Deal me in
Edward Cone
News & Record
8-7-05
Long before poker became a popular spectator sport on ESPN -- long before there was an ESPN -- there was Friday Night Poker. I first sat in on the game as a summer substitute just after I finished high school in 1980, but by then it was already an institution. A quarter-century later, the game continues, and I am still invited as an occasional seat-warmer (or in poker parlance, a pigeon) when one of the regulars can't make it to the table.
We play mostly seven-card poker, dealer's choice, generally high-low. Lots of Omaha and variations on stud and community-card games, with the occasional hand of something invented by a mad-genius math professor who used to be a regular; visitors are discouraged from dealing Baseball and other impure strains of the game that they learned at camp.
The mad-genius math professor left the game only because he moved so far away that a Friday-night commute was out of the question, although I'm sure he considered it. Regulars often stay with the game for life, like Supreme Court justices, but with only seven seats at the table. The core players tend to be academics, so the lexicon is learned and the patter erudite, or at least obscure. This patter goes well beyond the terminology of the games themselves (anyone with a television can call the flop and The River and Fifth Street) to arcane concepts like cased cards and stock phrases spoken in Bengali and Yiddish.
When the right card comes up the dealer will invariably intone, "Do not disdain the eight." This admonition, and the occasional bit of table talk critiquing the likely impact of a dealt card on a given hand, often leave me baffled. Everyone else seems to know what is going on, as if they can see my hole cards as well as their own. The truth is that I am not a very good poker player, lacking the focus, acumen, and sangfroid required to excel at the game, even when not much beyond pride is at stake. I generally rely on the kindness of the poker gods for strong hands and fortuitous table positions, and hope that the other players read my apparent cluelessness as a bluff.
Friday Night Poker is about playing cards, but it's not something you could replicate online, where poker is thriving. Like any long-running game going back to the poker-like Persian diversion called as nas, it is also a social occasion with deeply-ingrained habits and mores.
Drinking and conversation are encouraged, but neither to excess, and these days smoking is done outdoors. Nicknames abound, to the point that I have trouble remembering the real name of one longtime player, known to me as both Harry and Old Norman, neither of which were on his driver’s license. Vinnie, the game's capo di tutti capi, sings when he is winning, but I would not try it myself. Leaving the table after you fold may be excused if you are checking the score on the Tar Heels or the Braves, but is otherwise discouraged; last week our host practically defined that ethic by ignoring a crying baby for several hands, yet later finding the time to mix a pitcher of mojitos for the players.
In a restless culture, Friday Night Poker is continuity. 52 cards, seven players, chip values that are all but immune to inflation. Same games, sometimes even the same hands. The players have known each other through marriages and divorces and affairs and surgeries and mortalities, children and then grandchildren. But there is also occasional new blood, and for the first time I find of late that I am no longer the youngest guy at the table. I'm still usually the worst. That I expect to remain constant long after the current poker boom has gone bust.
Edward Cone (www.edcone.com, efcone@mindspring.com) writes a column for the News & Record most Sundays.
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Last update: 8/7/2005; 9:58:47 AM .
