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.