutes from our house.  The place was built back in the 40s, and it hasn't changed a bit.   Hot dogs and flat soda are the specialties of the house.  Here's a recent picture of the bowling alley:

Anyway, if you've never been bowling with a kid, what the bowling alley does is put up gutter guards.  Consequently, no gutter balls.  Alex and I bowled two games. I bounced my ball off the gutter guards a couple of times each game, getting from five to seven pins on the rebound.  Do the math.  I added between ten and fourteen pins to my score in each game.  Very scientific.  So, want to increase your bowling score?  Take a little kid with you.  Oh, and one last piece of advice: skip the hot dogs. 

What's it all about?

By all, I mean: this blog.  Aside from, well, golf and poker—and the reasons people like me don't get to spend their entire lives in casinos and on golf courses (things like 7-year-old kids, 30-year mortgages, and jobs that last a lifetime)—it'll focus like a laser on stuff that strikes me as interesting, which brings us to the $64,000 question: what the hell do I know? 

Enough to blog.

Lets take golf as an example.  By no means am I an expert, BUT, I know what the object of the game is, I know what it looks like when it's done right—and (believe you me) I know what it looks like when it's done wrong. And you can cross out the word golf and replace it with family, money, politics, sex, pretty much anything, and the principle still  holds.  It all comes down to getting a grip, keeping your eyes on the ball, and shifting your weight at the proper time.

Speaking of keeping your eye on the ball, the other day I took Alex (remember that 7-year-old kid I was talking about) to the driving range.  We took turns hitting balls, and the thing about Alex is, he likes to talk. And he did—while I was hitting, while he was hitting, talked pretty much nonstop for a full bucket of a hundred or so balls.  Among the topics Alex covered: He plans on either being rich or dating someone who is. He believes that I should hit the ball farther and straighter.  Tiger Woods is the best golfer in the world but not the best husband.

Smart boy.

Anyway, so it begins.  Call your neighbors.  Tell your friends and family.  Alert the media.  After all, it's free.  And feel free to comment, too.  As Lauren Bacall says to Bogie the second time they kiss in To Have and Have Not, "It's even better when you help."