Homage to Cruising

There's a line to an old Del Amitri song that says something about being " … wired and tired." It's a strange feeling, but that's precisely how I felt. There's something about playing poker for 15 hours straight that does it to you, especially when it comes hard on the heels of a 5 a.m. wake-up call, a dash to the airport, a flight from Palm Springs to New Orleans with the usual scurrying about required to change terminals and planes at the ill-designed Houston airport, a cab ride to the terminal, and the laborious procedures required to board cruise ships in this era of heightened security. But late afternoon finally came and the ship slipped her moorings and began gliding downriver to the Gulf of Mexico. The cruise was officially under way and the cards were soon in the air. That first night at sea, I played poker until the wee hours of the morning. We were also at sea the next two days, so I played cards the entire day, and all day and evening the next day, too.

I was going on pure adrenaline and feeling wired and tired, just like the song said, and unless you've played nonstop poker, you might never have experienced this sort of feeling firsthand. It was late at night - or early in the morning, depending on your orientation - of our second full day at sea, and the ship wouldn't make port until the following morning. The game had meandered all evening, ranging between $10-$20 hold'em and $20-$40 hold'em, depending on how many players were interested in each of those particular games at the moment.

That one gets to know others at the poker table in a manner unlike any other is abundantly clear to anyone who has ever played much poker. You see your opponents warts and all, and they see you the same way. I've read that one reason our oldest friends are our dearest - I'm talking about the friends we made and kept since grade school, high school, or college - is that they knew us before pretense and pretension, before the job of repackaging ourselves in whatever image we chose to present to the workaday world took hold. They know us for our foibles and our flaws, and for our imperfections as well as our skills and grace, and perhaps it's because of such a completely honest perspective that we bond to old friends like we do.

Poker is just like that. It doesn't take all that long to hone in on someone's character, style, and class at the poker table, and by late in the evening, everyone at my table had already accomplished that, even though we were a very disparate group. Other than a love for poker and good fellowship, the demographics were all so diverse. We were old - although the table's octogenarians were clearly young at heart - young, black, white, Jew, Palestinian, Catholic, Protestant, American, Canadian, British, male and female.

That we had accepted each other's warts and enjoyed the company only a good poker game can provide was measured in the humor and table talk. We'd long passed the point of having to live within the bounds of the kind of socialization demanded in our politically correct world. At that particular poker table, at that hour of the night, when all of us were wired and tired, we'd reached that rarified status envisioned by Dr. Martin Luther King, when he described a world in which all people would be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.

There were nine of us, living that moment at the forefront of the American dream, where right wins out and not much else matters. We felt free to joke about everything from Jewish American Princesses to Ebonics to what we'd all like to do with that sexy Romanian cocktail waitress if only she'd pay us the least bit of attention, which of course she had the good sense not to do. The talk ran high and we spoke of poker and sexual prowess, husbands and wives, sports and money, and politics and religion - all the things we were taught never to discuss in polite society. But we did so anyway, and it felt good. Everyone enjoyed it. We were free for the moment, and probably for the duration of the cruise, from all of the tedium and mind-numbing political correctness that seems to have seeped insidiously into the world around us. There were no militant feminists at the poker table, dead set on stealing the zest from our sexist, seventh-grade humor, no Al Sharpton haranguing us about the guilt we ought to be feeling for our own achievements in life, and no political regimes demonizing others for their race, color, creed, class, or economics. We were all just there, playing poker, enjoying each other's company immensely, diverse as we could be, and no one needed a consent decree or a quota system to make it so. We loved it. That is the way it ought to be in all things, but that isn't usually the case, so it's big enough news to warrant a column devoted to it whenever it occurs.

Maybe it's cruising. I've been on lots of poker cruises, and the camaraderie is always the same - in a word: wonderful. Anyone who's ever played poker in a casino for longer than an hour realizes that there are scads of malcontents and miserably unhappy souls who always seem to wind up at your table. But that's just not the way of the world on a poker cruise. There are two reasons for that: the self-selection mechanism of those who enjoy poker cruises, and the unrelenting efforts of the folks who run them. Taken together, they go a long way to making sure that guests enjoy themselves. If I had to venture a guess, I'd say poker cruising has succeeded to a degree that not even its promoters envisioned.

I've had nothing but good moments on poker cruises. The most popular destinations are the Caribbean and Mexican Riviera in the winter, and Alaska in the summer - where the sun never really sets - and if you stay up playing poker until 3:30 a.m., you'll have a chance to watch the sun dip behind the horizon and rise again within a four-hour period.

I love cruising. I love the ports and the poker and the people. My poker buddy Peter Secor is fond of telling the world, "You can still have fun in a poker room," and, "There are no strangers in poker, only friends you haven't met yet." Peter's right, too - and even more right when it comes to cruising. At least that's the way I've always found it.

I may be wired and tired from too much poker and too little sleep, but this particular combination infuses me with energy that lasts until the very end of the journey when it all seems to dissipate at once, like air escaping a balloon, or a draw to the nut flush that never gets there. It happens so quickly that you can count on my being the guy who's dead asleep the entire plane trip home. And, oh yeah, I'm also the guy who just can't wait to go again.

Visit my web site at www.loukrieger.com. Poker for Dummies and my newest book, Gambling for Dummies, are available at major bookstores everywhere, and all of my books are available online at www.ConJelCo.com and www.Amazon.com.